Social networking is strictly business

Photo: Marcel Tromp

I've always been attracted to things you can do with technology, as well as being design focused. Starting out, [web development] was an up-and-coming field where I got to do programming and design, and deal with some stunning businesses.

When Enlighten started in 1999, I’d just finished a double major in psychology and political science at Waikato University, and was about to go back and do clinical psychology. I was one of a bunch of students who gamed together but didn’t have the money to host the website we had.

I went to an ISP and said, “Your website’s really bad and we’ll develop it for you as long as you give us free hosting.” After that, the ISP just kept giving us more work, so I thought, “Maybe I’ll take a year off from uni and see how this plays out.”

Websites in New Zealand were really, really bad in the early 1990s. There weren’t many good suppliers around, and to be honest we almost had no competition. I’d been hanging out online with some people in America and learned a lot — they were developers and designers who were part of that early community vibe around the web. [The industry has] gone almost full circle from having a community feel to being quite commercial and, with the influence of social networking, to being quite a community again.

I only use social networking for business. LinkedIn’s good because it only involves your business contacts, and Twitter is good because the updates are really short. I’m not on Facebook or MySpace, because I just couldn’t handle adding that extra layer.

Now I don’t do much graphic design and programming, although I do a bit of solution architecting for customers because of my experience. These days it’s email and meetings. I use my iPhone for a million and one things, and our staff use the free application Fring for quick chats if we’re out of the office.

We’re quite a young organisation, ranging in age from 22 to 33, and I’m 32. It’s a laid-back environment with a lot of Gen Y-ers. We attract the best talent we can get and try to provide the best work environment.

We’ve transitioned where we are as a company. We’re a domain name registrar; a hosting company; we do enterprise software and web development; we’re an SMS service provider; we have our own products; and some resell our hosting and domains. As long as you’re consistently delivering high-quality work, you never have a problem with growth.

When you’re a CEO, you shouldn’t be holding onto things. My approach has been to get into an area, understand it, structure it, make sure the right people are trained, and then manage that area in moving forward. I still don’t have a personal assistant, because to a degree I feel it’s cheating. It means you’re holding onto too much and haven’t put the right people in place.