What’s the link between messaging for shipbrokers and schoolchildren? No, the answer is not that they are all a bunch of kids at heart, it’s Lawrence Royston.

Royston quit shipbroking communications technology in late 2001, a few months after his company Dataworks was bought out for more than £1m ($1.3m at today’s exchange rate) by bigger rival Strategic Software. His next step was to form another firm providing messaging services for schools.