The house I grew up in was being knocked down. Rollins House, a rundown Art Deco former factory in south-east London, was the kind of building that looks like nothing until you know what it is: unglamorous on the surface, full of history underneath. It was where my mother lived and where I was raised, and a developer wanted the site for flats. We had to fight, but couldn’t afford lawyers.
I decided to teach myself planning law in between school exam revision. I pored over archives nobody else had opened, putting together a dossier of precedents that would help our case.
I stood in front of a council panel, making our case opposite a law firm with more experience than I had years alive. We won.
The experience taught me about the value of detail, how research wins out, and that outsized odds shouldn’t be intimidating.
A decade later, I had to channel that upstart teenager once more, sitting across from Thomson Reuters, which wanted to buy my AI research startup, Safe Sign Technologies.
