Smesh People

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Tom Quick Founder, CEO
Buyer of lunch

Founder of Smesh and its predecessor company; also ex Technical Director at fine digital agency Poke, winner of many Webbies and NMA’s ‘Most Respected Agency’ 2008 and 2009. Once-upon-a-time academic Computer Scientist.

Tom launched Smesh in 2009 while working at Poke. Smesh was born with the help of some kindly midwifery from Poke, and has grown and developed from there.

Once solely focused on tech, Tom has seen better qualified people screw up businesses enough times to decide he could hardly do worse, especially if he got a bunch of brilliant people to help him out. So far this is working out OK.

James Booth Advisor, non-exec Director
Digital Marketing Uber-dude

In 2008, James and Torie Chilcott founded Rockabox, a digital content, tech and distribution business. Prior to this he was co-founder and CEO of Tangozebra, the leading provider of digital marketing solutions in Europe, with a UK market share of 70% for its rich-media solutions. Tangozebra was sold to DoubleClick / Google in 2007.

In 2003 James was nominated as the most influential person in new media, by New Media Age magazine; two years later, Campaign Magazine placed him fourth in a survey of the greatest Internet pioneers. In 2006, he was nominated at the NMA awards for the greatest individual contribution to new media.

Alex Kelly Lead Developer
Maker of things that work

Alex makes high-performance social data-crunching software. He can even turn low-performance social data-crunching software into high-performance data-crunching software.

Alex used to make systems for mapping the seabed, but his seafaring days are now behind him.

He’s also a demon in the kitchen, and can probably handle more chilli in his food than you.

Sergio Garcez Senior Developer
Quietly expert

All of the wonders of ‘Portuguese’ and ‘developer’ rolled into a single, marvellous, tattoo-covered package. Sergio can eat his lunch far faster than anyone else, yet elegantly, so you don’t notice until he’s finished.

Also a custard tart expert.

Jon Scott Developer
Mystic rhythms

Jon is part-time developer, part-time professional jazz drummer (Kairos Quartet and others).

Jon was hired on the basis that anyone who can cope with the complexity of jazz drumming can laugh in the face of gnarly algorithms. This has largely proven to be true.

Kenan McGrath Developer
Boy Wonder

Smesh’s very own technical wunderkind. Able to tackle all manner of ill-defined software and data analytics requirements.

Dresses terribly smartly for a young geek. Also has the capitalist intuition (and concomitant morals) of Gordon Gekko, but delivers any evil commercial advice with a wry smile, which makes it OK.

Byron Jones Systems Support
Always online. Never sleeps.

Byron leaps into action if AWS decides to block writing to disk at 3am. He carries multiple phones with multiple different network SIMs in them, just in case. He once went on holiday to Borneo and took a satellite phone with him, just in case. You get the picture.

Sally Leonard Enforcer & organiser
Aka 'The Jack Russell'

Sally helps bring order, mainly to Tom’s diary and Smesh’s accounts. Sally is lovely unless you don’t pay your bills, in which case she’ll hound you all the way to Mexico.

Andrew Clegg Data Scientist
Text-miner at large

Andrew earned his PhD using large scale text mining of academic biology papers to predict protein function. Now he helps Smesh to do amazing things with social data.

Peter Schauer Super stats nerd
aka 'Power Schauer'

Peter earned his PhD at UCL, bringing gnarly stats to the world of anthropology. Peter knows more about stats and anthropology than most other people. He’s the sort of person who would be vexed by the vague and unquantified use of ‘more’ and ‘most’ in the last sentence.

Peter helps Smesh do extra-clever things with social data, uncovering relationships and correlation layers of abstraction away from the raw figures. Just don’t mention causation.

James ‘Clint’ McLintock Reporting dude
Master of market research

James knows a lot about market research. He also leads Smesh’s report-writing activities.

Rex Crowle Illustrator
Bringer of brand beauty and direction

Rex helps run games company Media Molecule. He was visual designer for Bafta-award winning PS3 game Little Big Planet, including its iconic mascot, Sackboy. He is also creator and director of MTV’s Grip Wrench, amongst other things.

Rex’s life consists entirely of having fun and drawing cool stuff, but he’s so nice, no-one hates him for it.