Board of Governors

Richard Muirhead
Co-founding Managing Partner, Firestartr.co

Richard is Chairman of London-based Fanatix the leader in apps to help everyone get the most out of live sports and music, Interim CEO of New York-based Oriel a pioneer in handmade food and wine from around the world and a principal with European 'creative capital' boutique Archimedia. He is also working with a team of investors and government bodies to unlock more risk capital in the UK. Richard is an advisor to Evolven Software (Tel Aviv) and Riqhtster (London).

He was Founder, Chairman and CEO of Tideway Systems which tackled the fundamental challenge of managing change in distributed applications, which is more important than ever in today's versatile and sustainable 'cloud' architectures. Tideway's hundreds of clients included JPMorganChase, Avis, Goldman Sachs and BT. Tideway was bought by BMC Software in 2009 in an all cash transaction and its products and team now generate significant and growing revenues at the core of BMC's product portfolio under the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping brand. From 2001 to 2002 he was the Entrepreneur-In-Residence at the inception of Accel Partners' London office.

In 1996 he co-founded Orchestream which subsequently listed on the LSE in 2000 with a peak market capitalization of £1.0 billion. Today, its product is marketed by Oracle under the Oracle Communications IP Service Activator brand and automates service providers including AT&T, Telstra and Vodafone.

From 1994 Richard served as a strategy consultant at Monitor, setting up the Moscow office and executing a wide range of projects in France, Portugal, Holland, Germany, Serbia, Poland, The Czech Republic and Russia. This work built on Richard's Russian language studies and participation in the first non-lingual exchange between the UK and the Soviet Union for the Maths-Physics Summer Olympiad of 1988.

He was a finalist for the 2008 British Computing Society IT Leader of the Year Award and the 2006 UK Technology Innovation and Growth Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Richard was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2009.

He has an MA in Engineering from Cambridge University. Following internships at Lotus Engineering, McLaren Automotive and Gulf Eternit in Dubai he received a First for his final year project constructing a fuel-efficient vehicle.

Holding dual Australian/UK citizenship Richard rowed for Cambridge University, South Australia and medaled for Great Britain in the U23 World and Junior European Rowing Championships. He completed the Sydney to Hobart yacht race in 1996.

His interests include highly affordable art, the evolutionary history of man, cycling to work and North Adelaide Football Club a.k.a. The Roosters.