I was the odd one out in my family. I think I was a bit of a disappointment to my parents. As the eldest of four, people expected me to follow in my father's footsteps and become a tennis player. Both my parents were tennis coaches and my father, John, had played in the Davis Cup as a young man. Later he commentated for RTE. I liked sports but I was never particularly good at them.

I'm also the only one of family who went on to third level. We lived in Blackrock, Co Dublin, and I attended Avoca School which became Newpark Comprehensive when I was in fifth year.

By and large I liked school. I didn't work too hard through junior school or in the first part of senior school. I wasn't particularly ambitious until fifth year. I decided I wanted to go into the airline industry and took maths, physics and chemistry in the Leaving Cert.

My vision wasn't good enough to allow me to train as a pilot , so I thought I'd do aeronautical engineering. I decided, therefore, to opt for an engineering degree in TCD.

It was in Trinity during the mid-Seventies that I got my first introduction to computers. I'd never come across them before. I remember thinking in second year - `there's no way I'd go into the computer industry.' I couldn't bear the thought of being stuck in an office all day writing programmes.

It wasn't until third and fourth years when I got interested in electronics and learned how computers were built and operated that I found them interesting. Gradually I got into software and programming.

I moved into the computer science department for my postgraduate studies and enjoyed it but decided that I didn't want to become an academic or do research. Instead I went to Brussels to work as a civil servant in the EU on the 10-year Esprit programme designed to improve the computer industry.

It was an excellent experience. I gained an insight into the challenges facing the European computer industry, but it also convinced me that I didn't want to be a civil servant.

Back in Dublin I took a job teaching in TCD and working in funded research. As a result of the work we were doing, four of us got the opportunity to commercialise our research. We formed a campus company - Iona Technologies - and availed of TCD's incubation facilities to get the business off the ground. Last February we went public and the company raised $60 million.

Looking back on my education in TCD, I regret that we had no liberal arts module as part of the engineering programme. I've made up for it since, but I believe that engineering is a creative profession and an exposure to liberal arts is important.