About
Sean Westgate
I am an entrepreneurial technologist with over 20 years’ experience driving innovation, building products, running teams and growing businesses. I am working as a Technical Consultant helping tech teams improve and deliver disruptive products. Please check out my LinkedIn profile for a full list of experiences, or keep on reading to find out more about me.
As the driving founder of Green Hippo Ltd, I took the company all the way from a tiny office in North London to a successful international business with worldwide distribution. Our market leading product, the Hippotizer, served up video on many high profile shows, including the Eurovision Song Contest, Lady Gaga at the Super Bowl Half-time Show and the “Oscars” - Academy Award amongst many others.
As a founder, it is often tough to keep track of all the things that need doing, from day-to-day cashflow management to strategic planning, to building a strong brand and company culture. Oh, yes, not to forget to drive your product forward and look after your customers! Drop one ball, and it can be a real set-back. One of the key decisions we made during our growth was to bring on NEDs - Non-Executive Directors. It was invaluable to get honest feedback from experienced practitioners, enabling you to step outside the business and have a critical look at where your business is heading. Now that Green Hippo has found a new home with tvONE as parent company, I am interested in working with the next generation of disruptive ideas, supporting young founders on their journey to grow their businesses.
Next to building teams and businesses bringing new ideas to life, I have a real passion for technology. With a track record in high performance video playback and processing, I am turning towards the newer fields of data processing, machine learning and AI. Working with the team at Citi Logik in Leeds, I was able to help restructure their data processing work and bring software engineering practices to a team predominantly made up of Data Analysts. This meant creating processing templates to port their SQL algorithms to pySpark to speed up and parallelise processing of billions of events running on clusters in the cloud. We also added automated testing systems and combined JupyterLab based exploration with production ready and testable modules.
Picklejuice is all about helping teams grow. With a wealth of experience, I am just as happy to help solve challenging technical problems, look at dev team structure and best practice or create strategies to grow a business. All are needed for a successful modern business, and if you need an external view, let me know.