Duane grew up in childrens’ homes in the East End of London, left school with no qualifications and ended up serving a 5 year prison sentence for drug trafficking. He served time in US and UK prisons.
On his release, with a baby on the way, he decided to “go straight”. He struggled to use products like Sage and Quickbooks to keep accounts so developed a web-based application for his own use. He eventually spotted the opportunity to sell this product to other small businesses and KashFlow was born.
KashFlow was one of the first Software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and was at the forefront of the move of software from he desktop to the Cloud.
By 2013 KashFlow employed 40 people and was serving nearly 20,000 customers. In October 2013 the business was sold to IRIS for an undisclosed sum that has been reported as being “in the tens of millions”.
His extraordinary story is recapped in his recently released book Four Thousand Days and seen him be honoured in events such as the Pride of Britain Awards in October 2015. See our first released video of Business of Software Europe 2015 below and hear his story about building Kashflow.
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