Projects
Companies I've founded and led — from live sports data to developer tools to insurance.
Just Insure
Pay-per-mile car insurance that prices on how you actually drive.
I founded Just in 2019 after realising that the drivers who most need fair insurance — often lower-income drivers penalised by blunt proxies like credit score and ZIP code — were the ones being overcharged. Just uses telematics to measure real driving behaviour, rewards safe drivers, and typically saves customers around 40% versus their previous insurer.
As Founder & CEO I've grown the company across offices in Los Angeles and London, raised venture funding from investors including CrossCut Ventures, ManchesterStory and Western Technology Investments, and built the team behind SF Insuretech, Just's parent company.
Ballpark
Comparative rating, for free.
Ballpark is free comparative rating for independent insurance agencies, built inside Just. An agent enters a personal-auto risk once and sees estimated monthly premiums ranked across every carrier they're appointed with, in seconds.
It models premiums from public rate filings and live carrier APIs, landing within roughly 5% of a real rate — enough to shop a risk properly without paying the per-seat fees the incumbent raters charge. Agents never pay for it.
zwip
Chat in seconds. Gone in minutes.
zwip is ephemeral chat for temporary conversations. Spin up a room in seconds with a shareable code — no sign-up — share files and screenshots, and let the whole thing disappear when you're done. Private by default, with nothing stored permanently.
It's built for the quick, throwaway conversations that don't belong in a permanent chat history: tech support, pair programming, coordinating an event, or a study group.
Provision
Describe your server in Markdown. Provision does the rest.
Provision is LLM-powered server setup. You write what you want your server to look like in plain-English Markdown; Provision turns that into a verified execution plan and runs it on almost any Unix-like system — Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, macOS and more — planning, executing, verifying and self-repairing as it goes.
It's a single, fully reviewable script built for transparency: preview the plan before it runs, point it at a URL or a local file, and inspect exactly what it's doing. Made for DevOps engineers and sysadmins who want auditable infrastructure without the boilerplate.
Genius Sports
Turning live sport into structured, real-time data.
I founded Genius Sports to capture and structure live sports data — the raw material behind everything from performance analysis to the modern sports-betting industry. The company grew into a global leader in its field and sold for $280 million in 2018.
PythonAnywhere
Run, host and code Python entirely in the browser.
I founded PythonAnywhere in 2012 as a Python Platform-as-a-Service: a way to write, run and host Python applications from nothing more than a web browser, with no local setup. It became one of the best-known platforms of its kind for developers, students and educators.
politicalbetting.com
One of the internet's oldest and biggest political — and political betting — blogs.
I set up politicalbetting.com in 2004 with my father, Mike Smithson — a former BBC journalist and long-time authority on betting on politics, who edits the site. It launched before Guido Fawkes and ConservativeHome, and has grown into one of the largest and most influential political communities on the web, where I still post as rcs1000.
Arete Research
Independent research on the technology and telecoms sector.
I was a partner and co-founder of Arete Research, an independent equity research firm in London covering the technology and telecoms sector. I moved on more than twenty years ago, but it was where a lot of my thinking about analysing businesses from first principles was formed.