My first boss: John Paul Caffery, CEO and founder Ramp Global

Recruitment tech entrepreneur John Paul Caffery is founder and CEO of Ramp Global.

As a software-as-a-service recruitment platform specialising in tech roles, Ramp Global is at the heart of the global war for software and digital talent. It currently employs nearly 30 staff, with turnover of £20m, 130% growth year-on-year and supports customers in 60 countries. The number of fees posted on the platform for roles is in excess of £1bn.

Pete Gwilliam spotted me at a young age and saw the opportunity to support and teach me in my early twenties. He also enabled me to set up my first company.

His style was very much "you steer your own ship, I’m there to support not to dominate". That’s a powerful thing. I was at big staffing agency Michael Page before that; it was structured and target driven and so ultimately I now had to swim and figure things out on my own. From an execution point of view I had to create the business plan. It was daunting but exciting.

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Pete and I took out a respective shareholding each and if we hit a target then I would have a lion’s share of the business, which is what happened. He gave me the financial collateral, we shared the same building, there was connectivity in a standing start and building the plan out.

I learned about confidence in my own choices, as well as the ownership of those choices. For me to be truly successful I had to back my own plan rather than work towards someone else's. From Wolverhampton, he is a big character and always lets his personality shine through.

Pete and I are still close friends to this day and it was about bringing natural, personal relationships into the equation rather than a business transaction.

That’s quite unique if you look at the standard, performance-related investor relationship. His view was refreshing then as it is still today: to back the individual and if it doesn’t work out it's nothing ventured, nothing gained. This certainly gave me confidence and was less geared towards failure.

With a young child as a 19-year-old, I had previously worked nights at Hilton International as a porter to support the family. I became a trainee manager and also started my first venture on the side called Bite to Enjoy. It was at the early stages of the internet but didn’t have the scalability at the time.

Today, Ramp Global’s acquisition platform allows large global customers to hire talent anywhere in the world. We are a digital first platform and therefore scaleable and solving talent issues to make the employer’s life far easier.

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My background isn’t in tech but more product focused. The way you can mitigate against that and build your knowledge is by building a great team. If you’re a non tech CEO it is vital to bring tech experience to all levels of the business. Where CEOs fail is where they get technical resources dependent on a small group. If that group becomes disruptive, the business becomes exposed very quickly.

If you look at the industry news it would be perceived that the tech market is in a bad position and companies are haemorrhaging. There are underlying reasons for this, not least with over investment based on over valuations. The problem is that those investors are nervous and are reducing funding.

If you look at the general commentary, there is less talk around companies’ rapid growth at crazy percentages, more so with investors wanting to know the pathway to profitability. There is more pragmatism around planning.

I read that around half of the Fortune 500 companies were born from a downturn market, which probably tells you that the market isn’t as bad as people perceive.

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