About John Taysom | ITEGA founding director

John Taysom

John Taysom is a British-based technology investor and entrepreneur and an emeritus founding director of ITEGA. He is a board member and trustee of The Web Science Trust, and a founder and board member of Privitar. From 1983-2001 he was a product manager, strategy director and then venture investing executive at Reuters PLC in Hong Kong, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. He started the Reuters Venture Capital Fund in Palo Alto in 1995, making 82 investments in internet and web infrastructure and services, including Infoseek, Yahoo and Verisign. He acquired the fund in an MBO in 2002. His investments in 18 companies have lead to IPOs. He holds ground-breaking U.S. and European patents for the anonymization of private user data for advertising purposes.  He served as a director of Forbes.com until 2006. An alumnus of PricewaterhouseCoopers, he was chairman of Performance Horizon Group Ltd. until Sept. 2015, and earlier,  a director of Advertising.com Inc.  Taysom earned a Bsc in cconomics, with honors, from the University of Bath. He is a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy and a Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science, at UCL.In 2016, he helped organize the Privacy Summit of the Alan Turing Institute. He also runs a small farm in Devon.