Gilgamesh was the hero born broke, who went through all kinds of suffering, who crossed the ocean, the broad seas as far as the horizon would stretch, who inspected the edges of the world searching for eternal life. On his travels, Gilgamesh encountered a wise man who told him the story of a flood that destroyed the world and how one of the gods instructed him to build an ark to rescue his family and the animals. The earliest surviving account of the flood legend was written down in Mesopotamia 1,000 years before it was retold as the Story of Noah in the Old Testament, so you could say Gilgamesh fulfilled his quest for immortality. We still read the epic of Gilgamesh and with every reader

he lives again and in all those heroes and superheroes who have come since following the footsteps of the first hero’s journey another kind of immortality is realised.

The power of stories can allow us to travel in time between one civilization to another across thousands of years. Our mission at SWEN is to empower humanity and allow people to find their very own Gilgamesh story directly from the journalists telling those stories in the here and now. Our responsibility is to ensure that the information we are entrusted with can empower generations far into the future, like Gilgamesh.

This is the journey of SWEN founder, Fidel Ion who at 17 knew he would one day become a global media leader. Deciding to shelve PPE at Oxford University to instead create his own education as an Autodidact. Learning how to lead the hard way, choosing to gain direct exposure to the coalface of the global tech industry. This hero’s journey is a glimpse into the entrepreneurial path of our generations most promising media, and future global leader. Allowing people to get a glimpse of who Fidel is and where SWEN’s purpose comes from. In true SWEN swagga all cards are on the table in full transparency to empower you with information so you too can learn from Fidel’s path to create your own hero’s journey.

 Eric Schmidt delivers

the James MacTaggart lecture

In his lecture, Eric described how the United Kingdom’s creative industry had a unique capability unseen anywhere else on earth, but the technology side was lacking. However, he did commend the team at BBC for creating the iPlayer and essentially putting a national broadcasting service online. Eric’s words stuck with me and even at 17, I thought I could help fulfil the potential that Eric had spoken about. So I made the choice to shelve PPE at Oxford University, dropping out of college to create my own education as an autodidact.

When I got home from Edinburgh, I emailed BBC executive Joe Godwin with an idea about a future TV broadcasting platform, which would basically give anyone the ability to have their own TV network. He seemed receptive to the idea, but I knew that I would need to broaden my skill set in order to make it a reality.

At first, I thought the most efficient way to gain access to the people I'd need to build a global technology company was to learn how to speak their language and build it all myself, so I learned how to code at 17. Then, I quickly realized the best way to get true insider insights was to get as close to the CEO’s and leaders of these organisations as possible, making myself indispensable to them. So I could see how I could build a company to attract the people I would need for SWEN. The most efficient way I deduced, being a 17 year old with no experience, was actually to become a recruiter so I could get real experience finding the top technological minds, and I had what most recruiters didn’t have which was a real understanding of what my candidates did.

I started as an apprentice tech recruiter on £95 a week at 18 and by 25 I had travelled the globe as an international growth consultant building global tech teams from scratch for the worlds best tech brands making over £600 a day. Learning how to recruit and then mastering the art of persuasion and complex negotiations in headhunting was crucial because I wanted to be able to attract the worlds best minds. Being an interviewer I also had privileged access, being able to ask thousands of candidates what they did, how they did it and what made their solutions and companies different. Like a sponge, I learnt how tech companies were built and run from the inside out. Giving me an aggregated insider perspective of the global tech market and how most tech companies have become successful on every continent. So I could build SWEN with the capability to quickly localise, gaining access to the best possible tech minds across the entire global talent pool. So we could have a winning advantage when SWEN was ready to blitzscale across the world.

I knew that I wanted someone who had helped build the BBC iPlayer and just a few months into my recruiting career, I randomly came across the CV of Imran Ali, who had been on the BBC iPlayer founding team. It felt as though the universe had seen my vision. At the time, he was also at Sky News, the synchronicities were even better than I had imagined; because he had created a patent that allowed him to build the first news app for iPad. I reached out to him offering to be his personal executive recruiter. Even though I didn't have a job for

him, I managed to persuade him to meet with me at his offices at Sky News. He took me on a tour of the news studio and this is the first time I'd actually been in a TV newsroom. I loved it and knew it was an environment I wanted to be in again.

After a few years of knowing each other, Imran helped me to build my own technology consultancy called Tech Talent Group which was a consultancy I set up aged 19 to help technology companies in my home town of east London collaborate with government and education in 2013.

Whilst consulting for the UK GOV on the formation of what would become Tech City/Tech Nation I was hotdesking at Unruly Media, a programmatic video advertising start up in Brick Lane where co-founder, Sarah Wood provided me mentorship. Including inviting me to meetings with the UK Chancellor, George Osborne to discuss Tech City and our suggestions on its rollout. The London tech community which I had been a part in seeding was incubating my own talent and I was being conditioned from an early age to become the leader SWEN would need. The strategy of creating my own autodidact education was paying off. I was learning directly from the founders and leaders running the game and I was soaking up all their tools and tricks of the trade like a sponge.

LEARNING HOW TO INFLUENCE GOVERNMENT

Tech Talent

Group Launch - 2012

Tech Talent Group ultimately failed because I became a father at 20 and I needed a more stable source of income than trying to grow my own business. Even while working as a recruiter with another firm, I was still trying to develop my own platform that would realize the potential that Eric Schmidt had spoken about at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2011. With Imran’s help, I launched the Democrio platform in 2015 and we developed it to the point of having a minimal viable product (MVP) and we took on our first investors.

24 Hours On Democrio

Aniboxx Viral

However, we realised Democrio was essentially a social network powered by people’s opinions and, like any other social media network out there, it would quickly become plagued with trolls, conspiracies and false news. Furthermore; our first angel investor, had gone behind our backs and purchased the trademark for our apps name before us, as an insurance policy that he then used as a negotiating tool. Teaching me a lot as a young founder about trust. Promising myself right then and there I’d always test trust, as a way to earn it.

So, I made the difficult but necessary decision at 21, to decline the offer for £100,000 in investment and sever ties with that investor; ending the venture and retaining all my IP - knowing that, according to Moore’s law; in just a few years ,Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be capable of handling the tasks that I knew a global media platform like SWEN would need to succeed without being turned into a quagmire of toxicity.

For the next couple years I was focussed on refining my craft. Building global technology companies and learning the key verticals I would need to master in order to flawlessly execute, for SWEN to become a success. Advertising technology in media was right at the top of the list, so I got myself into Schibsted, the global news media conglomerate, famous for their tech platform and innovative monetisation strategy for journalism, they powered the boot-sale app Shpock and built a hugely successful self-serve programmatic advertising platform. I was responsible for building the team that delivered them both.

BUILDING PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING

TECHNOLOGY FOR JOURNALISM

In 2018, I was lucky enough to be approached by an Amazon headhunter, she said she got passed my CV due to my background collaborating with government and the education sector whilst at Tech Talent and was interested in my experience producing academic technical and scientific talent pipelines across europe.

Amazon had set up an AI development centre in Turin based on a promise that Jeff Bezos had made to the Italian Prime Minister. However, the development centre was failing because they couldn't find any talent to work in Turin. She told me my background as the UK’s Youth Entrepreneur Ambassador at the European Union made me the perfect fit for this position given the political nature of the situation.

EU Youth

Entrepreneur Ambassador

This was a fantastic opportunity because I had dedicated my whole career to getting myself into the companies that would provide me with the knowledge needed to build a global tech company. The one thing I had been missing was direct exposure with AI, which is was what SWEN would ultimately, be built on top of.

So, I learned everything that I possibly could about AI, it was almost obsessive. When I am interested in something I tend to learn instantly, it helps too that I have a photographic memory as I am able to hold lots of abstract and complex algorithmic concepts in my mind to synthesize new creative insights the more I read, learn from people and connect the dots. So I was successfully recruited through Amazon's rigorous interview process with flying colours and given the responsibility to recruit the team that would build Amazon Alexa in Turin and across Europe; as a single-threaded-owner, with a 2-pizza team.

BUILDING THE ALEXA

AI R&D TEAM

I was able to pull together scientists from right across the world to come to Turin to learn more about Amazon Alexa and in so doing was able to set in motion what is now one of the most influential conversational AI research teams in Europe. I was based at Amazon in Cambridge and it was here that I met Dr. Catherine Breslin.

FINDING THE BEST AI

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CREATORS

I think she sensed my thirst for knowledge, so she took me under her wing and we became really good friends. Just a few months into my role with Amazon, Catherine asked me if I wanted to attend the CogX AI conference with her, where she was presenting on behalf of Amazon.

CATHERINE BRESLIN

SWENS CHIEF SCIENTIST

I'll never forget that during our lunch break at the conference, we sat in a pub on the Thames eating fish and chips (I think it’s the oldest pub in the UK).I asked Catherine what she wanted to do with her career, she knew that she wanted to have a huge impact across AI but wanted to use her talents in a company where she was in charge. In the back of my mind I was connecting all of the dots and as far as I was concerned, Catherine didn’t know it, but in my head I knew she would some day become SWEN’s chief scientist

After my contract with Amazon was completed, I was headhunted by Babylon Health to assemble the largest collection of scientists, engineers and doctors in the world and was responsible for scaling their technical and scientific teams to what has now become over 1,000 people. We were sometimes hiring over 150 people per month and I was also hugely successful in deflecting Babylon's critics who said their AI was not peer reviewed and therefore shouldn’t be used to power the platform.

BLITZSCALING AI SCIENCE

AT BABYLON HEALTH

Being an autodidact I took this on as a personal challenge and used all of the skills and experience I had built over my career to really apply myself at finding the perfect person to fix this problem for Babylon. I scoured the leading scientific journals and research institutes and came across Professor Mike Tipping of the Institute for Mathematical Innovation, who was the leading global expert for Bayesian AI science. I knew that if we could hire Mike we could get Babylon the recognition of having a leading professor peer review their scientific claims.

So, I had to orchestrate the whole thing, from initially reaching out to the professor to sell him the dream of Babylon, to assembling the structure within Babylon’s research group so we could have a professor work with the team in order to create an internal peer review system. I did this all by looking at the challenge as if I was the founder, I had given myself a mission to hire the world's leading expert to address Babylon's problem. Which I was able to do in record time, whilst blitzscaling the AI engineering capability at 30+ hires a month.

RECRUITING WORLD LEADING

AI PROFESSORS

It was actually during my time at Babylon that we tragically lost my baby cousin Jaden Moodie. At 14, he was the youngest person to be brutally killed by a violent gang, after being expelled from school and criminally groomed. I was heartbroken and my family was torn apart, I decided to quit my comfortable and successful consulting career and went through a period of depression, I decided then, that I would go into “F*%K-IT Mode” and live my best life on behalf of my cousin, so I went around the world, travelling across Asia and America to take time out to find myself emotionally and spiritually, it was an impulsive year – I ended up going to Ibiza 3 times before I took what was left of my life savings and incorporated SWEN in September of 2019.

On my travels I kept on getting signs from the universe and I they were telling me to go back to my original purpose, which was to build a global media platform learning directly from everything that Eric Schmidt had said back in 2011 in his McTaggart. I went head first into the news industry and decided I would become a journalist myself to shine a light on the tragedy of young people being let down so badly like my cousin Jaden.

I wanted SWEN to be different to other news aggregators in that I wanted it to be a tech platform for journalists because I knew they didn't have the expertise or bandwidth to quickly evolve their industry to keep up with the technology in other industries.

Now I made it my mission to meet with everyone who I possibly could to understand journalism's unique challenges. It initially started with a conference called the Trust in Journalism conference run by the UK's press regulator, IMPRESS. It was here I learned what the industry was doing about its decline. I was bitterly disappointed to hear the leading innovation they thought would save journalism were paywalls. Paywalls! That’s not even an innovation. I knew this industry desperately needed help evolving.

LEARNING THE

JOURNALISM REGULATORY LANDSCAPE

Intelligent Times:

Dean Baquet and Simon Schama on Trump, Politics and The Future of News

My family had done a lot of press coverage due my cousin’s death. We had an interview in November 2019 with Channel 4 News following the trial of Jaden's murderer. I went along for moral support and to learn how journalists work on the job.

It was here that I met C4 News Producer Faye Clark who offered me work experience at Channel 4. I told her that just the week before I had met with the head of Channel 4 News, Dorothy Brynne at an event and had pitched her an idea for a documentary telling Jaden’s story in a unique and original way.

This rudimentary pitch for a doc by me; a complete novice to factual-TV production, to tell Jadens untold story, is what eventually became SWEN NEWS’ first original piece of national broadcast content. Which we sold to Channel 4 News as a 10 minute authored mini-documentary.

It was this process of learning the production side of news and the commercials of selling content to news stations and broadcasters that opened up my eyes to a completely new and potentially exponential revenue stream for SWEN. But what really inspired me was the fact that we could use our platform to tell untold stories from unheard communities. So in Jaden’s memory I decided to give young people an opportunity to do something good for the world and went about acquiring a studio and then designing a fully integrated SWEN newsroom that would become the first youth and AI powered news studio in the world.

During my work experience at Channel 4 in the Newsroom, I quickly got to understand the team and their problems. Because of my background as an international tech consultant, I was able to immediately understand the dynamics of the newsrooms technology stack by connecting with the CTO at ITN so I could understand what technology would be needed to transform how things were done in the ITN newsrooms.

I connected with Ben De Pear, the C4 News editor and asked him how he was using technology and AI for the show. But just like Dean at the New York Times, he explained that he was too busy to really think about using AI. So I explained to him that I was building a social news network with AI for journalism and that I wanted to understand how I could help C4 be faster at finding the latest news before everyone else. He acknowledged that he should be thinking about AI but didn't have the time or expertise, so he introduced me to the Channel 4 news director, Martin, who let me shadow him in the production suite that day when the news was going out. I'll never forget it because the first headline video on the news that night was a picture of the earth literally burning because they were reporting on the fires in Australia and flooding in other parts of the world at the beginning of 2020.

During that show there was an interview between Jon Snow and the Iranian ambassador. They were talking about Iran's alleged interference with the downing of a jet and how maybe the riots going on in Iran at the time had played some part in that. In the production suite, there was a frantic rush to find clips from the Channel 4 archive of these riots and I realised that they were literally looking through the clips manually. I couldn’t believe there was no tool for searching the video archives. Like, they should be able to press command F and just look for things the way you can do with text. Obviously, that is not something that's possible with the standard video archive in a newsroom.

So, I pitched an AI solution that I hadn’t named or even designed yet and said I'd bring Catherine with me the next time I came into the studio to fix that problem with SWEN. As soon as I left the newsroom for the day I got in touch with Catherine and the next day I was driving to Cambridge to meet with her and sell her the dream of SWEN. Luckily she saw the vision and agreed to come with me to C4 the next week. We sketched the original architecture for SEARCHr on the back of my notebook whilst waiting to be taken upstairs in the reception of ITN. Luckily we both think pretty quickly when it comes to building AI solutions and we knew exactly how to pitch the solution based on what I had learnt in the newsroom.

Catherine and I then pitched SEARCHr to Channel 4 and they loved it. Essentially, SEARCHr is a way to search for video clips using AI. We planned to go and shadow the Channel 4 team again for a few weeks and agreed we'd put in a joint innovation grant application to fuel the building of the research and development that would power SEARCHr. After we left the meeting, I asked Catherine if she would one day want to work for a company like SWEN and she said “you have lots to do” and didn’t show her hand. Being a scientist she’s an expert at being extremely analytical and thoughtful so said she’d be interested in seeing where it goes. I was getting closer to persuading one of the leading AI scientists to join SWEN. But, of course, Covid happened just a few days later and the whole country was locked down.

Luckily, we had already met with the BBC to get access to their news labs and also the BBC R&D division where I was introduced to Tristan Ferne who gave me his blessing to use his R&D into youth audience engagement with news as the basis of our UX research for SWEN.

Personalising News formats

for a young audience

We also went and tested our ideas with the leading academic experts in the field of journalism and its cross section with artificial intelligence and got some invaluable insights and feedback from Professor Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics. We presented to him the SWEN Brain (the main AI technology that runs the entirety of SWEN) and explained all of its benefits and how we were going to reinvent news online.

Initially, he was extremely sceptical of the fact that we were a news aggregator, saying that he had seen companies try and fail again and again to monetise this space. But, he did give us an ounce of hope in saying that my background as an AI growth headhunter and being in journalism could potentially see us create really useful tools for the industry. Charlie was on our radar because he is the author of the “AI in Journalism” report(The report (lse.ac.uk)), which is the largest global research study into the use of artificial intelligence in journalism and newsrooms.

Prior to Covid we were really on a roll and it was all going so well because we had decided from early on in 2019 that we wanted to build a global company to really empower humanity. We actually came up with our mission statement to empower humanity, then our vision statement and then our values before we really even thought about what exactly the product was going to be. It was this clear focus on building the company that would empower humanity that has allowed us to thrive with a global team and the processes to realise their exponential potential all whilst having a completely remote-first technical and organisational infrastructure which is basically our online headquarters. Or what we call SWEN GVHQ – “Global Virtual Headquarters”

Prior to Covid I knew that I could sustain the brand with the money I earned from my consulting, but tragically on the first week of lockdown in the UK both of my consulting gigs, which generated over £17k per month got terminated because all hiring stopped. So, I had to make the decision to either try and find more work to make more money or go all in. Of course I decided risk it all and to go all in.

This is my life’s work and my childhood dream, after all. So, when lockdown happened, we decided to really go extra hard. It was a unique opportunity because around that time in March, Covid affected everyone globally. So, all of a sudden all our remote workers and pretty much every global worker was being disrupted in their jobs. People were getting laid off and we had an opportunity to really make full use of that because everyone could work on SWEN full time.

I decided I wanted the SWEN founding team to be completely remote and global to represent all of humanity. So I set out to find co-founders from around the world to really embrace the fact that SWEN is designed to empower everyone, everywhere. I conducted over 100 interviews and found a leader for each domain in our product team. We then started Sprint zero, which was an invaluable step in building the foundation for a completely remote and cloud-powered platform.

Thinking about our architecture as a way to empower our management, business and product strategy, we started from the very beginning designing everything from first principles then creating bespoke DevOps processes to match, before laying one line of code. This speaks to SWEN and how we do things, we build the factory before we build the machine, everything we do is for scale and having this mindset ensures we innovate relentlessly allowing us to have the winning-capability of being able to hire hundreds, thousands of developers and then have them seamlessly begin contributing without a dip in available team productivity. A problem I had seen hamper companies who I had blitzscaled. They blitzscale without building in scalability from the outset.

We implemented infrastructure as code and looked to build an API driven; disentangled, decoupled, autonomously operated platform architecture and configuration that’s redeployable and permanent, breaking our product into all of its most essential components and then creating cross-functional component libraries across AI, backend, frontend and UX for every single individual nut and bolt that makes SWEN. Around that pursuit of storing knowledge and creating data we were able to build a culture and hiring philosophy through innovative processes to recognise exponential potential and we did all of this with realtime data, refining and iterating everything that we did almost hourly and at least daily.

It was a conviction of mine to build the company that I knew could be possible and I didn't want to spend anybody else’s money to go through the creative process of failing a lot, which is what we intentionally tried to maximise and optimise for. This may seem counterintuitive, but ultimately the more you fail and the faster you fail the better you get. It's exactly how the technology that we build everyday -- AI -- works. Like the AI we’re building, we learn, we unlearn, we relearn and we innovate relentlessly.

In August of 2020 we were able to begin our first 90-day Sprint, or what we call a horizon. We tasked ourselves with building the entire SWEN MVP from scratch. We are now in the last month of our second horizon and I'm happy to say we have successfully achieved that first target and we were able to build the entire SWEN MVP in 12 short weeks. We learned a lot along the way. What is really good to see is how our relentless innovation has given us a rare capability of scale prior to launch and a bespoke company management structure that is holistically delivered across every area in our company from project management with horizons, aims and focuses (the names we give to our various short- and long-term goals), to horizontally scaling our product road map with SWEN formations (our version of the Amazon 2-pizza team). SWEN formations are based on our horizons, giving SWEN leaders the role of a “formation-owner” to look after a horizon or a mission for our company as a single-threaded-owner.

We are now in a position to show our products to global customers and have proven that with just very limited resources in a period of complete uncertainty, you can work hard and flourish, if you have a strong mission and the determination to innovate relentlessly. We have built a powerful product, that’s way more than just a product. SWEN is an entire ecosystem for news, I am so excited to share it with the world. I see news online today and it gets me angry at how unthoughtful the experience is. SWEN really, truly is beautifully designed, we have taken the best of the web and brought it all together in an AI powered experience that’s personalised to every human on earth to empower them with information in a way that they choose and control.

And all the hard work we put into building a completely bespoke SWEN cloud AI architecture will provide the seed for a strong API and cloud business for all of media, with Channel 4 and ITN as our flagship clients and where I am lucky enough to work as a freelance broadcast journalist. Giving SWEN unprecedented access and insights to our customers’ jobs and problems so we can build SWEN media-tech solutions on-the-fly and integrate them into our platform instantly, seamlessly; with our huge development capability.

We know SWEN will be coming out of stealth mode soon so we are actively building our network of journalism and broadcasting customers to begin talking about and using SWEN, which is why SWEN is looking for our first investor! We are hoping to work with someone who has experience blitzscaling and is brave enough to do it faster than ever before. We need to rapidly grow our product, globally, into every newsroom, being used by every journalist. News is in rapid decline, with news-desserts expanding and information-poverty at all time record highs. We haven’t got a lot of time. We need to move fast to save news. All we need now, is the backing of a visionary investor to work with us to unleash SWEN to go and empower humanity with information. Is that you?

QUANTUM – Catherine Breslin and I have dedicated our first SWEN Universe (how we define a 9 year target) to building humanity’s first artificial general intelligence. As parents ourselves we understand how important it is to teach your children good values and principles. And we think of SWEN AI in very much the same way. We have mastered how to teach SWEN AI as opposed to program it. So, just imagine the possibilities with the advent of quantum processing allowing for billions/trillions of processes and learning loops to happen instantly and asynchronously across all of

humanity’s information on SWEN. So we are constantly implementing things from today in our AI architecture that will power SWEN AI tomorrow. The first AGI with humanity and 9 years of training from today. SWEN QAI is scheduled to launch in 2030.

Think about everything in life as a learning-tree.... At SWEN we have a concept called; store knowledge, create data. Its foundation comes from my own personal learning style. Having ADHD, I often get bored by things I am not interested in and obsessed with things I am. I love media, journalism, tech and AI, so I am comfortably obsessed with all things SWEN. But what it means is that we build a super strong support system of knowledge for any idea or problem we face in that we ensure the soil is rich with deep understanding to first “know what’s going on” and then we go about building our knowledge through learning, unlearning and relearning in concentric rings with each phase getting us to a more sturdy trunk of knowledge. Then, once we have built that foundation we are prime for maximum sustainable energy capture from the sun producing lots of leaves of data and sweet fruits(products and new knowledge).

‘I have been dehumanised’:

the Windrush victim sleeping rough at Heathrow airport | Windrush scandal | The Guardian

I also met with the head of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, who was doing a lecture on the future of news and, of course, the effect Donald Trump’s “fake news” tirades were having on journalism. I asked him what he was doing at the New York Times to implement AI and how he was connecting with young people and it was clear from his answer that SWEN was going to be his solution. You see, journalists come from a writing background. They are creative, but not necessarily savvy when it comes to implementing new technology in their industry. With SWEN, we allow journalists to do what they do best and give them the tools to do it even better.