Mark Johnson
Sales and Marketing Director of Vetstream, tells his story

Background | A turning-point | Follow-up | The Future

Back in the early nineties we were desperately seeking venture funding to develop and launch our unique multimedia clinical information service for vets from a prototype and business plan.

It was hard to get companies to see that electronic publishing was the future, even though we had won phases 1 and 2 of the DTI SMART awards, which allowed us to carry detailed market research and development of our prototype.

We had tried unsuccessfully to use the old BES vehicle to raise the money. Subsequently Vetstream talked to software companies, information providers, venture capitalists, publishers and private individuals, but it was a recession and people were not as comfortable investing in new media as they are now. Vetstream was also in the classic equity gap of needing £550,000 – barely worth a glance from institutional sources, yet beyond the directors' own resources.

We knew that we had a world-beating product and yet it seemed that sympathetic shrugs and encouraging words were all we were ever going to get.

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