Switch On: Make sense of all the data

My name is Mike O’Neil and I have owned my own software companies since I was 23; I have been developing / designing software for the best part of 40 years now. Chances are, if you sold or bought a house in the last 18 years, your conveyancer used software I designed and developed. Fifteen years ago, I decided it was time to do something that did not require me being away from home yet made me as much as I needed to live on, and the only thing I could come up with was punting on horses. I wasn’t going to jump straight in; I figured a great test of my abilities with computers and mathematics would be to create a program that would guarantee success. Not a single friend believed it was possible, which is probably why I didn’t quit after the first five years; when someone says it cannot be done, all I hear is no one else could do it. In that time we have spent tens of thousands of hours. Myself and Hamid Ghasempour, without doubt the best software engineer I ever employed in my commercial life, spent that time collecting every bit of data we could, writing 1,000’s of algorithms, designing and ditching 100’s of calculators. Truth is, if I had known it would take this long and cost what it has, I never would have started; never let it be said that I am a quitter – whatever the cost.