After reading Social Anthropology at Cambridge in the early 1980s, he spent the following decade in trade journalism covering electronic data interchange and logistics. He edited Electronic Trader, an international magazine covering EDI and related developments, and a series of yearbooks for the National Computing Centre (covering EDI, Business Process Management, Computer Telephony Integration, Workflow, and Teleworking and Teleconferencing). He also produced a series of publications for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. In parallel he set up a web publishing company with his brother and worked with a pioneering SAAS company.

He has subsequently worked in the public sector as an IT adviser and strategist, across social care, public health, and chronic condition management, where the practical failures of platform lock-in and data hoarding sharpened his sense of what infrastructure ought to do.

A substantial career change saw him set up and run a microbrewery, where he developed a bespoke brewery management system that captured data at source, managed traceability through the whole process, and tolerated variability inside a structured workflow.

Having sold the business, he returned to the infrastructure idea that had been consolidating and maturing through several iterations over his career. The maturity of technology and the emergence of AI have finally caught up with the idea.

Alongside Weave, he is writing The Capture Gradient, a book about the structural mechanism that moves shared resources toward private enclosure, and a series of essays examining the digital infrastructure version of that pattern.