A View from the Top with the Founder of Gospel Technology Ian Smith

The tech founder tells Andy Martin about his vision for the future of data and how to make the internet trustworthy again

Smith works with aerospace and pharmaceutical companies (Gospel Technology)

Sometimes failing your maths A-level can be the making of you. “I think I got an ‘N’ – for near-miss,” says Ian Smith, at his HQ off Oxford Street. Which has not stopped him founding Gospel Technology, mastering the mysteries of blockchain, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “DEUS”.

Now 40, the tech CEO was born in Cumbria, and retains the accent of the northwest, redolent of hills and dales. “All of my bloodline have been craftsmen,” he says – carpenters, metal workers, shaping “tangible” things. His father worked on oilrigs and at Sellafield. “I’m an engineer too,” he adds. “But I’ve gone more intangible. The trick is finding the tangibility in software.”

After studying geology at Sheffield University, Smith got a job working for the British Antarctic Survey on the Y2K issue. It was 1999 and everyone was panicking about a potential technology meltdown. “I found I quite liked tech,” he says. From there he went to HSBC to set up their internet banking platform. “No one had a mobile phone back then – we actually had to make physical connections.” He shakes his head with a kind of amazement.

By 2010, the free flow of data was becoming more important than the infrastructure. It didn’t matter so much what the machine was any more. This was the thinking behind Smith’s first company, Butterfly, which provided “middle-ware” to enable businesses to adapt their hardware to accommodate and exploit data.

It was a success, but Smith was fundamentally frustrated. It wasn’t “tangible” enough for him, it lacked something his forebears took for granted: the feeling of truth, of tangibility, the smack of the empirical. So after selling Butterfly to IBM in 2012, he “retired” and found greater “day-to-day fulfilment” buying and fixing up old Massey Ferguson tractors and planting a vineyard outside Henley. Ever the troubleshooter, Smith even came up with a fix for getting the grapes to ripen faster on the vine: “We’ve exposed the ground so it radiates the heat back at the vine – it gives you an extra 15 minutes of warmth at the end of the day.”

It’s all very tangible, and even drinkable (the 2018 vintage looks set to be “some of the best”), but, as Smith discovered, “sometimes not working is more work than working”. His epiphany occurred when he read a paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is very likely that Satoshi Nakamoto does not exist and is the spurious cover for an individual or individuals unknown. But, even so, Nakamoto is credited with the invention of bitcoin. Smith was not particularly inspired by crypto-currency, but rather by “a beautifully elegant architecture”. He realised that at the core of the new concept of blockchain was the possibility of “trusted transactions”. In other words, of truth, even on the internet, which is fast becoming a byword for fraud and deception.

He reckons a lot of social media is crippled by the same problem: “Consumption has moved ahead of governance.” A lot of users, but operating in a lawless, post-truth environment of information anarchy. He cites Facebook as a classic case study. “They recklessly moved forward without trust. I believe in collaboration, but what if your collaborators turn out to be ill-intentioned Russians?”

The “Gospel” in “Gospel Technology” is synonymous with “truth”. And truth and trust are interdependent. Truth generates trust; without trust there is no truth. The question, as Smith saw it, while toiling honestly over his tractors and grapes, was how to achieve “trusted collaboration”.

You can build a fortress, but then how do you move data out of the fortress and make it accessible to others, without also opening the door to thieves and bad guys? Smith says that trust can only be “data-driven” not “intuition-driven”. In other words, it’s hard to trust your fellow man or woman. “Problems arise where humans are interacting. If you’re involved in a digital process, then the human is usually a liability.”

He laughs at the idea that this sounds rather like Skynet (of Terminator fame) i.e. all we need to do is completely eliminate humanity and all will be well. “What we’re doing is ensuring a trusted foundation to data, across businesses, governments and countries.” This is where blockchain comes in. It makes data accessible to a variety of users but protects against cyber attack.

What everybody now fears, when you watch those pixels dance across your screen, is that you might be looking at “data” (so-called) that’s been hacked or corrupted. A form of “fake news”. Gospel is there to ensure the purity of your data. Smith makes a strong claim: “We have eliminated lying. It’s impossible to lie any more.”

So does that mean novelists and Hollywood screenwriters are out of a job then? Smith allows that there is still scope for fiction in the world at large, but not in the realm of Gospel. “We’re talking about decentralised, distributed truth. But it’s a tighter network of participants.”

There is a philosophical air to Smith, as if he is seeing everything from a great height. He argues that what he calls “the old hub-and-spoke model” or “legacy architecture” doesn’t work any more. We used to have faith in a central core with players on the periphery. But Smith reckons we are all now sceptical about the centralisation of data. The failed efforts of the NHS to digitise provide a cautionary example. “Most of those projects are obsolete by the time they get to market. Machines used to have a five-year lifespan. Now it’s more like six months. Data has to be fluid.”

The blockchain approach taken by Gospel has produced “a system in which multiple parties agrees that this is the truth”. The chain is a form of “distributed trust”. You need trust. But how do you trust? The answer is, every time you write to the chain, you create a signature and you write that into the next block, creating “aggregated signatures”. This builds what Smith calls “immutability”, making the exchange of data invulnerable to modification – and hacking.

Since it was founded at the beginning of 2017, Gospel has specialised in working with the aerospace industry and pharmaceutical companies. But “removing risk and reducing cost” could be applied to just about any business – so everyone could do with a bit of immutability.

In his leisure hours, Smith also likes to get his hands dirty and repair and ride old motorbikes. He has one dating back to the 1920s, a BSA, still rideable, but “only short distances”. This explains the T-shirt. DEUS is short for “deus ex machina”, the clever brand name of a motorcycle company from Australia. Smith gives it his own spin: “Truth from the machine, that’s how I see it.”