Freddy May

Codio is the world’s leading platform for teaching computer science, and it is used by many of the leading universities and courses as well as by schools.

Professor Eitan Grinspun, one of the world’s leading experts in computer graphics at Columbia University, chose Codio for teaching general computer science at Columbia and for his edX computer graphics microdegree course.

Codio is used by hundreds of Ivy League and research universities, colleges, and schools worldwide.

We achieved two incredibly satisfying things:
• We significantly improved the lives of faculty and students by allowing complex development stacks to be created by the faculty and consumed by the students using nothing more than a browser.
• We freed faculty and students from the need for CS labs. We enabled them to use their laptops to work from anywhere, eliminating the need to invest in and maintain expensive CS facilities.

As a result, student satisfaction has increased significantly. Facilities that used to house desks and PCs were freed up for other purposes and achieved substantial cost savings.

Although this project is now in the distant past, I would like to highlight this as an example of how I like to innovate.

I founded Formic, managed the product, and coded the first version myself before recruiting an engineering team. I built the company and sold it without having raised any funds.

At the time, image scanners were being used for things like OCR, photo scanning, and, at the higher end, image archival. I believed they could be used for data collection.

The product comprised two main components, a survey form design tool and the scanning engine, which scanned the data, primarily checkboxes and handwritten numbers. The results could then be analyzed using proprietary third-party data analysis packages.

Over four years, we sold Formic to over 80% of all UK hospitals, 40% of ambulance services, and 20% of police forces for a wide range of data collection applications.

The highlight was the RAJAR project. This involved processing TV and radio diaries from households across the country, totaling over one million sheets of scanned paper every week, that had to be delivered punctually to clients like the BBC, Sky, and independent TV and radio stations.

Crotchety is designed to be a domain niche-specific LinkedIn. It provides individuals and organizations with a customizable, extensible social platform that addresses the following key points:
• It allows people and organizations to configure skills-based profiles.
• It uses a map-driven UI, allowing people and organizations to find each other based on skills they are looking for or already have.
• Jobs and gigs can be posted with the sought skills being specified.
• Interview and audition scheduling and booking.
• Portfolio items can be added showcasing personal or organizational highlights.
• Private and group chat at the job and gig level.
• Posts, timeline, followers and following, likes, and reposts.
• Powerful free text search capabilities.

One major design characteristic is being able to reconfigure Crotchety for a new domain and niche within four hours. This involves rebranding, domain-specific skills configuration, and app store presence.

The first two chosen domains were performing arts and fund management. However, any domain or community can be addressed, including ERP consultants, food and cooking, software development, graph database consultants, translators, and copywriters.

Perfectforms was built in the era when business process management was the preserve of larger organizations and required considerable resources and expertise.

Our goal was to provide a simple yet powerful way of dealing with any process that could be mapped to a form or collection of forms and then be routed between different people or departments for approval, sign-off, or information enhancement.

Users can create a workflow and data access rules using a flowchart rather than code. Furthermore, being a SaaS platform, users could get up and running quickly and begin prototyping at a very low cost before moving seamlessly into production.

I was the chief product officer and recruited and managed the engineering and QA teams. I ran technical sales for crucial clients and successfully closed many corporate and government sales. The largest individual deal I made was to HSBC Compliance, worth $1 million over three years.

CooklyBookly, available as a web and iOS/Android app, grew quickly to become one of the UK’s most-used culinary publishing platforms and was used by hundreds of social media influencers, initially in the UK and later in the US.

My role was to design and develop the product, build the engineering team, and occasionally write code when engineering capacity was unavailable.

A major responsibility was talking to social media influencers to understand their requirements and balance those with the business objectives.

I also closed a major strategic partnership with HP, which had started a division that offered on-demand printed books to social media influencers. I led the sales process and the technical integration with HP’s publishing platform. I also designed and led the monetization capabilities of the platform, allowing influencers to monetize their content through various offerings, including digital cookbooks, subscriptions to digital culinary courses, and brand deals.

The company met its demise when Russia invaded Ukraine. It was in the process of a funding round, but the entire engineering and QA team was in Russia, so the company could not close the round.