This wild-eyed man is Dave Rowe, founder and veteran CEO of business ISP Easynet. Dave was our first landlord at Webmedia in 1994 and last week he invited me (and Ivan, naturally) to Easynet’s tenth anniversary do – and very nice it was too.
On meeting Dave this time I asked (like you do) “what’s new?”. Dave didn’t say “not much” or anything like that. He proceeded to give me a dazzling five minute summary of the state of the networking and telecoms business – from local loop unbundling to VOIP and from broadband to Frame Relay. Wish I could remember a word of it…
Click the small pic for a bigger one.
Yeah – I remember him – and Keith Teare – they were a geeky pair.
Keith Teare – there’s a blast from the past.
And whatever happened to Ed “BBC” Briffa?
Yeah, Dave was in fine flow until you told him we never paid for any coffees at Cyberia, that you used to erase the record. Then he turned on his heel and just walked off …
I have been very impressed by David, and Easynet’s, rise. When I first met him he was running a small and dodgy-seeming company in Great Portland Street called Microprism. And the stories of Easynet’s early days were disconcerting (for instance, Keith Teare having to reset the modems after each the end of each connection). But I still use Easynet today, for LLU ADSL, and the service is pretty good. They are a solid product of the dotcom era.