Jon Valentine

Background

About Jon Valentine

Having a great passion for technology from a very young age, I found electronics and programming was a great way to express my creative side. This led to a passion at just 8 years old for Artificial Intelligence and creating computer programs that 'learned' and by 12 years old, I was pretty good at understanding how to use micro-controllers to build learning robots, but programming was where I excelled.I started working as an adviser to schools in 2001 throughout my city where in one school I came up with the idea of Impero, which by 2007 had more than 250 schools on board.In spring 2014 Impero was well established as the UK's Market leading solution and I bought out my shareholders in a £10m MBO. I became the majority shareholder and an investment firm took claim to a small stake.Just 1 year later, I stepped away as CEO to take on the seemingly impossible task of building a cloud based SaaS competitor to my former creation (yes, both products compete)-My first start-up company sold for ~£28million thanks to the product being disruptive, inventive and comprehensive. not to mention it was taken to market by a great team of people, however, the product was very dated and reached end of life. So I am very excited about my new creation which betters the previous product in every way-Spring 2018: Just a few months after officially releasing our new solution (senso), we had over 650 schools - it took me more than 9 years to get to this point at Impero which is amazing for a new start-up. Very exciting!Spring 2019: A little over one year since we took senso to market and we enjoy a seriously large market share, of around 1300 schools. We are now at 'year 12' of my former business, in less than 18 months.Summer 2024: We hit a milestone of schools globally! Amazing achievement by a fantastic team.I believe we should not learn from the success of others, instead we should learn from the failure of others and make our own success.