Team

Tom Allason

Founder & CEO

Tom caught the entrepreneur bug in his teens making fake IDs however that didn’t end so well… His courier infatuation began while working at his only real job as a trainee ship-broker. After a courier mis-delivered some tickets, Tom decided there was a gap in the market for a courier firm that made customers happy.

With the backing of his employers, friends, family, angels and eventually a VC, eCourier.co.uk developed some nifty technology, garish van livery and set about changing the (courier) world. eCourier reached #6 on Deloitte’s list of UK’s fastest growing technology businesses with 5,000+% growth since ‘04.

Tom left eCourier.co.uk with the intention of finding a way to use his courier experience to solve delivery for e-commerce. Today Tom prides himself on being Shutl’s no. 1 customer! He atones for his many sins by serving as a Trustee at Foundation Stone, making seed donations to start-up charities.

Kajetan Bojko

Software Engineer

Kajetan came to London six years ago after completing his Masters inSoftware Engineering at Bialystok University of Technology. After a couple of years getting his head round London life – including a stint as a bicycle courier – he finally decided to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a software developer. Kai joined the Shutl crew from property developer RIngley out of keenness to experience the joys of Test Driven Development.

Outside work, Kai spends 2 hours a day cycling to and from the office. He can often be found carving wooden spoons or knife handles and working in the garden always fuelled by his all-consuming Haribo addiction.

Mark Burns

Senior Ruby-on-Rails Developer

Mark’s three main interests are creating music, writing good quality, well tested code and Japanese. After becoming an unsuccessful musician of no acclaim, he decided to earn a living through programming and managed to combine two of his passions by creating the game emGol for the iPhone. As a child, Mark started programming in BASIC and assembler on an Amstrad CPC 664. Later, he was attracted to the zen-like simplicity of the Japanese-created programming language Ruby and then on to the shiny delights of the web through Ruby-on-Rails. He loves working with the calibre of people that are involved in the Ruby community and has a particular interest in agile, behaviour and test-driven development.

Mark joined Shutl after a 4 month trip to Osaka to improve his Japanese and try and pick up some Osaka dialect. He was previously at Sharp and at Headshift, where he worked for clients including Collect+.

Fraser Deans

Web Designer

So keen was Fraser to get stuck in to working life that he joined Logica straight out of sixth form whilst at the same time studying for a degree in Business Management at the University of Winchester. When we met this guy we knew we needed to have him on our side.

Fraser is due to complete his degree next year and in the meantime squeezes his studies around the design of beautiful, intuitive web apps for Shutl. In his spare time he enjoys watching F1, skiing and going to gigs. He is also Shutl’s reigning poker king.

Christophe Gehlen

Systems Engineer

Chris was lured away from a career in music, seduced by the world of Unix/Linux and open-source computing which he sawas an alternative way of expressing his creativity (and still actuallyearn a living).

Chris manages all Shutl’s systems, from Webservers to DBs, but maintains a strong interest in programming in a range of languages. He brings heaps of experience from similar roles at Betfair and ArcSight.

Outside work Chris can be foundhanging out in London’s smoooothest jazz venues, as well as finding the time to host his own (rather obscure) radio show. He also wins the prize for having Shutl’s skinniest jeans.

Tom Jobbins

Head of Systems

Tom is a self-confessed systems junkie who will describe at great length the fundamental beauty of the UNIX architecture to anyone who will listen – and, more frequently than not, to those who won’t.

Tom joined Shutl from Flytxt, a pioneer in mobile marketing, where he built scalable systems capable of handling thousands of transactions per second from multi-billion row databases. He loves nothing more than fully automated, self-healing, auto-scaling UNIX platforms that efficiently achieve the maximum for the minimum possible cost. Although focusing on systems, he loves to have a “finger in every pie”, working in parallel as a database administrator, coder and tester. He has also built and manages a range of affiliate websites. Giving up the chance to drink and watch daytime TV for three years, Tom declined an offer from Durham University and has worked full time since the age of 17 – much to the annoyance of his A-level teachers!

Steven Kemp

Head of Service

A keen photographer, Steven sees work as a reflection of his hobby- it tests his patience, attention to detail and his ability to find areas of improvement within his own work.

Directly responsible for ensuring that each of our customers receives an excellent service every time they shutl, steve draws upon his experience running customer service operations for the likes of Aviva, AIG , MMC & Royal Sun Alliance. He also helped eCourier.co.uk deliver happiness by setting up and running their client relationship and customer service teams.

An intrepid explorer,Steven likes to travel the hard way and has recently dragged his family ‘on holiday’ to Iceland and the Pyrenees in their Land Rover Defender. Ouch.

Steve Romney

CTO

Nothing would get in the way of Steve and becoming Shutl’s top techie. Not even the daunting task of persuading his Texan wife and daughter to sell the family home in Austin and up sticks to London… Thankfully for Shutl, Steve’s sales skills are second only to his technical ability!

Prior to the move, Steve had spent his last 8 years architecting, implementing, and deploying mission critical applications in financial services (Provenir) and retail (The Home Depot). He also holds the award for holding the most degrees of any member, with a BA in Economics with Computer Science minor from Dartmouth College, a Masters of Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Masters of Business Administration from the McCombs School of Business.

When not focused on scaling code, adding whizz bang features and arguing merits of the various object-oriented programming languages with David & Mark, Steve likes to spend time with his family discovering Europe.

Amritpal Singh

Senior Test Engineer

Amrit’s job is to make sure that Shutl’s engineers are writing beautiful bugless binary. Over the last 12 years Amrit has busted his QA chops for DELL in India and BUPA and BrightHouse in UK. A fully certified PRINCE II, ISTQB and Brain Bench professional, nothing makes Amrit happier than finding software defects. His second love is fixing computers and laptops, which he does in the evenings and at weekends for a few extra bucks.

Amrit’s non-tech passions include travelling, cooking and photography. So far he’s eaten his way across Asia, Europe, Africa and North America.He’s looking forward to having only Antarctica to go…

Ed Tinsley

Business Development Executive

Fresh out of Trinity College Dublin, Ed describes himself as ‘the world’s most experienced intern’ having spent his summers from the tender age of 15 working everywhere from the Copa Libertadores in Brazil to Coca-Cola in the USA.

Taking the plunge into full time employment, Ed converted his internship into the role of ‘Business Development Executive’. This is the fancy way of saying that he makes Shutl tick by doing everything; from conducting market research and crunching financial models to designing keynotes and of course keeping@shutldog in peak physical condition.

Outside of Shutl he is most likely to be found gliding around a football pitch or relaxing with his family on the west coast of Ireland.

Phyo Wai Win

Senior Software Developer

Phyo came to the UK from Burma to finish his studies in 2003. Originally a web developer, he opened his eyes to Ruby and the open source community in 2009 and has never looked back…

Phyo co-founded KinKub , which went on to develop the UK’s most popular swimming app, Splashpath. Unfortunately, the company had some financing issues, and in 2011 Phyo joined Hubsphere where he helped build ’sustainability management solutions’ for various clients including the NHS. When Hubsphere went into administration, Phyo joined Shutl to be part of ‘the next big thing’. And also to prove he’s not a jinx to start-ups. We’re keeping our fingers crossed…

Outside work, Phyo loves to play games and swim.

Guy Westlake

Head of Marketing

Beyond his family, Guy has two all-consuming ambitions: to cook and eat the perfect meal and to beat David Batey at squash. Sadly, to date, he has not managed to achieve either… though he likes to think he has come close.

At Shutl, Guy is responsible for communicating the full extent of our awesomeness to shoppers and retailers. Having cut his teeth in product marketing roles at both Vignette (now Open Text) and Canon, he has a fair bit of experience creating and launching complex value propositions within the retail space at both SME and enterprise level.

Our resident linguist, Guy has a joint honours BA in Spanish and Italian from the University of Bristol and a Masters in European Business from ESCP-EAP in Paris. At the weekend he juggles nappies.

Tim Williams

Head of Partnerships

Tim looks after Shutl’s retail and technology partners; his job is to make it even quicker, easier and cheaper to offer the world’s fastest, most convenient delivery service. He also wears a kilt to awards dinners.

Prior to Shutl, Tim was a key member of the management team that turned around Flytxt.A pretty easy job really. All they had to do was sellthe Company’s agency business, establishing an Indian subsidiary, launching Flytxt’s enterprise mobile marketing solution and then sell it to India’s mobile phone operators. Progressing from VP sales to CEO, Tim lists his key achievements as serving 150M subscribers, earning a Platinum card on Jet airways and catching typhoid.By comparison, Shutl is a walk in the park.

In his previous lives Timhas designed graphics chips for IBM and video compression systems for Intel. He’s alsomanaged teams selling and supporting video communications technology across the US and Europe. Thanks to 5 years spent in Silicon Valley, Tim can drive on both sides of the road which comes in very handy when commuting by pedal power. With more cycles than suits, he’s a proud MAMIL and when not on a bike he spends his time (largely unsuccessfully) attempting to persuade his wife and teenage kids to eat his homemade jam.