Taking the start-up plunge

KENT BLECHYNDEN/The Dominion Post

FRESH START: Personal Information Management managing director Ross Hughson says his new venture 'focuses the mind'.

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Former Inland Revenue chief information officer Ross Hughson swapped one of the hottest seats in government IT for a desk at Wellington technology incubator CreativeHQ, and so far he's not regretting it.

There he is establishing his own start-up software firm that is just beginning to contribute to the country's tax coffers.

Mr Hughson quit Inland Revenue's employ in March but had been out of the day-to-day running at the department for a year before that, on secondment to the State Services Commission where he was assisting with the design of shared services.

His downloadable application, myInfoSafe, started as a hobby two years ago, but Mr Hughson is now working on it fulltime and has employed his first staff member.

The "personal data warehouse" is designed to store personal information – such as scans of vital documents, financial information, property details, health records, PINs and passwords and the like – in an encrypted vault on customers' computers, so they can find it when they need it.

"I have spent a lot of my time managing information in organisations, but today in our personal lives we are getting flooded with more and more information and I think people need help," he says.

"It is like in the corporation, we are getting islands of information in the home that we need to look at integrating. With ultrafast broadband happening – if we are going to have a gigabit of speed into each household – we are just going to get more and more of it."

Customers – just a few hundred so far – can back up their vaults to a USB stick, but Mr Hughson plans a third release of myInfoSafe later this year that will also let people store their information securely online in "the cloud", so they can access it from anywhere.

The software can be downloaded from popular United States technology site Cnet for US$29.95 (NZ$36). Mr Hughson says he was also approached by a US distributor last year, which agreed to sell it a few weeks ago.

That approach gave him the confidence to make the fulltime plunge. He was offered a place at CreativeHQ last year after his idea for myInfoSafe won the services category award at Grow Wellington's Bright Ideas challenge.

This month he is off to the United States and "the Valley" to visit the distributor and get an update on what is happening in the mobile space.

Mr Hughson, 50, says he has gone from a good salary to pretty much nothing. "I've set myself up so I've got a period of time when that is fine, but it certainly focuses the mind. I have got to work on something and make it happen – not that I didn't do that as a CIO, but there is a sense of urgency that's there.

"I am just enjoying it. I enjoyed Inland Revenue and Westpac" – where he was also chief information officer – "but it came to the point where I was thinking whether I wanted to do another corporate CIO job."

SMALL BEGINNINGS:

• Established in 2003, CreativeHQ on Manners St is Wellington's sole surviving technology incubator and is one of 10 members of Incubators New Zealand. The incubator is owned by Wellington Regional Council but governed by its own independent board. Victoria University used to own a popular incubator, T-Up, next to the MetService building in the Botanical Gardens. It is no longer an incubator but still provides office space for small businesses.
• CreativeHQ houses 22 start-ups, about half of which rent physical space. The other half have only a "virtual presence". A $300 monthly rental buys a desk, access to meeting rooms and the use of its communal IT infrastructure. The largest occupant rents seven desks, but most have only one. Members get access to discounts from professional services firms such as lawyers and accountants, but the incubator is not a "serviced office" and does not provide secretarial services.
• The incubator currently has vacancies for about five more start-ups, but entry is not automatic. The incubator's goal is to promote economic development. Entrepreneurs must apply to join and satisfy CreativeHQ their business has high-growth potential and is preferably scalable globally.
• Twenty-nine firms have "graduated" from the incubator and established their own premises. Successful alumni include user-testing company Optimal Usability, online talent broker StarNow and "open source" content management software maker Silverstripe.

- © Fairfax NZ News