John Taysom

John Taysom started the Reuters Venture Capital Fund in Palo Alto in 1995 making 82 investments in internet and web infrastructure and services including Verisign, UltraDNS, Digimarc, ZeroKnowledge and Intertrust. He was a member of the Board of Digimarc pre and post its Nasdaq IPO, a Board member at Intertrust and a Board member at TIBCO through its Nasdaq IPO. To date, seventeen of his investments have achieved an IPO.John acquired the Fund in an MBO in 2002. Now London-based with a seed portfolio of thirty US and UK start-ups; one has achieved an IPO and several have been acquired by Experian, Linkedin, Tesco, BMC and others. In 2011 and 2012 John took a Fellowship at Harvard to work on privacy issues and holds EU and US patents on a method of improving privacy online. For 2015 John is a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy and a Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science, at UCL. He is a member of the Board of the Web Science Trust; chairs Performance Horizon, a fast growing UK startup; is a Governor at Hurstpierpoint College; and runs a small farm in Devon.