Everything was
leading here.

The human bit

“I'm hearing-impaired and dyslexic — and I've turned both into an unfair advantage.”

The hearing is tinnitus, like a lot of people carry — a souvenir from the armed forces, the loud music of the '90s, and too many miles on a motorbike without earplugs. Some things in life have a way of catching up with you. But living with constant noise teaches you to find the signal in it — and to listen on purpose. I can't fake attention, so I give it fully and read the room as much as the words. That's half of any embedded architecture role.

Dyslexia, for me, is critical thinking and spatial awareness: I think in pictures and systems before words, and I tend to see the architecture — and the failure mode — before the sentence. School never quite knew what to do with that, so I left at sixteen to make my own way in the world. It was never a ceiling, though — just a different route up. Diagnosed dyslexic later, I went back through night school for A-Level Chemistry and Human Biology, came out with A grades, and went on to a postgraduate qualification at Cambridge. The thing most dyslexic minds share — spotting the connections and systems others miss — counts for far more in architecture, strategy and building companies than fast reading or tidy spelling ever did.

And I'm in good company: Richard Branson, IKEA's Ingvar Kamprad and Charles Schwab all built empires with it. I'm not putting myself in their league — just making the point that it's a feature, not a bug. Plenty of founders suspect it runs higher in tech and entrepreneurship than the numbers show: people quietly build their own workarounds and never get the label. So if an email from me is short or the spelling is creative, that's the feature talking.

See the wider roster

Business

• Richard Branson — Virgin
• Ingvar Kamprad — IKEA
• Charles Schwab

Film & TV

• Steven Spielberg
• Tom Cruise
• Whoopi Goldberg
• Keanu Reeves
• Jennifer Aniston

Writers

• John Irving
• Dav Pilkey

Sport

• Muhammad Ali
• Magic Johnson

Often cited — though debated

• Albert Einstein
• Steve Jobs
• Thomas Edison
• Winston Churchill

Openly dyslexic or publicly self-identified — except the last group, who are often cited but where the evidence is genuinely debated. Knowing the difference is rather the point.

And the bridge isn't only in the work — it was set early. Growing up across Hertfordshire and Yorkshire, I spanned the south and the north of a divided England long before bridging worlds was ever a job; the compass was set young — south to north, west to east. Years later, in London, I met my wife — Filipina, a marketing exec, and the kind of person who nurtures, pushes and never gives up. Our five-year-old son is English-Filipino. Today we live in Thailand as a family, after two and a half years in Singapore — three cultures under one roof, with ties from the UK to the Philippines. Being based between East and West isn't a compromise — it's a deliberate seat at the table, one I've lived at home before it's ever offered to a client.