Why I'm here, and what I'll be writing about

The times they are a-changin'

To say the working world has changed over the past year would be an understatement. I haven’t come here to hype or scaremonger - I’d much rather stick to the practical and pragmatic - but it’s not an exaggeration to say that as I write, the ground is quite literally moving beneath our feet. In the decade or so I’ve been at it, I’ve never seen or experienced anything quite like it.

The LinkedIn Lunatic will tell you the ‘playbook has changed’, in short. snappy. sentences. not designed for any reason other than to have you click. Perhaps I should be there too, but hopefully by writing here, away from the whims of a social media algorithm, my learnings will come across not as clickbait, but as authentic as the intentions behind sharing them.

Where I've been

I've been trying to figure out whether I've enough lived experience to merit starting this. So first, an attempt to qualify that, before we get into where we are now, and how to prepare for what's next.

First, it was Too Good To Go. I built that from the ground up, right from the very start. It was the adventure of a lifetime, and it’s forever humbling to see how far it’s gone now. There’s plenty of tales to tell from that period that I’m looking forward to getting into later.

Then it was Futureplay - a completely different journey in a completely different country with a completely different culture. I was the first marketing hire there, and, while the transition was tough (it takes a lot to move away from the day-to-day of your own company) I like to think I had a small part to play in helping the studio to a successful acquisition by Plarium.

From one ‘play’ to another - Futureplay to Metaplay - and another startup of just ten people, not making games, but the tech that powers them. At Metaplay, I've been able to draw upon all of my learnings from growing companies and games in both B2B and B2C to help us scale internationally.

Along the way I’ve built teams, hired people, fired people, managed up, managed down, raised funding, chased grants, closed deals, lost deals, launched products, ran campaigns, and even had my company introduced on primetime UK TV by Jon Bon Jovi (I wish I still had that video).

In short, my career over the years has involved all of the things that working in or leading a tech startup could entail, bar the actual tech development itself.

The present day

Up to now, people like me have always relied on the skills and experience of developers much smarter than us in order to get the technical things we needed doing done.

Take website development. Every brand needs a website, but few marketing teams have the development capabilities to build one in-house. For years, that's meant marketers have needed off-the-shelf tooling that's never quite as good as you want it to be, or used external web development agencies, or chased internal developers from other teams who would probably prefer to carry on working on the thing they were already doing.

At Metaplay, we spent three years with an agency. At the time it was fine, but now, I look back and wonder how the hell we got by working that way for so long. Design briefs. Development briefs. Lead times. Development times. And at the end of it all, a handsome invoice from the agency to boot. Now, as a small team of two non-developers, we run our own website ourselves, and can change anything we like as fast as we want.

This is where I get back to the ground shifting. Non-programmers can now build websites, autonomous CRMs, outreach pipelines, and just about any tool or system they might need to be able to do their job better. Not only that - it turns out that spending your career working so close to the customer has lots of advantages in knowing what to build, and why. In fact, I think commercial leaders and operators are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the opportunity ahead - if you can learn to manipulate the tools right.

An 18-month AI journey

As a keen early adopter of all-things exciting tech, I've been riding the ‘vibe coding’ wave since before the term became a popularised concept. I threw myself into Lovable when it first launched in late 2024, got helplessly addicted, built a bucket of hobby projects (some of them really quite complex), and, slowly but surely, in the time from then to now, graduated from Lovable through to Cursor and, eventually, Claude Code.

This hardcore adoption ramp has meant that while not being a coder, I’ve been able to pick up a lot of the thinking and mental models required to build powerful interconnected systems. Moving from the hobbyist realm to the professional realm and layering years of frontline commercial experience on top, I’ve seen that these are the kinds of systems that allow marketing and commercial to operate at pace, self-sufficiently, with advanced custom setups that can have small teams punching way above their weight.

It also helps that I’m also lucky enough to work at the deepest end of deep tech. It doesn’t get much more complex than building massively scalable backends for games, and, daily, I marvel at the engineering skills of my peers at Metaplay, and just how far we are ahead of the curve on this whole AI thing.

Building end-to-end commercial systems with AI

Taking inspiration from my colleagues and applying it to our commercial function, since the start of 2026 alone, our tiny team of two has been able to close out a number of big projects that would otherwise have taken us years. We’ve moved to an AI-first way of operating, building tools and agents to handle all the background work, and leaving people to do the things only people can do: strategy, judgement, decision-making, and content production (yes, even though we could, we don’t have AI write our blogs, emails, newsletters and such. IMO, that’s how you lose an audience).

In the long-run, this keeps a small commercial team focused only on the impactful things that are most likely to move the needle, and means we don't have to concern ourselves with background tasks like CRM hygiene, data drift, keeping fragmented information in our head, and, generally, just cleaning up after ourselves.

Getting ahead of the paradigm shift

At the risk of re-entering the realms of the Linkedin Lunatic, we really are moving through a paradigm shift. It's only the tooling we use and the systems we've built that have allowed us to get ahead - and we've only been able to build those thanks to the emergence and progress of AI.

In the next posts, I’ll share the first practical steps on how we got started - the building blocks that unlocked everything else. It starts with a unified commercial function that more efficiently organises often fragmented go-to-market activities (marketing, sales, account management and GTM strategy) into one single flywheel. If you’re just setting out on a similar journey, or thinking about doing so sometime soon, follow along.