My first startup

How I became a founder by accident

I fell into startups by accident.

There were two paths I could have gone down at university. Next to an over-posed photo taken at a digital photo booth at a branch of Boots the Pharmacist in downtown Oxford, my high school yearbook declares that I’m likely to become a journalist. On the other hand, I’d taught myself to program, and then to write HTML, and the web seemed like an exciting medium to tell stories with.

I got into the Computer Science program at the University of Edinburgh. In England, at least at the time, you effectively picked your major two years before even going to university: at sixteen years old, you were asked to choose three or four A-level subjects that you’d study exclusively until the end of high school. In turn, those subjects would dictate which degrees you were allowed to apply for. I refused to filter myself in this way, and I was still in the early stages of trying to figure out who I was, let alone what I wanted to do — a tall order for any sixteen year old, let alone a third culture kid who felt physically and socially out of sorts with the world. Edinburgh was one of the few programs that didn’t see my spread across arts and sciences as a bad thing.

I was big and I hated it. I’d grown up to be well over six feet tall, and I wasn’t skinny in the way…