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My earliest interest in game design came when I was in primary school, and my parents bought a Commodore 128 computer. I taught myself to write programs in BASIC, and then I made my own games.

I joined the staff of EMI in Middlesex in 1951, where I worked for a while on radar and guided weapons and later ran a small design laboratory. During this time, I became particularly interested in computers, which were then in their infancy. It was interesting, pioneering work at that time: drums and tape decks had to be designed from scratch.

You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on.

My father, an entrepreneur but hardly a technologist, was looking to buy a computer to 'automate' our family business. In 1981, he characteristically dove head first into computing and bought an Osborne I.

As I started college, I started to build software products that I could sell to people over the Web.

Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.

My first app was released in July or August of 2008. It was a 'fingermill' - a treadmill for your fingers. My level of programming was quite basic to begin with, so it was more gimmicky to start with. Day one it was up there, I had 79 pounds worth of revenue.

When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us.