[Techie Tuesday] He started coding at 8, he went on to build a corporate blockchain platform

Richard Brownit’s CTO’s turn London based blockchain startup R3 it was fortuitous. He spent more than 15 years at IBM and participated in various technology and product development initiatives at the software giant.

He was working on several blockchain and bitcoin ideas and projects, but he wasn’t looking to change jobs. But David E. Rutter, the founder of R3, had other plans – the first was to hire Richard.

“He was quite persistent. To get it off me, I said I would join if he could get five banks to sign on the dotted line to build a consortium of technologists and banks to launch a blockchain network, ”Richard recalls.

Needless to say R3 was able to get five banks and more, and Richard ended up joining.

As CTO, Richard, along with the team, designed Corda, an advanced enterprise blockchain platform. The company now has a consortium of nearly 100 banks, regulators, technology companies, professional services firms and trade associations.

Building rudimentary IoT devices

Richard’s interest in bitcoin and blockchain was sparked in 2012, but his technological journey began in 1985 when his father gave him a second-hand computer for his eighth birthday.

The oldest of three children, Richard has grown up Liverpool, UK. His father was a social worker and his mother was a teacher, and the boy shared his interest in math and technology with his father.

“My father was an experienced mathematician and he instilled in me a love of mathematics. I was super excited when he took my computer. It was a ZX Specter, a simple machine, but I was hooked. You can load games onto it via a cassette player. And you can also program on the computer, which comes with the built-in BASIC programming language, ”recalls Richard.

He says he had the support of his uncle, an electrical engineer. In 1989, to encourage Richard, his uncle built a device that could connect to the ZX spectrum; this device could help to broadcast and control things.

“I could detect closed circuits; I could turn the burglar alarms and lights on and off. It was fun. Now it’s called the IoT (with raspberry pie), but I did it with rudimentary systems. I was really interested in computers but back then there was no computer mindset,” he says.

Richard joined Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 1996 and studied mathematics, physics, chemistry and additional mathematics.

In 1999, the UK government, recognizing the importance of computerization, introduced a one-year computer science degree at Cambridge. A three-year course was condensed into a one-year diploma, from which Richard got.

IBM’s elite lab

Richard passed out in 2000, the time of the dotcom bust. Although most people were wary of computer-related jobs and careers, they knew this was what they wanted to do.

“I knew little about the world of startups or IT. I applied for IBM and didn’t know there would be two campuses and companies: the consulting and the engineering part of the software. Luckily, I was recruited to join IBM’s Hursley Labs in Winchester, UK“, Remember.

“More than 2,000 software engineers were sitting in the English countryside and building things. We went from the university, a very academic and invigorating environment, to this laboratory. The daily work was writing and testing the software; it was a completely practical world, “he says.

Richard’s team has continued to build products such as Websphere, MQ series, which is still used today by the World Bank.

On his first day, he remembers that “he had to install the whole code and the very complicated integration product”.

“I was in charge of quality control. Initially I was put out, but in hindsight it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It gave me a broad view of the industry, the products, how they work and how it all fits into the user’s world. Most developers rarely get a 360-degree perspective,” he says.

Work all over the world

In the early 2000s, the world was going online and e-commerce was gaining ground.

During this time, IBM had built an integration project. If you were a company that just set up an e-commerce site, you had to understand that how the orders got to the production system and the logistics departmentand how to integrate the different parts of your company.

This may seem obvious today, but in the early 2000s it was a new concept. IBM had the power and technical strength, but it was losing out to the more agile startups.

“We were a a competitive disadvantage. A team of engineers worked on the product and it was deployed around the world to ensure the product worked. When I was twenty, I saw the world and built projects in Australia, Eastern Europe, Siberia, etc. “, Says Richard.

Understanding the financial markets

Richard quickly realized he needed to build products and watch the entire journey from start to finish. By that time, the lab team was breaking up and Richard, wondering what the next step was, discovered that there was an opening in IBM’s procurement team.

“This was a team for the same products. It wasn’t about winning deals; it was about successfully implementing solutions. At the time, IBM was purchasing many other software vendors and companies. So, I got to develop skills in other products as well, “he says.

Most of these projects weren’t happening in London, and Richard realized it was businessmen and architects who were moving around the world.

Richard, who had begun to develop an interest in finance and economics, soon recognized this London was home to all major banking systems.

“I spent most of my time studying the budget; I found it fascinating, “he says.

Down the blockchain rabbit hole

Soon a technical job emerged within IBM and Richard decided to take it back. In 2013, interest in bitcoin had started to grow.

“I had discovered a small column in The Economist; piqued my interest. I started going down the rabbit hole and found it fascinating. I’ve heard this might be more relevant to fintechs. If something happens with banks and the blockchain, more companies had to do things together “.

In 2015, he and a couple of colleagues worked on a joint project to see the different opportunities and ideas that could be built with some small banks.

It was then that R3 wanted to combine the world’s banks into a consortium. In September 2015, Richard joined R3.

“We believe the opportunity is to build new systems for the markets, where all banks can be synchronized on trade and loan agreements, and perhaps on other sectors as well. It’s about making markets work more efficiently. It’s about optimizing business processes that could transform the operations of entire industries, ”says Richard.

Construction rope

The R3 team finished it these and other technologies could be built with bitcoin and blockchain.

Public blockchains are based on pseudonymous identities. Identity is important in the financial sector as you need to know who you are transacting with. But you also don’t want the world to know who you’re signing a contract with or who you’re transacting with.

“How do we create a system that works similarly, but differently where it matters? This has led to a lot of experimentation and prototypes, ”says Richard.

It was then that the idea of ​​Corda was born. Mike Hearn, a well-known Google engineer who had done a lot of work in the bitcoin space, joined as chief engineer and the product was soon built.

A small startup in North America started using Corda to tokenize gold, a small number of insurance companies started using it for marine insurance, and the journey began.

Today, Richard manages a small but agile team in R3.

What are you looking for while hiring a software engineer? “If they can actually write software.”

“At IBM, hiring is a more centralized function and I wasn’t part of many early shifts. But in R3, along with Mike, we realized that a lot of people can’t actually write software, but they can keep software written by other people, follow tutorials and tweak things. “

“I’m not looking for a superstar. I am not looking like the best programmer in the world. I just want to see evidence that this person can write a program, ”Richard says.

Advise all technicians to “become an expert”.

“Master something and get to know it thoroughly. This is how I went from being one of 90/100 people to being one of the chosen few. I was a product expert; I knew how it worked. This gives people higher confidence. Use your time to master something become an expert. You can’t be an expert when you get senior because you have to cover a lot more topics. So work on it first, ”Richard says.