Becoming an Entrepreneur

Have you always envisaged being an entrepreneur and owning your own business? If so what made you decide to be an entrepreneur?  

No.  I joined ICI in a gap year at 17, and, apart from my 6 years at Oxford, had spent all my time until the end of 2004 in chemical companies with over $500M turnover (ICI, Zeneca, FMC and, finally, Flexsys).  I had the opportunity to take a severance package from Flexsys and to either carry on doing more of the same or do something different.  I decided to do the latter, and helping to start up a new company in the chemicals space appealed to me as an opportunity to put something back into the industry that had given me a long, exciting and successful international career to date.

How did you become an entrepreneur?

Through the help of a colleague on the Council of the Chemical Industries Association I contacted Isis Innovation Limited, the technology transfer company of Oxford University, and quickly got matched up with a couple of potential spin-out companies from the Chemistry Department.  Both companies had exciting prospects in my estimation, but timing essentially selected Oxford Catalysts for me.  So I started to work with the academic founders as Interim CEO, preparing a business plan and beginning to talk to investors.

Tell us about your business and product.

Oxford Catalysts designs and develops specialty catalysts for the generation of clean fuels from both conventional fossil fuels and certain renewable sources. The Company has two key platform technologies resulting from some 19 years of research at the University of Oxford's prestigious Wolfson Catalysis Centre. The first platform is for a novel class of catalysts made from metal carbides, the second, relates to a series of unique chemical reactions that can be used to generate either hydrogen gas or high-temperature steam, instantaneously, starting from room temperature, using a cheap and safe liquid fuel alongside the Company's patented catalysts.