About Us!
Hetro lifemates Mark Green and William West met one another at Oxford whilst attending different colleges. William finished top of his class at Queens with a double first and Mark scraped a Desmond from Oxford Polytechnic. Both were well known on peer to peer networks called bulletin boards that preceeded the Internet. This is how they came to the attention of entrepeneur extrodinaire Martin Ackroyd. A millionaire at 25 with multiple successful businesses. Married to a Miss World runner up and friend of the rich and famous. Inspired by the bulletin board technology allowing us to share sound and data simutaeneously this celebrated son of Leeds had developed a system for bettting shops that allowed a single user working from head ofice to control any one of a dozen screens in any number of betting shops at once. This level of control meant that the bookies would display up to date and accurate information that could be configured to suit different locations and was all under their own control. All communications were by modem and without digital phone lines or data pipework this was proving difficult. Mark & William agreed to take a look at the modem design and arranged to stay for a month in a house that belonged to a friend of which was empty pending purchase. Five years later they had bought the house and stayed at Microskill as part of the tiny support team who were now responsible for more than a thousand installations throughout Europe that relied on a technology that only a handful of people in the world knew anything about. Somebody would have to show the shop managers how to perform small maintanace tasks and explain the installation procedures to in-house electricians and the like. Mat & Will were only too pleased to take their show on the road and on the same day that Leah Betts died from water intoxication they set off on a tour that would take 2 years to complete. In 1997 the company was bought outright by SKY TV or with SKY TV funding. They were simply terminating one of their rivals and installing their own service instead so had no need to continue with support and develop of the now obsolete product. SKY turned out to be very generous with the redundancy payments but dreams of retirement were cut short when they realised that it would be 2 years before all the old systems could be replaced with their own kit and there was no longer any service, support or spares available. SKy offered everyone their jobs back at improved rates with cool cars but most of the team had shares in the company and the redundancy windfall just provided the icing on the cake. After nearly settling for a 30 hour week and a Nissan Silvia Turbo to come back and head a new 12 man support team with continuity of employment assured Mat and Will decided to set up on their own and develop some other projects they had talked about. Not a single day ever passed without a service call from the betting shops and even as the number of installations began to dwindle the remaining shops developed more faults as their systems got older. New clients were found well before the work from SKY TV came to an end and one of the guys that William played rugby with at Oxford had hooked him up with a massive plc who were flying him first class around the globe to oversee one the world's biggest Exchange Server Installations. Clearly not as happy with the aount of their bill as Mat and Will were the client offered William the position as head of IT. We are talking about a multi-billion dollar operation with thousands of employees in 30 countries and half a dozen corporate jets on stan by. We are talking share options and healthcare, tickets for Internationals and the Monaco grand prix. A budget of millions, hundreds of subordinates and the opportunity for peer to peer networking at the very highest level. The end of an era and it meant breaking up a winning team but it was just too good an opportunity to ignore. A couple of months later Will set off for London flying business class from Manchester During the flight he decided to begin collecting air miles and took just 3 years to notch up a million.
