Charles Cohen

Welcome to my site. I hope you find it interesting and enjoyable. Tell all your friends.

The first time I used the web must have been about 1994; I was working in Parliament as a research assistant to Robert (now Lord) Maclennan, and someone must have told me about a new way of accessing information visually rather than in the text-only Lynx browser. It was called Mosaic and it could take you to a new site called Yahoo! whose home page boasted that it had indexed (by hand) about 100,000 web pages.

Clicking through this directory I soon came across the schedule for a women’s netball team at a college several thousand miles away in the United States. Sadly, the web didn’t have many pictures in those days, but this was still one of the most memorable discoveries of my life to date. Connected via a 2400 baud modem, here was a whole universe as seen through a drinking straw. The interface was clunky, the speed slow and the connection unreliable. Yet it was exploding, truly a triumph of curiosity over bandwidth.

I immediately went into orbit. Amongst other adventures, I ultimately convinced the leader of the political Party I was working for, Paddy Ashdown, to try this e-mail thing and get everyone else doing it too. We went into the General Election with the boast of being Britain’s most Wired political party. He wrote me a nice letter when I left about how important this internet thing was and thank you for finding it for us.

To me all this was as nothing compared to the radically transformational potential of the still uncoiled world wide web. Many others have expressed equal admiration for it: the web must stand equal to the discovery of electricity, or even the invention of the zero, in the pantheon of human intellectual endeavour.

The web, and its limitations, have shaped my working and intellectual life ever since. Briefly, when I had a Facebook page, it also tickled the edges of my social life too but it was just too clingy, so I shook myself free.

In about 1996, my first business venture was a web design business called Thought Interactive, and we developed an early type of CMS called Incorporate, aimed at the press offices of large corporates. They could publish press releases and briefings online and journalists would come to them. This was a time when the next best thing was a fax machine which could store 100 numbers and spend all night dialing them with your release.

In 1998, I had another, even better idea. We’d been trying and failing to provide a credit card payment service for one of Thought’s clients and it occurred to me that what the web really needed was a payment system could move money around as efficiently as information was already moving. Banks and credit cards were too slow and ignorant to do this, so I thought: create a currency for the web. Let people buy this currency, at one exchange rate. Let them trade it electronically anywhere on the web – totally frictionless. Let them cash it out again when they want, at another exchange rate; make lots of money on the arbitrage. I called this currency “beenz” as in been there, done that. The rest is on Wikipedia.

After beenz was sold in 2001, just before 9/11, I was jaded and very, very tired. Anyone who says business globetrotting is glamorous clearly hasn’t done much of it. Fortunately I could afford not to work for a while and decided to take it easy until the next good idea came along. In the meantime I converted the dank lower half of our garage to an office, filled it with gadgets, and wrote a book called “Corporate Vices: What’s Gone Wrong With Business?“. Let’s just agree it was not a great contribution to world literature, made my far-more-literate-than-I-am wife mildly jealous, but it got me onto the corporate speaking circuit. You can still get it from Amazon, but it’s not been in print for a while.

The germ of the idea which became Probability (of which I am currently the CEO) was sewn by John Carson, a lottery expert based in the US.

Why hasn’t anyone ever done a lottery on mobile phones, he asked? Now I knew a bit about Lotteries because I’d worked on the National Lottery brief for Bob back in 1992.

When it comes to new things like this, one of my principles is that just because noone has done something yet doesn’t make it a bad idea. I mean, it took thousands of years to invent the sliced loaf.

A little light went on: this was an idea whose time had come. Naturally, the real world had other ideas.

So with John Scaife and David Charlesworth we set up mLotto to try this idea out. Vincent Tchenguiz invested along with various of my family to get it going. Everyone workd pretty much for sweat equity, even the lawyers (up to a point).

We got a deal with T-Mobile and a lottery permit from the government. Some University friends helped with the development and before you know it we were losing every penny we had. Noone wanted to buy a ticket in a lottery whose top prize was less than £10,000, no matter how convenient the delivery channel.

But they loved the scratchcards – an animated fruit machine type thing which flickered out the result and paid you your cash. So Adam Neilson, a beenz lab veteran, agreed to write a Java app which could operate like a proper fruit machine. John Scaife and I went to Court and became licensed bookmakers. The ad for the game went out in the Monstermob catalogue on a Thursday. We reckoned that if we got 50 customers in the first week it would be a success. By Monday we had over 1,000. Adam, by the way, is currently the CTO of Probability.

Anyone who has started a business before will know the peril of an early success like this – the very great danger of Hubris, confusing luck with judgement.

mLotto ran out of cash despite this success and fundraising was essential to keep going. John and I kept pumping money in, probably beyond what was sensible at the time, and it got pretty hairy when one funding round fell apart on the day it was expected to close. We sat in the bar of the Adam Street members club, which doubled as our office, and decided it was worth one last push.

The original business was effectively closed down and we re-started it as a pure gambling company using the bookmaking licence, much of technology being thrown out and rewritten (by me, for goodness sake – that’s how desperate things were).

We held our nerve and the business started to gain traction. Slots on mobiles were, it turns out, the killer app.

In August 2006 we listed Probability, as it was now called, on the London Stock Exchange and  in 2008/9 we started to generate profits. There may still be a long way to go, but it feels much more real than beenz ever did: customers, not investors, are pulling us ahead.

As for unfulfilled ambitions, there are plenty, the most deeply held of which is to do something in public life – perhaps even in front line politics, if they’ll have me. Where I am today is the product of a great deal of good luck and other people’s sacrifices and assistance, as much as personal effort and application; all of this has sent me from a wonderful private school to Oxford University, and into more than one business venture. Not to give something back would be selfish and, perhaps, self defeating.