Doug Richard

Doug Richard in 2006

Doug Richard is an American entrepreneur based in England, who specialises in technology transfer, commercialisation, and business incubation. He best known for his appearances on TV show Dragons' Den and as a government adviser.^[1]

Biography

1996-2003 Micrografx and move to UK

He founded and sold two companies: Visual Software and ITAL Computers.^[2]

2004-2008 Library House, Tudor Investments, Dragons' Den and School for Startups

In Cambridge, Richard founded Cambridge Angels ^[3][4] and with investment from this group founded Library House, a serviced office space for investors in Cambridge. He gained prominence from the BBC programme Dragons' Den, where he appeared as a 'dragon', or investor in the first two series. Although he made one investment during the first series, he did not make any investments in the second, and was fired from the programme. He thereafter advised Tudor Investments, a US-based hedge fund that began investing in early stage high technology startups. Tudor invested in a number of start ups that Richard had interests in including $14.4 million in Hotext ^[5] renamed Trutap where Richard was Chairman and CEO from October 2004 to November 2008 (a company he founded that offered ephemeral text messaging as a service for teens that had over 250000 users around the world.^[6]) and WizWoz, a secure social network targeting teens.^[7]

These companies subsequently went into receivership as did Library House. He remains the only Dragon not to invest throughout a series.^[1] Doug Richard was dropped from Dragon’s Den for not making any investments.

In May 2006, he received an honorary Queen's Award for Enterprise Promotion^[8] - the only honorary awardee that year^[9] - for his work promoting, developing and helping entrepreneurs.^[10] as director and co-founder, Library House in Cambridge. Library House went into administration in December 2008.^[11]

In May 2008 Richard published his investigation into the British government's support of small businesses.^[12] The Richard Report was written at the behest of the Conservative Party, though Richard emphasised the work was politically neutral.

2010-present

In 2010, Doug teamed up with Andrew Reynolds to promote a work from home scheme called the "dragon system". They got in to trouble after using an image of the dragons in a mailshot. ^[13]

In 2011, Doug Richard became an adviser (he reported he was an investor but there is no evidence of this) to FitFinder/Floxx a mobile app that allowed users to report 'sightings' of attractive people at schools and colleges.

Mr Richards tried to reinvent himself as an internet marketer. However in 2012, he was struggling and a groupon promotion to one of his courses only sold 3.^[14]

In 2013 Doug Richard was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Business from Plymouth University.^[15]

In January 2015 Richard was arrested on suspicion of raping a 13-year-old girl. He denied the claim and was bailed until March.^[1][16][17]

Richard's arrest was widely reported in January 2015 in national press though nowhere on the BBC News site. Richard believes in his right to be presumed innocent and has worked with some of the pre-eminent lawyers and SEO agencies in the UK to maintain a low profile since then.

References