Sir Alex Ferguson - Shareholder
World famous Manager of Manchester United Football Club. After a successful playing career at Glasgow Rangers, Sir Alex trained as a chef and applied for a license to open a restaurant in Paisley. Luckily for the world of football, he was refused planning permission and went into Football Management. After a spell at St Mirren, Sir Alex spent ten years as the manager of Aberdeen F.C. where he took them to the top of Scottish Football before joining Manchester United. Sir Alex was knighted in 1999 and now combines his high profile career at Manchester United with being a successful author and entrepreneur.
Gary Rhodes - Shareholder
Gary Rhodes is one of the UK's leading chefs. Gary is best known for his enthusiastic and informative cooking television series and accompanying books. Responsible for the revival of a pride in British cooking and produce, Gary's mission is to put British food back on the map, not only in the UK but all over the world.
Why not book a table at one of his restaurants, Rhodes 24, Rhodes W1 or Rhodes W1 Brasserie.
Dr Andy Phillipps - Chairman
Andy was previously CEO of Active Hotels, which he co-founded in 1999 and expanded rapidly across Europe. In September 2004, Andy sold Active Hotels to Priceline for $161 million and Andy led the acquisition and assimilation of Bookings BV making Priceline the largest hotel booking company in Europe.
Subsequent to Priceline, Andy has helped set up a number of ventures, including Reevoo.com and i2o water, lectures in Entrepreneurship at LBS and INSEAD and is on the board of Albion Ventures VCT.
Karen Hanton - Founder
Karen has developed and divested a number of successful ventures over the past 15 years including founding Mortimer Spinks, an IT recruitment company, sold to Harvey Nash, a FTSE 250 company.
She is widely known as a pioneer within new media, regularly lecturing on the subject as well as coaching and mentoring young entrepreneurs.
Karen has also received significant public recognition including:
- Named one of The Telegraph 50 most influential Briton's in technology
- Financial Times/Moet Hennessy Extraordinary Achievers Award
- NOP/e-consultancy - named in the top 100 most influential people in the first decade of the internet
- New Business Magazine - named one of today's top 30 entrepreneurs
- MBS Group - Named one of the most influential people in UK e-commerce and an E-trendsetter
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Chris Wood - Managing Director
Chris joined toptable.com in February 2005 from Conran where he was appointed Sales & Marketing Director of the restaurants division in 2001. During his tenure at Conran he developed conran.com, Conran Events and oversaw numerous high profile restaurant launches.
Prior to Conran, Chris was Director of Brands at Hilton where he was responsible for the development and launch of business traveller, conference and leisure product offerings and played a major role in repositioning the Hilton brand. Chris has also held senior positions at the interactive agency - Digitas; and leading direct marketing agency, Wunderman (part of the WPP group).
Andy Cottle - Head of Finance
Andy holds a mathematics degree from Sheffield University and is a qualified Management Accountant. He was previously the Financial Controller at a leading software development company that grew from 25 to 300 employees within 18 months before going public in December 2000. He spent a year working in New York before taking some time out to travel throughout Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia. He joined toptable in November 2003.
Matthew Witt - Non-Executive Director
Trained as a scientist, and with a PhD in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Cambridge University, Matthew has an excellent track record in key roles within product development, marketing and general management for a variety of blue chip corporations in the last 20 years. During this time, he was responsible for the development of major new materials for use in various high tech industries such as aviation, electronics and steelmaking.
Immediately prior to joining Active Hotels in 2000, he was general manager for 3 electronics production facilities in Benelux. Matthew joined Active Hotels at its very inception and was part of the management team that took Active from a start-up in 2000 through the trade sale to priceline.com in 2004, to becoming the number one European online hotel retailer in 2006. During this time, he has held roles in Sales, Distribution, Technology Development and Marketing. Following the merger with Bookings BV in 2005, he continued as Chief Operating Officer for Active Hotels, overseeing the integration of the 2 companies’ technical and management systems, and the creation of a single operating business, Booking.com, with gross bookings of $1.9 Billion in the year to 30th June 2007, and over 600 employees.On the successful completion of the Booking.com integration, Matthew stepped down as a Director. He currently holds non-executive directorships at two other successful online businesses: golfbreaks.com and wigadoo.com.
Kjartan Rist - Shareholder and Non-Executive Director
Prior to founding Korral Partners in 2002, Kjartan co-founded the €50m Citicorp Digital Networks Venture Capital Fund, and before that carried out Nordic technology research with Goldman Sachs in London. Kjartan also has extensive private equity experience as a participating investor, advisor and non-executive director, from a wide area of industries and geographies. In addition, Kjartan has also co-founded five companies within the media, technology and energy area. Kjartan has a BSc. Business (Honours) Degree from University of Bath and an MBAfrom London Imperial College of Science and Technology.