Director
Keima Ltd

Steve M

00:02 My name’s Steve M and I’m the director of Keima Ltd. Day to day it’s about running the business about developing software about talking to clients, customers, updating the website, building collateral, you name it, there’s only 3 of us, we have to you know split the jobs fairly cleanly between us at the moment.

00:18 We started it in January 2006 prior to that we’d all been working together in a company called Actix which are actually based in Hammersmith in London, but we were in a satellite office in Cardiff. Prior to that we were all at Cardiff university together in the PhD study programme there, myself and my two colleagues.

00:37 The sort of telecom communications company it’s a bit like your Vodaphone and Orange and other players like that, I’ve a lot of engineering work going on, design activities for new networks and to help them do this job they use a variety of software tools, so we provide those type of tools for the engineers. The software that we write is quite complex and, scientifically detailed if you like.

00:58 I had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school it’s one of the reasons I did the PhD cos I couldn’t, I had thought about doing a career and I knew I didn’t want to go and work for a bank which a lot of my compatriots did in the course I was on.

01:12 It’s really been a kind of case of stumbling from one thing to the next, rather than a plan of going, ending up like this.

01:17 I did enjoy school it was something I really quite enjoyed actually. I made a lot of good friends there and some which I keep in touch with today. I enjoyed the learning process as well it was something I always quite, you know absorbing new things or learning new technology or particularly on the sciences side actually was my particular flavour.

01:38 I wouldn’t say I found it easy, I enjoyed the challenge I think more than anything else, it was nice to be able to master something, get to a point where you really understood it, and then find out that actually you didn’t understand it cos there’s more to learn later on and that’s quite humbling.

01:51 My parents have always been very good they’ve always left me to get on with it really, it’s most been self inflicted the pressure that comes to me constantly. My father is a chemical engineer, or was a chemical engineer, now retired, and he actually had a PhD which is one of the reasons why I considered doing a PhD in the first place, and my mother taught in computer science department so and that was the inspiration I think for a lot of the computing I’ve done.

02:16 Although I don’t think my parents would have pushed me had I decided to do something different, I think they would have been you know pleased had I been happy doing an apprenticeship or whatever it was I wanted to do.

02:26 As long as I was gainfully employed I don’t think they really minded. Yeah. But I always wanted to go to university, I think it was just something I wanted to do.

02:33 I went to Imperial partly because my grandfather went there I think yeah it seemed like a good place to go to study the kind of things I was interested in at that time.

02:44 I go to work, I come home and look after the family and I go back to work again, pretty much yeah. Having a family’s a really good it’s been a real eye opener for me, it’s came to, we’d been married for a long time but we haven’t really, recently started this family so, yeah it’s good to have something to go to work for, but it’s also good to have something to come back to if you understand me. Yeah they’re real inspiration.

03:07 I’d like to make a success of what we’re doing currently, I’m not really ready to give up on that yet, this particular at this time where you know things are starting to come together now, opportunity wise, I’m not quite sure how long that will take, it could take 2 years it could take 10 I’m not really sure but until I’ve given it a proper shake of the stick I don’t think I’ll be ready to look on, move on anywhere else yet.

03:30 When you start out in business you’re full of big ideas and you, I could do this I could do that and these are really great ideas and er what we’ve learnt over the years is actually very simple things can be very effective. Thing about software companies is that you can run them on a shoe string, you can literally run it out of your bedroom, because all you really need is a computer and an internet connection. I wouldn’t call myself a Bill Gates in any sense of the word but I’d like to be you know, successful in what we do.

03:56