Dan Hon, Co-founder

Dan Hon is CEO of Six to Start, an award winning entertainment production company founded with his brother, Adrian, in September 2007.

Six to Start’s first project, We Tell Stories, for Penguin, re-imagined how a publisher could adapt to producing internet natvie fiction. We Tell Stories was received to great critical and commercial acclaim, winning the awards for both Innovation and Best of Show at South by Southwest Interactive 2009.

Prior to co-founding Six to Start with his brother, Dan was COO at the Accel Partners and Index Ventures backed start-up Mind Candy, where he worked on the award-winning alternate reality game Perplex City. He is a law graduate from Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University, and has an MSc in Software Engineering from the University of Liverpool.

Dan has spoken extensively on ARGs, transmedia, cross-platform entertainment and social gaming and has served as a jury member for the BAFTA Videogames and RTS Education Awards. A winner of the 4Talent Multiplatform award for new talent, Dan has most recently spoken at The Media Festival, b.tween 2009, Hello Digital 2008, Sheffield Doc/Fest 2008, WildScreen, South by Southwest 2009, 2008 and 2007, and the London Games Festival.

Dan has been cold turkey on World of Warcraft ever since Christmas, and his Horde Rogue has been sadly neglected. He has been blogging since 2000, is excited by Twitter for completely different reasons and is incredibly passionate about the potential for creating new kinds of media and entertainment.

Read more about Dan at his blog.

Adrian Hon, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer

Adrian is one of the world’s leading alternate reality game designers, having been influential in the genre since its birth. Previously, Adrian was Director of Play at Mind Candy, where he designed and produced Perplex City, the world’s first commercially successful ARG. Some of the venues at which Adrian has spoken include TED, Google, GDC, Nordic Game and the Montreal Games Summit.

Adrian previously studied neuroscience at Oxford University and Cambridge University, and is the founder of the innovative Let’s Change the Game competition to produce an ARG to raise funds for charity.

Read more about Adrian at his blog.

LISA, Operations

LISA is our Lightweight Interactive Systems Actuator, and handles all of our operational tasks from finding office space to crunching numbers for the accountants.  It’s the latest in artificial intelligence, though we do find some bugs every once in a while. Apologies for any inconvenience caused, this is truly a work in progress.

When it’s not trying to resolve the conflicting feeds on Health & Safety from the government, it seems to spend a lot of time on the traveling salesman problem (possibly a remnant of the time spent at INSEAD.)  Perhaps it’s going to file its own holiday request someday…

Tim Cooke, Non-Executive Chairman

Tim has worked in senior levels in media, software, and IT services companies throughout his working life.

Tim has a Chemistry MA and DPhil from Oxford University and an MTech from Brunel University. He was an early employee with Logica, where he held numerous senior management positions in the UK and overseas.

He was later Managing Director of Oxford Molecular Group plc and floated this software based drug design and genomics company. He has also floated Intelligent Environments plc, the London stock market’s first internet company.

Tim holds a portfolio of Non-Executive Chairmanships and Directorships and is currently Chairman of Six to Start Ltd and Clarinet Ltd. He is also a Non Executive Director of Harmonic, a defence consulting company.  He is also  Venture Partner to NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, a leading investor in early stage technology companies.

Jo Goodson, Non-Executive Director

Jo has over 20 years’ experience in a range of media and software businesses both as an Executive and a Non-Executive Director.

In 1998 Jo co-founded Mediagold. The company had offices in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany and gave US software publishers access to the European market place.  The UK company experienced high growth and solid profitability between 1998 and 2003 and the business was sold to French company Avanquest at the end of 2003.

After leaving Avanquest, Jo continued to work with the Board on M&A projects and also worked as interim COO for Ariadne Capital.

Prior to MediaGold, Jo ran the European Sales Division for the highly successful US consumer publisher Broderbund.  She was the second employee of the company and took it from start-up to £12million in revenue in two years.

Previously, Jo was involved with a number of companies working with different emerging technologies and chaired the British Interactive Multimedia Association (BIMA).

Jo graduated from Bristol University with an honours degree in German.  She lived and studied in Hanover for one year and speaks fluent German and French.

Read more about Jo at her LinkedIn profile.