Eureka moment
Realizing the phonebook's limits, as an interactive directory with a real depth of data and powerful search capabilities offers much more. I had experimented with online messages boards at university and the internet was beginning to explode in 1997. It was the right to time to put public data online. The first step was adding 44 million records from the edited electoral roll to the phonebook, making it easier to find a name and address.
Financing
I started 192.com based in my sister's spare room, with no outside investment, using my own savings. Much was spent purchasing the edited electoral roll from councils, and having it manually typed out in China. This process allowed us to be the first company to put the edited electoral roll on a CD Rom, costing customers just £20. We distributed 2 million copies of the first series of CD ROM's, as people embarked on finding families and friends. 192.com now has 10 million unique users a month.
Regrets
A series of court cases from incumbent players. BT had monopolized the directory enquiry market for decades, and only backed down after a legal wrangle. We even had to contest a two year High Court case against the Royal Mail who sued us for "using the postcode", claiming, wrongly, that we didn't have a license to share the UK postcode. We won the case.
What would you have changed?
Not much, though I guess I should have invested in that little start-up social networking group I came across in Harvard in 2004.
