James Howard FVS

I love helping founders and business owners: building the operating systems that let technology businesses move at scale-up pace while carrying the obligations of a regulated, institutional or high-stakes customer base. Starting as a graduate, I spent sixteen years growing a global analytics platform inside an investment bank, to $25M ARR with 80 people across London, New York and Tokyo, serving 100+ institutional clients managing trillions in AUM. I left to co-found an EdTech SaaS business from scratch. That decision taught me more about what actually breaks in a startup than anything before it: we scaled from zero to $1M ARR across 300+ schools and exited through a strategic distribution partnership. I've been the institutional operator who knows what good looks like at scale, and the owner-side COO who built revenue, product, delivery, people and governance at once. I bring technical depth alongside commercial range: an engineering and analytics background means I can challenge architecture assumptions, interrogate delivery timelines, and translate between engineering and commercial stakeholders without losing fidelity in either direction.