About
Background
Arthur Meadows has over 25 years' experience in the software industry, both in the UK, Europe & in the US.
He classes himself as a product manager and product marketing manager and a retired programmer - he has always been much more interested in the business processes underlying the software, rather than the nuts and bolts of its programming.
Since November 2008, he has been based in Cambridge, UK. He has spent over seven years in the US during several periods: in Dallas, Texas and in Northern California (in the good ol' boom days, prior to the tech crash in 2000) and in San Diego, California. His former positions have included translation engineer, QA tester, change management consultant and project management specialist. He has worked for software companies a variety of different sectors: logistics, consumer social media, ad-tech, public sector, consumer telecoms, AI / ML and blockchain, smart energy as examples.
He has an MBA from Judge Business School, Cambridge University. Whilst at Cambridge, he caught the innovation bug and has been building new ventures inside larger companies and / or working with small software companies ever since. He is a co-founder of the Cambridge Product Management Network, a professional network for technology product managers in Cambridge.
Professional Experience
On completion of his MBA, he took an abortive flight back to San Francisco, his previous home, on 11th Sept 2001. Realising that the tech industry in Silicon Valley was no place to look for a job at that time, he returned to London and worked with a number of UK software start-ups. He met one company, Midentity, that fascinated him so much that he joined as a co-founder. See the case study for more details.
After four fascinating years, he decided to leave Midentity at Christmas 2005 to seek new challenges. He has applied his sharp business acumen to repeat previous successes with other ventures, either for start-ups or for established companies on new product introductions. During 2006, he enjoyed working for Vectone, a VoIP / mobile network provider, as a product management & marketing consultant.
In August 2006, he relocated to San Diego, California and became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of California, San Diego, before joining Webmetrics (website performance monitoring provider for web apps, enterprise mash-ups and internet ecosystems) as product manager and product marketing manager. He took them through acquisition by Neustar in January 2008. (See the case study for more details.) He returned to Cambridge in June 2008 and continued his Webmetrics role remotely for another 10 months.
In April 2009, he joined VentureNavigator - a government-funded website helping SMEs and entrepreneurs improve their chance of success, based in Cambridge, UK. After the UK Government Spending Review in October 2010, in which funds to support entrepreneurship were reigned in, the management team decided to reduce scope and costs and Arthur left to find pastures new.
Arthur spent over a year doing Product Management consultancy. His most interesting assignment was for CDK Global, a market-dominating provider of software for car showrooms and service centres, to become their release manager for version 9 of their product (version 8 shipped 12 years previously). See the case study for more details.
In February 2013, Arthur joined Conversity, headquartered in London, who provided competitive intelligence and assisted sales platforms for fast moving and highly dynamic markets. Its lead customer is the UK mobile operator, Everything Everywhere (now BT), who used Conversity's software and market data for their sales and retention teams, both in their retail stores and in their call centres. Arthur's role was to maintain and service two legacy systems at the same time, redesigning and re-engineering them onto a single, much more flexible platform.
Arthur joined Grapeshot in April 2014, the leading player in contextual data for internet display advertising to build their Product Management and Product Marketing function. This combined two long term interests: natural language processing and high performance computing in the very fast moving advertising tech sector. See the case study for more details.
With an itch to educate other product managers, Arthur spent several months designing and authoring elearning courses for Product Managers and Product Marketers for a Fortune 500 company during 2016.
In early 2017, Arthur joined Fetch.ai, as one of first employees and first full-time member of the management team. Fetch.ai combines Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and blockchain to build an entirely new approach to digital marketplaces - one driven by self-actuating, distributed, bottom-up intelligence. Arthur has worn a number of hats since those early days: from recruiter (head count now stands at 40 people), patent portfolio manager, legal and compliance offer and commercial director. He was Head of Investor Relations as Fetch.ai raised $15m in 2018 from private investors. In early 2019, Fetch.AI raised an additional $6m on a crowd funding platform via an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) - the remarkable aspect was that the sale was all over in 22 seconds. Four days later, Fetch.ai tokens listed on the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance (see FET-USDT trading pair). See the case study for more details.
In late 2019, Arthur was engaged by SATAVIA as Head of Product. SATAVIA provides atmospheric modelling of the atmosphere to the aviation sector. By Q2 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic had decimated this industry.
Since then he has been working on various product management projects in a range of fields: turnaround / go-to-market for med-tech ML service, market evaluation for a new UAV / drone service, interim Head of Products for next-generation smart energy player.