Hello, world

Welcome. This is the first post in the blog. Not quite a placeholder, but near enough. It’s a scene setter and an explanation as to why I am writing this blog at all. So, here goes…

I founded Eighteen Zeros Limited in April 2026 with the purpose to provide managed IT service for small businesses, using open source tools and delivered exclusively using European providers - zero US supply chain dependencies in the platform I provide to customers. I have a decent amount of experience operating various IT services, platforms, software across large and small organisations and I knew that as a solo founder, what I was setting out to build was ambitious. Certainly, there was no real prospect that I could build it myself in a sensible time frame. In the past this would have meant spending some fairly serious cash with some contractors to help build the platform to a reasonable deadline. But, today, we have AI.

I’ve been using AI (specifically Anthropic’s Claude models + Claude Code) to build not only the Eighteen Zeros platform, but also the supporting tools and processes to operate the business - marketing, compliance, security. Along the way I have been discovering how powerful AI can be in a greenfield deployment, and perhaps some insight into why we are not seeing the truly transformational changes in wider industry that the AI labs are promising (spoiler: this has much more to do with organisational complexity and inertia than it does about the capabilities of the latest models).

So, this blog is an attempt to start capturing some of that journey. What’s worked, what hasn’t, lessons learned in the process, and maybe some speculation on how we might start to see the truly transformational changes this technology promises and what that might mean for all of us.