Doug Richard: see present to see future

“IF YOU WANT TO FIND OUT what’s happening next, find out what someone’s already doing,” software entrepreneur, millionaire and TV Dragon Doug Richard told an audience of egaming delegates this morning.

Richard was speaking at EGR Live, eGaming Review’s two-day conference and exhibition in London today, where he advised gathered online gambling executives how to make successful predictions in technology businesses.

Richard, who appeared in the first and second series of BBC2’s TV show Dragon’s Den, is the founder and vice-chairman of technology investment fund Cambridge Angels.

Between 1996 and 2000 he was president and chief executive of Micrografx, a US publicly quoted software company which he sold to Corel Corporation in 2000, and before that founded and later sold the Visual Software and ITAL Computers businesses.

Quoting science fiction author William Gibson, the angel investor said that ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.’

“If you want to see the future of mobile phones, go spend some time with some Japanese teenagers in Tokyo and see what they are using. If you want to see the future of broadband, go into any South Korean home and experience what they experience when they go online,” he said.

Advising that “success is made by your reaction to adversity,” the software mogul summarised a long career in business in which “I have sat around every seat of the table.”

This included experiences such as establishing his first company in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, “where to the south of the hills you have movies studios and glamour, while to the north, in the Woodland Hills area where we were based, they still make movies but without so many clothes on.” He also told the audience of experience of his doomed investment in a mail order custom tailoring business taht appeared on BBC2’s Dragons Den, and his being forced to move from California to Texas by major investor that he later bought out. “I hate Texas,” he joked, “and if you want to know why, it’s because if you are from Texas, you are wrong.”

Describing how investors can emulate his success, Richard said: “If you want to forecast where technology is headed, ask yourself this question: ‘where can I not do what I want to do, when I want to do it?’ If you want to know what’s next in the industry, you will find the answer there. All successful technology companies of the last ten years have been about scratching an itch.”