Founder vision stays true

Mike O'Brien co-founded Opencast back in 2012 with his business partner Charlie Hoult. In a new video, Mike explains how Opencast has managed to stay true to the values that started the business even during rapid growth, led by a dynamic executive team.

In October this year, Opencast co-founder Mike O’Brien was recognised by the Entrepreneurs Forum as its 2022 entrepreneur of the year. He says the award was “a massive surprise”, but “excellent for the company and Charlie and I to be recognised”.

Mike says the plan for Opencast emerged after a huge walk around a lake in Northumberland – with the idea for “a different type of tech consulting company: people focused, but also focused on really interesting technology, and some of the real change that that can make in the world.

“There are a lot of people who do this type of work in the world,” he says. “What I saw in a previous life was that you could do this sort of thing differently.”

Mike and Charlie remain on the Opencast board today, with an executive team leading the business day to day. In 2022 they’ve seen the business more than double in size in terms of people numbers, with revenues rising too, in response to the demands of its clients.

Despite this rapid growth, the company works hard to maintain the vision and values of the founders – and Mike is proud of the way the business has kept to its founding ideals.

“I think Opencast still maintains all the values and goals that we had at the start,” says Mike. “In fact, the whole thing has blossomed into something even better, which is brilliant. That’s your absolute dream when you start a company – that it gets better all the time. That's testament to the sorts of people that we've hired.

“We've got an absolutely wonderful leadership team here at Opencast. It needed to evolve to something that can support the company of 400 people and in coming years, a thousand people and more. We have found people who had the same ideas about how you would do things and how you would treat people and how you treat clients. And we trust them.”

Watch the video below.