LBS alumnus David McDowell – from spare room office to billion-dollar turnover companies

In July 1994 Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com in a spare room in his Bellevue, Washington home.

It was one of those spare rooms one tends to find in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. These are houses which tend to be somewhat larger than those in the UK and Europe, so when a room is empty or unfurnished, such a space can look very forlorn indeed.

And so it was that in a famous photograph from that time Mr Bezos’s modestly sized desk, rather amateurishly designed ‘amazon.com’ logo, and his antique looking 14” monitor all looked bit lost in an otherwise empty room. Indeed, the famous entrepreneur looked like, well, an archetypal start-up adventurer.

The make and mend look of many start-ups is an accepted and indeed iconic part of the pre-revenue enterprise culture, and depending on how buccaneering one is, it is a very stimulating part of the enterprise ethos. No regular hours, no regular paycheck – just cash from friends and family, a spare room, or a garage to operate in, plus a ton of moxie and chutzpah to lift one’s spirits and propel one forward.

A not dissimilar experience awaited two London Business School alumnus David McDowell (MBA ‘95) and his fellow classmate, Don Matthews, when they started ’SOS Personal Learning Solutions’ in Toronto in 1995. What might be billed as a Software as a Service (SAAS) enterprise today, was in 1995 an enterprise that took a much more human form.

By hiring a squad of computer-literate students, teams of Torontian scholars were dispatched to homes and businesses where IT skills were imparted on a one-to-one basis.

“We weren’t trailblazers – ignorant maybe,” says David self-effacingly, reflecting on the fact that he and his classmate were not in the majority when pursuing an entrepreneurial career when it came to time to leaving LBS with a newly-minted MBA.

Certainly, moving back to their native North America (Don is Canadian and David is a “next-door neighbor” from Michigan) and setting up a business at a time when “there was not a big venture scene in Canada” was an intrepid thing to do.

Financed by a $35k loan from their parents and using a room in a house that Don’s parents were selling, the two applied their energy and enthusiasm in wonderfully creative ways, with Don securing spots on radio stations, and nabbing spare advertising hoardings on Toronto’s subway system, while David oversaw all aspects of management accounting, technology development and daily operations.

“We never quite achieved critical mass with the business,” says David. “The main lesson learnt was that you need to raise a decent amount of capital otherwise it’s always going to be a slow burn.”

In 1998 David left Canada and SOS for new opportunities in London, which included making a life with his fellow classmate and now his partner and wife, Dorien Pluim.

In 2001 another venture beckoned for David, with the formation of another company, GAN plc. GAN began life as a platform for skills-based games such as backgammon and gin rummy, but then pivoted to become an early pioneer in building casino games for online casinos.

David co-wrote the business plan, led fundraising activity and oversaw the accounting, technology development and operations teams. David and his co-founder, another LBS alumnus, Kevin O’Neil, built the business from an idea into an award-winning B2B supplier servicing most Tier 1 bookmakers in the UK.

His next business, FSB Technology, was founded with the Chief Technology Officer of GAN, Sam Lawrence. This was at a time when the gambling industry was starting to focus on live betting within a football match and, says David, “it was obvious that this shift was going to change the face of sports betting at the same time when iPhones and the whole smartphone market was taking off”.

As the CEO of FSB Technology, David was responsible for all areas of strategy, business development, operations, fundraising, accounting, regulatory compliance, HR and supplier negotiations. As the business scaled, he built a seven-person C-suite team managing nearly 300 employees, contractors and consultants with operations and revenue generation spanning five continents.

Today, David and his wife, Dorien, have formed the consultancy, Plum McDowell Limited, established to share the knowledge gained from twice building billion-dollar turnover B2B companies from scratch.

Reflecting on his time with LBS, David describes the School as somewhere that has “never really left him”, and he spends a considerable amount of time on campus, mentoring to aspiring entrepreneurs at summer school while continuing to enjoy the LBS community at large.

“I first came to study in London in order to benefit from the international experience that LBS offers, which is something that I continue to enjoy and benefit from to this day.”

Picture - Local news story from the mid 1990s. McDowell and Matthews working on their first start-up, SOS, in an office in the garment industry district of Toronto