Leeds has spent decades nurturing technology entrepreneurs – not just through its universities and established businesses, but through the places where founders meet, work and exchange ideas.
From the now-closed Round Foundry Media Centre in Holbeck to Platform and West Village, the city has developed hubs that bring growing businesses together.
Leeds Digital Festival has added another layer, creating a city-wide forum for entrepreneurs, technologists and investors to learn from each other.
Few careers illustrate the value of that ecosystem better than Andrew Mason’s. The Leeds entrepreneur has spent more than 25 years building technology businesses, including RandomStorm, RapidSpike, Data Protection People, Pentest People and, most recently, cybersecurity company DarkInvader.
Mason started his first company in the 1990s, initially undertaking technology consultancy, website development and hardware sales. In 2001, he co-founded cybersecurity business Boxing Orange before going on to establish RandomStorm.
It was with RandomStorm that the importance of Leeds as a place to build technology companies became particularly apparent. The business was based at the Round Foundry Media Centre in Holbeck, then home to a concentration of young digital and technology companies.
“The Foundry was a hotbed for tech talent,” says Mason. “You had to be a tech firm to be there, and there was a lot of cross-selling between the businesses. A lot of those companies went on to grow and sell.”
RandomStorm eventually moved to Wetherby, where Mason found it more difficult to attract and retain younger technology workers. The company was sold in 2014, seven years after it was founded.
Following the sale of RandomStorm in 2014, Mason returned to the Round Foundry Media Centre, initially with new ventures RapidSpike and Data Protection People. After completing a three-year non-compete period, he founded Pentest People in 2017. The business went on to grow before being sold.
Along the way, Mason also took part in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme. It introduced him to other entrepreneurs and led to a bursary towards an MBA at Leeds University Business School.
“It helped me join the dots and the circles to create better companies with better teams,” he says.
For Mason, however, much of Leeds’ strength comes from something less formal: its people.
“Leeds people are open and willing to help each other, even when they’re competitors. That’s something special about the city,” he explains.
That same principle explains his support for Leeds Digital Festival. Mason encourages his employees to attend events across the programme, seeing the festival as both a training resource and a way to strengthen relationships across the city’s technology community.
“There’s no better way from a training or networking perspective,” he says. “I have learning-based organisations, because that’s how you move forward. I tell our staff to get out and enjoy it.
“It’s free training, and it’s a chance to meet your peers. That’s how problems get solved.”
His latest venture also shows how dramatically the process of building a technology company is changing.
DarkInvader specialises in External Attack Surface Management, helping organisations discover their digital assets, identify vulnerabilities and monitor threats across the web. Mason describes it as an ‘AI-first’ company, using artificial intelligence across software development, data classification, service delivery, sales and marketing.
The result is a 13-person business doing work Mason believes might previously have required 30 or 40 employees. AI tools have also shortened development cycles, allowing new functionality to move from an idea to a working feature in minutes rather than waiting for a traditional development sprint.
For an entrepreneur who has spent his career creating technology businesses, it represents another change to embrace. It is also a change being picked up by the next generation.
Mason has recently started Awareness Marketing with his son Tom, who is also developing AwarenessAI ahead of a planned launch in the coming months. Tom has embraced artificial intelligence and is becoming increasingly involved in the Leeds technology community, building his own network and businesses in the city where his father has spent much of his career.
For Mason, there is a sense of passing on the baton. The technology and opportunities have changed considerably since his first ventures in the 1990s, but the principles behind building a business have not.
The tools may be different, but the fundamentals remain familiar: find a problem, build something people need, keep learning and surround yourself with other people doing the same.
More than 25 years after Mason began building technology companies in Leeds, those same values are now helping to shape another generation of entrepreneurs in the city.