The founders of online advertising data firm Telemetry are swapping organic growth for a cash injection to fund global expansion. They reveal how simplicity, stubbornness and strong team spirit have fuelled their success
Anthony Rushton I was working in media planning and buying in London and Russell, an old school friend, and Beau had finished working for Nintendo on the sequel to GoldenEye – the biggest-selling Nintendo 64 game. In 2001, we asked, should we start a business? We didn't have a master plan to build the world's first online video delivery and analysis tool.
Beau Chesluk I wasn't sure we could make money but I thought it would be interesting to try. The whole thing snowballed. It was very fast-moving.
Russell Irwin We believed we could change things. It's all to do with timing – it was obvious the internet was going to be huge and there was a lot of money going into the sector but not much quality.
Anthony Rushton Our big break was when
we won the pitch to make the broadband version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? It set us en route to our Emmy award. From there we thought it would be cool if we used engineering to fix the anomalies in media planning and buying – there was
no science to analyse it accurately. That was the birth of Telemetry in 2004. We went on to win the Emmy in 2008 for
our ability to deliver video content for companies and analyse the data so they could have the equity value for their online video advertising. What we managed to
do was mind-blowing.
Russell Irwin None of the technologies out there were very good at counting lots of data quickly. We designed a clever way of counting things in real time, which came from the games industry really.
Beau Chesluk None of our systems had ever been done before – all of our technology is bespoke. We used to design complicated systems but you might have to throw away a month's work because no one could get to grips with it. Simplifying things right down means there's more understanding between each other and our clients.
Anthony Rushton Our turnover is £24m and we made a profit this year of £5.2m. There were two routes for this business: organic growth, with a fantastic, profitable business in three to four years' time but then you don't have masses of cash reserve and you can't make rash decisions. Or, for the right valuation, offload some equity so that we can grow from 58 employees to 200 in two years, open seven offices globally and re-energise our partnership. We're going with the second option.
Beau Chesluk Obviously, it's got to be the right person. I don't want them to impose restrictions on what we're trying to do with the business. But if we get an investor they might bring something else to the table.
Russell Irwin If you'd asked me three years ago I would have said 'no way, I'm not selling a stake'. But time was becoming our enemy. We could have carried on where we were going and get there in six or seven years and maybe miss the boat. Or set up a truly global business operating in 50 countries and be massively successful within a couple of years. It wasn't going to happen without a boom moment – a massive injection of cash. I think we've been artificially held back because we were growing organically.
Anthony Rushton We decide these things equally and always respect each other's boundaries. Inevitably, there are stresses and strains like any relationship but there was never a doubt that we would work well together. I do the presentations, the speeches, the commercial strategy. The guff, as they call it. Russ is responsible for our back-end, our infrastructure. That's his baby, the really clever stuff. Beau has always been more front-end technical – how it appears commercially. They're fantastic at what they do.
Beau Chesluk Russ and Anthony don't compromise, which can be annoying as well as beneficial. All three of us do it actually: one of us will stick on something and won't let go. We don't sit around and pick things apart and debate every single decision. There's no time for that. So we try to decide what's important and move on. If we all agreed on everything it would be boring. There would only need to be one of us…
Russell Irwin Anthony is the best holder of an audience I've met. He was like that at school. He's an inspirational commercial person. He convinces people of our passion. When he's in his 'zone' he's quite intense, quite hard to keep up with. But obviously it's working fine because we've been doing it for 11 years. I think Beau is a genius. We're both engineers but he has an off-the-wall perspective – he's more creative and has more flair with his technical approach. He's almost anarchic. I think we work well together because of it.
