Charles Burt. I imagine, build and ship software products.

Story

A life spent taking things apart.

I grew up dismantling things. The karaoke machine I loved — screwdriver in hand, opened to see what was inside. My Mazda MX‑5 — instead of taking it to the garage, I bought the workshop manual and serviced it myself. Mathematics fascinated me the same way: not the formulas themselves, but how Pythagoras and the others had arrived at them. I won a mathematics scholarship as a child, and the love stuck.

My father’s side of the family is entrepreneurial, so the question was never will I work for someone? — it was what will I build? Software turned out to be the answer. It has properties nothing physical does: it duplicates on sale rather than getting more expensive to manufacture; it reaches anyone with a screen; it directly helps customers you’ve never met; and it outlasts you. A well-made product is a small piece of legacy you leave in the world.

Ten years in games. The last ten in the enterprise.

From entertainment to essential.

Entertainment — building things people love

By my mid-twenties I’d founded Colossal Games. We built Commando Jack — a tower defence reimagined: at any moment a player could leap into the turret and shoot in first person, or fly over the battlefield throwing grenades. It wasn’t another tower defence with extra towers. It was a fundamentally different way to play the genre.

I identified EA Games as the right publisher after they acquired Chillingo (the studio behind Angry Birds), built a prototype, commissioned the art and pitched directly to EA’s Senior Director of Business Development. We partnered. Commando Jack reached #1 in 36 countries, earned 4.5/5 stars, was selected for EA’s Summer Showcase at Millbank Tower from a portfolio of 150+ titles, and went on to over 10 million plays. When I tallied the total hours people had spent inside the game, it came to more than two and a half of my own lifespans. You can’t really compare hours-played to hours-lived — apples and oranges — but as a rough measure it told me I’d given more back to the world than I’d taken from it in the years of building. That’s the kind of trade I want every product I make to come close to.

When the game launched I took two weeks off and barely slept. I set an alarm every three hours so I could watch the analytics dashboard’s world map light up across time zones — Australia going green as the UK went dark, Asia waking next, Europe again at dawn. I refreshed the app stores in every region and ran the non-English reviews through Google Translate — sitting at my screen in London, reading what people in dozens of countries thought of something I’d made. You don’t get to meet most of the people who use the things you make, but for those two weeks the world lit up in a way that words can’t describe.

Sometime after launch, a cousin called me from a beach in Spain to say he’d just walked past someone sitting on the sand playing Commando Jack. Genuine joy.

Mastering the craft

Understanding the engine behind the product

Running Colossal taught me where my real bottleneck was. To build the products I imagined, I had to hire — and hiring meant raising money and carrying overhead, pulling me further and further from the product itself.

So I made a deliberate decision: I would spend a decade becoming the kind of engineer who could build the next generation of products. I went deep on C#/.NET, refreshed the mathematics I’d loved as a child, and grew a freelance operation into a staffed consultancy — including working alongside teams at JP Morgan, McDonald’s (R/GA), HP, IBM and EA, then moving on to deeper technical work for Meta and at ImpactXP.ai for global FMCG brands. Professionally, I received praise for my coding ability, and during continuing education in software and data engineering, I rose to the top of my study cohorts.

I learned Kotlin recently to ship my latest product, picking up enough fundamentals to debug confidently, with modern AI tooling alongside. The lesson there was: the language doesn’t matter much any more; what matters is being close enough to the code to know what you’re asking AI to do.

I’m satisfied with where that decade took me — but I’ve never thought of the learning as finished. The real skill it built wasn’t any single language; it was the appetite for picking up new ones fast, for getting inside an unfamiliar codebase or a new tool — AI tooling included — and being useful with it quickly. I keep it sharp in my own time, still writing code and building prototypes myself, because staying close to the code is where the products come from. It means I lead product from what’s actually true — what something costs, how it scales, whether I’m asking for a day’s work or a quarter’s — never as a straw man.

Healthcare — building for what people need

I founded Immersive Medical to deliver care remotely through VR as a telemedicine suite: virtual appointments, including a virtual hospital, physiotherapy you could do from your own living room, all watched over by real clinicians. Moving to healthcare is personal to me, as I want the products I make to leave a legacy that is life giving to its users.

I built the platform, brought in a founding team that included a consultant physician, and got as far as a provisionally agreed NHS physiotherapy pilot. Then the sponsor who championed it moved on, the funding ran dry, and I had to let it go. The idea was right; the timing and the dependencies weren’t. It taught me to weigh dependency risk in product strategy. For the products I take on personally — on my own time, for the love of it — I now choose problems small enough to ship solo and fast, without staking everything on a single sponsor. That’s a deliberate scoping choice, not an aversion to scale: at work, the bigger the problem, the bigger the team I build around it. Productivity was the right size to build with my own hands. That’s what pointed me there.

Productivity — software from within

The product I’m about to launch — a productivity app — is the personal thread, built lean and heavily AI-assisted — a way of working I’ve invested in deliberately. I direct the architecture and every product decision while AI coding tools do the heavy lifting: Claude Code wrote the bulk of it under my direction. The skill isn’t typing every line — it’s knowing exactly what to ask for, what to check, and where AI accelerates you versus where it quietly buries you in technical debt. That judgement took me from idea to near-launch on my own. It’s how good products often start: someone builds the tool they themselves need, then finds thousands of people have the same problem.

The move from games to healthcare to productivity follows a simple logic: people need to be productive more often than they need to be entertained, and the ability to get things done sits higher on the needs list. It’s also personal — I’m always optimising my own productivity, and I was at my best using a combination of tools I’d built myself. They worked, but they were disparate and hard to use consistently. So I built one convenient app that consolidates them — and now the market gets to tell me what it thinks.

Step back and there’s a through-line. Entertainment gives people back a little peace. Healthcare gives them their health. And my productivity product — the chapter I’m in now — gives them the practical productivity layer I wanted but could not find in existing tools.

Where I’m at now

After two decades, the three sides of how I work have fused: I invent the product, own its commercials, and can build it or lead the team that does — at Colossal I hired and led a ~15-strong team and ran the publishing and platform partnerships around it; at R/GA I owned the McDonald’s app’s release, oversaw its ~30-person development partner and built up a further ~20-person team; at NEOM I turned around a distributed team. I’m looking to bring that to founder-led businesses, scale-ups and well-backed corporates — as CPO/CPTO owning strategy, delivery and go-to-market; as an entrepreneur- or founder-in-residence standing up a net-new product, division or venture and running it like a startup; or at board level. Wherever it lands, I work close to the numbers and turn ideas into things the market actually pays for.