I grew up in Slough, a town just outside London scoffed at by anyone who knows it for being both the setting for The Office and the subject of a 1937 poem which opens, "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now." We lived in Chalvey, the part of Slough that people from Slough look down upon.

I started teaching myself to code at eleven, assembling computers, writing software and building database-driven websites from scratch. A popular music site I created in my early teens was listed by MTV as one of the then nascent web’s top twenty sources. I received scores of free CDs from record companies while unwittingly honing skills as a programmer, reporter, writer and entrepreneur.



I was the first person in my family to go to university and began studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge though, unexcited by the medieval city's social life, moved to Manchester where I focused on Physics. My primary interests lie in cosmology. However, my Master's project, the abstract to which was published, was more practical: a simulation of the heart to investigate atrial fibrillation.



Outside physics, I ran the news section of the student newspaper, learned drill and discipline in the Officers' Training Corps and went backpacking around South America—leading to a drug-filled Bolivian prison and leishmaniasis, a rare flesh-eating bug.

After graduating, I took a one-way flight to become a foreign correspondent. I was based primarily in Venezuela for nearly a decade where I produced groundbreaking investigations, covered daily clashes and reported on a humanitarian crisis. From Caracas, I traveled the world—often its most hostile environments including Colombia, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and Mexico.



As a freelancer, I covered the cancer, election and death of Hugo Chávez, the messy transition to Nicolás Maduro’s rule and the crisis that followed, including daily violent unrest. I also investigated diamond smuggling from illegal jungle mines in the Amazon, a Colombian paramilitary massacre and the killing of wildcat gold miners there. I covered Cuba's slow reopening, protests in Brazil, violence in Juárez, unrest in Tahrir Square, strikes on the Suez Canal, Syrian refugees at Zaatari and rocket attacks on Beirut.

As a Senior Correspondent at Reuters covering Venezuela, I demonstrated—always with documents—multi-billion-dollar government oil corruption, military missile inventories, details of soldiers arrested for treason and rebellion, fabrication of electoral results and that the country’s Chief Justice was arrested on suspicion of murder. My investigative work on Venezuela took me to the United States and all over Latin America. I also continued to cover the country's ever-worsening hyperinflation, social decay, food riots and protests. During my final few months there, I produced the in-country elements of a documentary on its downfall. Outside Venezuela, I spent time in Kabul and covered Islamic State's final days in Mosul.



Wanting to understand the country's crisis from first principles, I wrote web, mobile and watch applications to provide live and historic data on Venezuela's dire economy.

My software was used by thousands of people including politicians, investors and journalists for everything from live black market exchange rate fluctuations to details of the brisk money-printing that fueled the world's highest inflation. I also wrote code to automate data acquisition, simple story-writing and other mind-numbing tasks that pull resources from reporting.



However, I left journalism and expanded the Venezuela Econ platform into a company, Data Drum, which offered automated, clean and elegant global macroeconomic data for half a dozen countries. The idea was to make public data accessible to the public. I worked tirelessly on a meticulous product but never quite found its market.



I then spent just over a year in Mumbai where I built a data science unit at a public policy non-profit. Over the years, I've created smaller-scale products of my own—GlobalOTP, Readwise2Roam, According To Documents and Math for Journalists. Then, as Chief Technology Officer at Stanford-conceived, Google-funded startup Deepnews, I helped build a machine learning algorithm to identify quality journalism at scale.

In 2021, I moved to San Francisco and wrote a memoir, Always Go about my time as a reporter. Late 2021, I joined Subcity as a founding software engineer.

In August 2022, I became a father.

Just under a year later, I co-founded Tellen.