In early 1993 I became one of the founders of Nemesys Research which developed and marketed networked attached video codecs. There were two devices; the AVA was the encoder and the ATV the decoder that completed the pair. They were used for the video distribution application, but also for CCTV and video conferencing. I remember watching the 1994 World Cup matches in a window on my Sun workstation. We built a fairly complete voice-directed conference mixer/echo canceler and associated software. It all worked pretty well but was too expensive (approximately $2000 per box) and we didn’t move quickly enough to drive down the costs.

I personally worked mostly on the control and management software, including workstation video/audio playback as well as the usual ‘founder’ stuff including being an amateur sales person, even more amateur accountant and everything else that goes into running a small business!

My full-time co-founder was Joe Dixon, Ian Pratt and Paul Barham built the first version of the AVA as research students at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory under the supervision of Ian Leslie and Derek McAuley. Neil Viljoeen joined soon after we raised our first and only round of funding as CEO. Ian Pratt went on to create Xen and XenSource.

We sold Nemesys to FORE Systems in November of 1996 and continued to develop the AVA/ATV product line until the spring of 1999, at which point I moved to the US to work for FORE Systems in the Bay Area.

Overall it was an excellent experience and my only regret is that it came “too early” in all of our careers for us to make the most of it. Given the same set of people and circumstances 20 years on I’m sure we could have made it into a much larger business.