Jack Hunt

Imperial College London

Director & Co-founder at GridMarkets, and Endeavor Entrepreneur

GridMarkets makes it push-button easy to leverage the Cloud for workloads that need 1000s of CPUs & GPUs for compute-intensive problems like rendering and drug discovery.  Our multi-award-winning platform is used by 1000+ VFX/animation artists and scientists in over 100 countries to create block-buster worthy special effects and modern drugs.

Our solution gained us the accolade of "the most promising start-up in Malaysia"​, and one of Asia's top 10 start-ups (<a href="http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/sizzle-fizzle/echelon-malaysia-satellite-a-hit-with-startups">www.digitalnewsasia.com/sizzle-fizzle/echelon-malaysia-satellite-a-hit-with-startups</a>), taking us to the Echelon 2013 Asia-wide finals in Singapore, as well as making us a finalist for the Red Herring Asia 2013 awards (<a href="http://www.redherring.com/events/red-herring-asia/finalists2013/">www.redherring.com/events/red-herring-asia/finalists2013/</a>) and winner of the BBVA Global OpenTalent 2014 innovation award.  We were selected by Oracle in 2019 as one of its key global startup partners, but also work several other Cloud providers to maximise the use of their capacity.

GridMarkets is growing rapidly and looking for talent, so please visit <a href="http://www.gridmarkets.com/hiring.html">www.gridmarkets.com/hiring.html</a>

GridMarkets

Director & Co-founder

We developed a radically new patent-pending mobile solution for social networking, payments and other transactions that required NO app, smart phone or even an Internet connection.  We garnered a lot of interest from industry leaders, but were a little ahead of our time and could not translate it into a real market opportunity as we just couldn't get the backing we needed to get it off the ground.  However, it was personally a HUGE learning experience in one of the hottest new trends in tech.  No regrets.

qnnecto.me

CEO & Co-founder

The move to the Cloud is the other great sea-change in IT.  CloudGarage aims to translate the hype into technically-workable business-grounded solutions.  I am involved with a group of technical experts to commercialise various Cloud-based technologies into real-world products, including defining market entry plans, legal frameworks and sales & marketing strategies.  A consulting engagement to leverage the Cloud and Cloud technologies led to the forming of GridMarkets (see above).

CloudGarage

Commercial Director

I took on this role in parallel with the prior one for over a year and focused fully on it post the Reuters acquisition.  The initial focus was on firm-wide in & out-bound partnerships, especially in markets where TF had little business such as China, India and Korea, and resulted in (re)negotiating, maintain/growing or terminating over 50 relationships including strategic & tactical partners, industry associations, the media, competitors and government entities.  The role expanded to lead a team to develop growth plans for Japan, China and India, securing >US$500k in funding, and then to developing a divisional Asia-wide strategy, leading to a number of acquisition opportunities.

Eventually, I was tasked with building a business plan to enter the mainland China market focusing on the domestic buy-side and retail wealth opportunities with just a remit to “Go figure it out!”  I built a team to develop the 5 year plan with a $5m budget and $25m revenue target detailing product/content, infrastructure, sales & marketing and service & support requirements, as well as identifying partnership and acquisition targets.  Key to this was designing an organisational and operational structure to be an effective player in Asia’s domestic markets as well as defining a full marketing strategy and an approach for handling China’s complex regulatory environment.

Thomson Reuters

Strategic Business Development Director – Asia, Investment & Advisory

Promoted and moved to Asia to run TF’s investment banking, sell-side research and private equity/venture capital verticals across all jurisdictions, including Japan.  The business was doing well with approx. $10m annual recurring revenue and 9% growth, so most did not feel the need for a business manager/partner/leader.  This view was compounded by the fact that I had little experience or contacts in the region, and my task was further hampered by major management changes in the region.

But with minimal support from headquarters I built a team to mentor, refocus and rally the entire 100+ Asia organisation and became “the face” of TF’s sell-side business in Asia by executing internal and external marketing events through seminars, conferences, speaking engagements and media coverage.  The team also generated >US$5m in annual recurring revenue by developing sales channels through strategic third-parties, sales campaigns and negotiating legacy migrations.  In addition, we launched several new solutions into the region including a localised version of Thomson ONE Investment Banking for the Japanese market, which went on to be the #1 solution in that segment and the highest new revenue generator (US$10m) for TF in Asia.

All this resulted in exceeding revenue and operating income targets every year, more than tripling both revenue to $30m and growth to 27%, transforming the Asia business to be 40% of the absolute growth of TF’s sell-side business globally in spite of being only 10% of the revenue.

Thomson Financial

Customer Segment Manager: Sell-side Segment – Asia

I was recruited to manage senior relationships at bulge-bracket clients to deliver products and customised solutions such as In/Extranets, requiring coordination across multiple parts of the TF and client organisations, many of whom had competing priorities.  One of the engagements led to the creation of a solution that became Thomson ONE Investment Banking.  I was in the core team that conceived, designed, developed and launched the product that subsequently became Thomson Financial’s global flagship product, winning a number of awards, including Inside Market Data’s 2003 “Product Development of the Year” and propelled Thomson Financial to be their “Company to Watch”, elevating it to the same league as Reuters and Bloomberg.

I parleyed this to co-head the Investment (Sell-Side) Research segment globally, a new focus for TF, co-developing the business plan and launching a complete set of TF and third-party solutions for the vertical, including negotiating third-party contracts and creating a new version of Thomson ONE with Datastream.

Both these sets of solutions were new for Thomson Financial and I was responsible for developing of all marketing and training materials as the firm’s “market specialist” as well as coaching and working closely with the sales organisation to foster consultative solution-selling based on value.

Vice President – Investment Banking & Research

Hired into the head office to lead the department’s “Strategic Stream” initiative to create an iterative development lifecycle and quality management system to redefine the approach to all applications development based on-object oriented practices & technologies.  I created role definitions, reuse models and cost-benefit analyses by investigating and introducing new tools, components and technologies including layered & distributed architectures.

I then took responsibility for the design, delivery and high-availability (including for Y2K) of the group’s real-time market data and news systems, planning tactical & long-term strategies and negotiating contracts with a US$5m annual budget.  In the process, I lead the development of the corporate Intranet’s intra-day pricing and news components, closed a long-standing compliance issue by deploying an entitlement & reporting system that passed vendor audits and reduced information costs by >US$1m/annum.

Finally, I delivered an enterprise-wide strategy for real-time and historical news to all user communities, conducting business analyses, creating RFPs, selecting vendors, running pilots and negotiating contracts with vendors such as Dow Jones, Reuters, Factiva and the FT.

Goldman, Sachs & Co.

Associate – Investment Banking Technology

I completed several deliveries for two major clients in the UK, performed QA on one in Sweden and ran global training courses.

London Stock Exchange - Market Monitoring and Surveillance System ('94-'96)
I was in a cherry-picked core team of 5 consultants assembled to architect and implement a state-of-the-art distributed system to analyse real-time and historic trading information using an object-oriented design and development methodology with cutting-edge NeXT, OpenSTEP and Solaris technologies.  Not only was it one of the fastest messaging architectures in the world with a rich front-end, it was so robust that it had ZERO software failures in almost 10 yeas of continuous real-time and batch operation.

I initially selected, installed and supported the development & test environments, ultimately also doing so for the production & disaster recovery environments, but then moved on to lead the design, implementation & testing of numerous common components and real-time & batch systems including feed-handlers, all aspects of procedural and technical security as well as the disaster recovery systems and procedures.


North West Water - Work Management System ('92-'94)
I was deeply involved with all aspects of system development including the technical and functional design of major components for the largest (>1000 man years) client/server project in Europe at the time.  I was initially coding, but by the end of my tenure was providing extensive technical support to the development teams, ultimately becoming one of 3 people responsible in a core “design authority” team reviewing all designs.  In particular, I specified and prototyped the functional and technical design of the largest and most complex component of the primary release of the system to support a new organisational structure, and specified technical and functional requirements to enable communication between the system and a network of mobile computers used by the client's service personnel.

Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting)

Manager

Founding member of a 4-person company when projects were conceptual or embryonic and therefore personally involved in investigating, architecting/designing, developing, testing and supporting numerous systems, including:
- A multi-media communications system with integrated fax and e/v-mail with Windows 3.x clients;
- A voice recognition/dictation editing system with a Windows front-end;
- A Windows personal organiser with generic printing facilities.

The first two products were way ahead of their time and the company was bought by OCTEL a year after I left.

Forum Hi-Tech Ltd.

Systems Analyst & Programmer (London)

Designed, developed, tested and produced all user & system documentation for a Macintosh 4GL-based client/server multi-user Telex solution for (at the time) a small start-up.