F-B-F.org -

They just didn’t have the ambition.”During his second year at Cambridge, Twiss began to realise the opportunity on his doorstep. “We were in this great environment where we all had the Internet in our rooms and used that to do a lot of our work. Why get up in the morning for lectures when you can lie in bed until 11am, get the notes over the Internet and then critique the lecturer via the Internet for being boring and stuffy? Damian and I were running a big website ourselves but we couldn’t sleep at night because the hard-drive was churning away and steam was coming off it. We either had to buy bigger machines, take down our baby, or write our own software to deal with the problem.”During exams, Twiss found himself with time on his hands so he began tapping out an idea for a server prototype.

Over the ensuing days, he and Reeves perfected it, released it and began to get feedback from users. By the time they left college, both with first-class degrees, they were selling their software.Two years later, Twiss and Reeves took the decision to find outside investors. “Our big break came when Autonomy went public and we were in the same building People started looking for the next Autonomy. We had to educate a lot of people about what the Internet was, explaining that this wasn’t just the latest trend but was going to change the way we live.

People saw three kids trying to convince them that their company was going to be a key part of this new economy, and some just thought we were mad.”Bankers from WestLB paid a visit and put in money of their own, and Twiss began to take heart “It’s what I call the Michael Owen factor. When he was playing in the World Cup he was probably a lot less nervous than Stuart Pearce, because he remembers a time when he first played for Liverpool, and for the reserves, and for his school. Each time it’s the next step up and he’s got that confidence building up. We had been trying to convince people in our small corner for ages, so investment was the next progression. We hadn’t given up any high-paid jobs, so we didn’t have to be risk-averse.”Twiss says his strategy since has been to establish the company at the high end of a booming market. “Traffic across British Telecom’s UK backbone is growing at 7 per cent per week and most of that is Web traffic.