For more than twenty years, I worked in the UK technology and startup world, co-founding several businesses. Found is a return to that world from a different direction.

I’m currently working on a collection of portraits of founders that I intend to exhibit in 2027. The name Found plays on both the idea that each person has started a company (or companies) and the possibility that a portrait might reveal something about the sitter that isn’t immediately obvious.

Founders spend much of their lives persuading other people to believe in something that doesn’t yet exist. Confidence helps. So do obsession, charm, stubbornness and the ability to live with uncertainty.

These paintings aren’t intended as celebrations of entrepreneurship. I certainly don’t want to produce a series of boardroom portraits paying homage to ‘people you may have heard of’ from the world of tech entrepreneurship. Nobody cares about that.

In my experience, many founders know what it’s like to present a face of calm optimism whilst secretly contemplating imminent bankruptcy. So I’m interested in what remains when the pitch is removed: confidence and doubt, bravado and anxiety, success and disappointment. And the person underneath the story they’ve learned to tell.

Found will comprise about 12–15 oil portraits, including a self-portrait.