It's finally Rupert's turn for a grilling from our Community Manager Boomer!

What is your role at Just About?

I'm the Founder and CEO. This means that I started the business… and now I’m the one ultimately responsible for making sure it works!

How did it all come about?

In early 2022 I decided that I'd like to work on a new project, and started to talk to friends and contacts about a few ideas that I had been mulling over. As I spoke to more people, I got a better feel for what might work, and a plan started to form.

There was a great deal of agreement from the people I spoke to that a progressive new platform could potentially be successful. There seemed to be dissatisfaction - for lots of different reasons - with the current social media platforms, as well as the direction of travel for online media.

The next step was to see if I could actually make it happen. Fortunately, because my previous venture had been successful, there was a great deal of interest from investors. I was able to raise the funds that allowed me to start hiring a team to begin building the platform in earnest.

Now that we’re Just About up and running, I’m here mainly to enable - and occasionally annoy - the team, so that together we can be as successful as possible.

Where did you work before?

I started a website called Eurogamer with my brother Nick in 1999. I was 16 at the time, so it wasn’t a career move per se. We had been running LAN parties for a couple of years and we were so excited for the potential of online gaming - which was just beginning to take off at the time - that together with a group of talented people we’d met via the Quake scene, we decided to launch a website dedicated to covering video games.

That website evolved into a company - Gamer Network - which grew organically over the next couple of decades into a very successful games media and events business. Ultimately, we sold the business to ReedPop in 2018.

After Gamer Network’s transition to ReedPop’s ownership, I travelled the world with my wife. That trip was curtailed by the COVID pandemic after six months, but throughout this period and after we got home, I had been making some angel investments in various businesses inside and outside of the games industry which enabled me to keep in touch with a wide range of people.

While I enjoy getting to work with a wider variety of startups and founders, it just isn’t quite as satisfying as getting stuck in and building something yourself… hence Just About!

What’s your favourite game?

It’s no secret that Quake 2 has a special place in my heart. We used to play it in every spare moment of the day for years and years. Q2DM1 is just perfect.

Around the same time I also used to love Ultima Online, which was the first time I'd ever experienced an MMO.

Going back even further, Bubble Bobble is an all-time classic - and I still play it today on my arcade machine. More recently, my wife and I really got into Overcooked…

What is your favourite TV show?

There might be some recency bias going on here, but I would choose Succession. (Please see the title image of this article of me doing my best Kendall impression at the GoJo company retreat!)

What about Alan Partridge?

I do have an unhealthy obsession with Alan Partridge, yes. I'm very much looking forward to the launch of Just About Alan...

If you could live anywhere in the world, where and why?

I was very lucky to be born in Brighton, England. It’s a great place to live and work, and as a result I’ve never lived anywhere else! When we’re away, we daydream about getting away from “broken Brexit Britain” to somewhere better, but I don’t think we’d ever be able to move away from our friends and family.