02/03/2023 – Adam Mendler Blog
I recently went one on one with Al Kingsley, CEO of NetSupport.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I’m sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here?
Al: It has been a long journey in many regards but a short one in others. My career started in finance working both with Barclays Bank and Unilever training as an accountant. As part of that process, I happened to be at the crossover where technology and computers became some of the tools we used to manage our organizations and financially report on them. I found computing technology more interesting than accounting – which for many seemed like a terrible sin – but I decided to get more involved in technology.
I left Unilever and went out on my own, providing a business where I would do the accounts for small businesses in the region and at the same time would support them with their IT. That worked well for a few years but then I bumped into a guy, Dave Apsey, who had developed an early DOS-based computer product that offered remote control of PCs. This was to become the very first iteration of what is now NetSupport Manager, a tool that over a modem allowed you to remotely manage another device to save the trip up the motorway to support or fix it. I thought it was cool so I joined him. That became the early focus for how we would sell and market our technology. We learned we could offer commercial remote control in long and short ranges. We could support a device for a user 200 miles away and at the same time, scale to support 30 users two meters away. That was the advent of our instruction technology or classroom management solution, which we launched in 1995.
We grew the business over many years in the UK. Then at the end of the ‘90s, I moved and spent a few years living in Atlanta and we grew our US business. I came back to the UK base in 2002 and we’ve continued to grow our technology….Read the full interview here on Adam Mendler’s blog.