Keith Teare

Keith Teare is a protege of Frank Furedi and is associated with the LM network. Teare has written of his time at the University of Kent, 'I got a double first on an essay I wrote for Frank Furedi, who became a kind of mentor. We still keep in touch.' This seriously understates the relationship. Teare, under the name Keith Tompson, became a leading member of the RCP and in the 1980s headed the RCP front organisation Workers Against Racism.

Career

In the mid-90s, with the RCP heading more and more in its new pro-technology, pro-enterprise direction, Teare helped set up a series of internet business ventures, including Cyberia, Easynet, and Cscape. These were mostly headed by and employed other RCP-ers. Teare then went on to become a Silicon Valley tycoon, enjoying a roller coaster romp through the boom years of the new economy bubble.

According to a profile in The Independent:

Teare isn't your typical Valley boy. For starters, he grew up on a council estate in Scarborough in the early Sixties, the only child of six to go to university (Kent, to study political science and sociology). Afterwards he set up the London-based Workers against Racism and rallied against British involvement in Northern Ireland. He published a book critical of the treatment of immigrants in Britain under a pseudonym, so that the National Front wouldn't get him.

Of course the false name was not adopted for the purposes of writing the book but was in fact his 'party' name adopted some years before the book was published. The profile continues:

Working for a small publishing company in 1981, he was put in charge of the computing system. He had never encountered a computer before. "I got completely obssessed," he says. By 1986 he had translated his obsession into a database and software support company, which he set up with his brother Brian. The Internet service provider Easynet came later, in 1994, shortly followed by the chairmanship of Cyberia, the Internet cafes.

Centraal grew from Teare's experiences with Easynet in France. While trying to give Easynet subscribers access to Minitel through the Web, Teare hit on the idea of simplifying the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) system to allow users to type in a simple keyword which would link them to the appropriate Web site without the need for complicated dots and slashes. He e-mailed his idea to Jean Marie Hullot, who at the time was the chief technical officer of Steve Jobs' NeXT Software. "Hullot e-mailed me back with one word, 'Wow,' and I took that to mean that he wanted in," Teare recalls. By the end of 1996, Teare and Hullot were ready to launch Centraal, using some $ 3m of private finance, much of which Teare raised from the sale of his stake in Easynet. In spite of the fact that Hullot insisted on remaining in Paris, Teare chose to locate his start-up in Silicon Valley.

Keith Teare biographical note from http://www.futureexploration.net/fom07/speakers.html accessed 14 November 2010

Affiliations, Publications, Resources, Notes

Affiliations

• Revolutionary Communist Party
• Spiked - shareholder

Publications

• Keith Tompson, Under Siege: Racism and Violence in Britain Today., Penguin, 1988

Resources

Website (circa 2001-8) http://teare.com

Archive of the site: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://teare.com/