I woke to a tweet notification about the outgoing Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, Sam Gyimah who resigned yesterday calling the Brexit deal "naive".
He did indeed attend Tuttle during 2008 and had a startup called Workology which was a kind of social network for portfolio workers, maybe it would eventually have been like Upwork but it folded quite quickly like lots of other things of that time, when everyone was trying to do the Facebook of X for just about any X you could name. The only thing that remains of it is a puff piece from the Guardian.
So I think I was introduced to him by someone who was coaching him. I don't think I picked up that he'd been President of the Oxford Union, reading PPE and had worked for Goldman Sachs until 2003. He presented as just another Web 2.0 startup guy. Although I thought it was a bit odd that in that position he needed to e-mail me for instructions to sign up for Tuttle on the wiki (that was one of the many fiendish filtering mechanisms we had in the early days to keep predators out). At that time, it was my standard advice to entrepreneurs to set up their own blog and start writing about what they were doing. He's got one, but it doesn't seem to have got very far.
I'm pretty sure that he also came and spoke at 2gether08 which I helped Steve organise and which was the point when I realised that we were probably going to have a Conservative government under Cameron quite soon. I didn't know at that point that Sam had already tried his hand standing for election as a Camden Councillor and that he was presumably already close to Cameron, given that by 2012 after getting elected in 2010 he became PPS to the then Prime Minister.
In fact, this morning was when I found out that he'd even become an MP, I think we stopped doing anything together late in 2008, probably around the time I got busy with some work at the MOJ and Workology was falling apart.
I suppose I just take it as a reminder that you never know who you're meeting, what might happen, when you might be reminded of something and that the consequences of actions have a very long tail. I shall be sure to drop into conversation in future that Tuttle was visited by at least one prospective Government Minister in the earliest of days.
