Simon Galbraith and the fine art of being wrong

In February 2003, ten people at Redgate tried to think of their next product. Paper aeroplanes were thrown. Creativity was encouraged. The result was no useful new idea at all. For a software company, this was an unpromising return on an afternoon’s aviation.

Simon Galbraith later treated that meeting as a turning point. He and Neil Davidson had started Redgate in 1999. They could build software, recruit capable colleagues and make sales. What they had neglected was the experience of the people actually using their tools. A company full of clever people had somehow left the customer outside the conversation.

The response was to revisit SQL Compare, which Davidson had originally written in his spare time. Listening to users led them to replace the code and simplify the interface. Version 3 ran 100 times faster than its predecessors. The idea they needed was already on the premises.

There is something appealing about a founder who preserves this episode rather than polishing it away. A failed meeting is rarely the centrepiece of a corporate legend. Galbraith made room for one.

Before the database, the dining table

His earliest business education happened at home. His father ran a building firm employing roughly ten to fifteen people. Conversation around the family dining table gave the younger Galbraith a view of work at its practical scale: a business made of people, decisions and obligations, rather than an abstraction on a presentation slide.

At sixteen, he won a scholarship to Charterhouse. The school introduced him to a more openly ambitious environment and, more consequentially, to Davidson. Their friendship would survive becoming a business partnership, which is a more demanding examination than most schools administer.

Galbraith’s academic route was through mathematics and physics at Durham, work at Thorn EMI’s research laboratories, and a Cambridge doctorate in shock physics. He then became a petrophysicist at Shell International in the Netherlands. Database software was still several professional turns away.

The route matters because it resists the neatness of a founder biography written backwards. A physics degree does not point inevitably towards selling tools to database administrators. There were laboratories, an international employer and an established technical career before the spare room. The company was a choice made after those experiences, with a friend he already knew.

When Imperial College advertised his entrepreneurship talk in March 2021, its description mocked the familiar weaknesses of the genre: survivor bias, underestimating luck and giving the speaker too much credit. It was an unusually candid invitation to a founder’s lecture. The audience was being encouraged to inspect the sales pitch, including the person delivering it.

The physicist makes a case for sales

In a 2008 interview, Galbraith recalled that Davidson had sold software through magazines as a schoolboy. His own early commercial venture was a paper round. Both had an interest in business; their first distribution channels were simply rather different.

By then Galbraith was Redgate’s marketing director, and he had little patience for the contempt that technical people sometimes directed at sales. He saw a communication problem: knowing how a product works can make it hard to appreciate how little a prospective customer knows. Expertise can be remarkably bad at introducing itself.

That observation gives the physicist’s move into marketing some coherence. A working product still needs an explanation that reaches another person. Customers also need to explain their work back to the company. He argued that listening was central to selling and that a product could take years to become properly suited to its users.

The familiar picture of a technical founder reluctantly tolerating commerce does not fit especially well here. Galbraith was prepared to defend the commercial work as part of making useful software.

One download button, fewer hoops

In 2009, he described a wonderfully ordinary obstruction. Millions of people visited Redgate’s website each year. About a tenth clicked a download button. Only around half of that group completed the download process. A product could lose its audience before anyone had discovered whether it was any good.

For SQL Prompt 4, the team removed the registration steps and let visitors get the executable directly. The old process had collected contact details that helped Redgate offer assistance and start customer relationships. Removing it meant surrendering some of that opportunity.

Galbraith did not announce that simplicity had solved everything. Early results still showed people abandoning downloads, albeit at a lower rate. He wondered what would happen to paid licences. The experiment remained an experiment.

That is a useful glimpse of his working temperament. Even a plausible improvement carried a cost, and even an encouraging early result needed watching. The customer’s time and the company’s ability to help were both real considerations. The button was small; the argument around it was substantial.

Even the CEO needed a whiteboard

By October 2012, Galbraith was trying agile practices with his leadership team. Redgate’s developers had used agile methods since 2007; now the people running the company were borrowing from the people building its products. Seniority did not apparently confer immunity from awkward meetings.

They began gathering for a daily standup around a whiteboard and adjusted the process as they went. Nine months later, he reported better information sharing, greater clarity about time and improved trust. Decision-making and complicated projects still needed work.

He was interested in the mechanics that business books often hurried past: organising meetings, distributing responsibility and making sure decisions actually happened. One regret was ending facilitated standups too early. A person helping the group work together had made a difference.

The appeal of this episode is its lack of grandeur. The chief executive was asking colleagues to help him run his team better. A whiteboard is a modest accessory for an authority figure, but a useful one.

“The story I want to tell about my own life is a net positive.”

Simon Galbraith · 2014

The people with permission to change his mind

By 2018, Galbraith was publicly asking whether product management was supplanting the CEO. The question had names attached. In 2016, Elizabeth Ayer, then head of product management, argued that Redgate was spread too thinly. The company reduced peripheral work and concentrated on existing customers. Six months of focus preceded a record fourth quarter.

Richard Macaskill then made the case for investment in data privacy and protection. Leo Machado took a provisioning proposal to a board meeting in Austin. Galbraith’s point was that the ideas changing the company’s direction increasingly came from product managers rather than its founders.

Those employees were close to products and markets, and their role gave them permission to act on what they heard. They still had to persuade sceptical colleagues repeatedly. This was no description of a suggestion box that magically emptied into the strategy.

It also changes how the early SQL Compare story reads. Listening to customers was becoming a question of who inside the company had enough contact with them, and enough influence, to get something done. The CEO could help by recognising the argument when it arrived.

A business that kept its acquaintances

The relationships lasted beyond individual products. Redgate became SQLServerCentral’s first advertising customer in 2001. Steve Jones first met Galbraith at the PASS Summit in Seattle the following year. Redgate bought SQLServerCentral in 2006, and Jones was still writing about that relationship at Redgate’s twenty-fifth birthday celebrations in 2024.

In October 2026, Jones returned to the founders’ school photograph and the long friendship behind the business. He also noted that he and Galbraith still met periodically. A corporate history can be told through offices and acquisitions; this one also has recurring conversations.

Another colleague, HyperBac founder Jeffrey Aven, described Galbraith visiting the Australian team several times after Redgate acquired his company. In his public recommendation, Aven emphasised that Redgate kept its commitments. It is a narrower claim than a slogan about company culture, and more useful for being specific.

Galbraith himself had described Cambridge as a place he wanted to help succeed. He valued the surrounding network of employers and opportunities, including the possibilities it offered employees’ families. The business belonged to a city as well as a market.

Leaving the chair at the front of the meeting

In December 2021, Redgate announced Jakub Lamik as its next CEO. Davidson and Galbraith had shared the role until 2012; Galbraith had then run the company alone for nine years. At the handover, Redgate employed about 400 people and had offices in the United States, Germany and Australia alongside its UK base.

Lamik came from the chief product officer’s job. For a founder who had been writing about the influence of product managers, it was an apt succession. Galbraith stayed on the board. Redgate’s current leadership page identifies him as co-founder and non-executive director.

His investment work offers another way to spend time with businesses. Cade Hill, his personal investment vehicle, emerged from Redgate’s investment arm around 2016. Its stated approach is to take substantial holdings, typically between 20 and 60 percent, and work with companies for extended periods, sometimes more than a decade.

The emphasis is on involvement and patience. Oxford Algorithms also describes him as an investor and strategic adviser. His accumulated experience can now be brought to companies where somebody else has the chief executive’s job.

Redgate itself announced a new ownership chapter in January 2026: a growth investment from Bregal Sagemount, with terms undisclosed and completion initially subject to approvals. The announcement described a company with more than 500 employees across six locations. The spare room had acquired quite a travel itinerary.

The choices after Redgate

His public life has also moved into political funding. In September 2026, donations totalling £500,000 through Cade Hill Investments to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain became public. Galbraith explained his support in terms of dissatisfaction with the state, institutions and democratic representation. The donation places a concrete political choice alongside his record as a software founder and investor.

It makes for a less tidy portrait than a business parable. His career contains scientific training, a friendship, a company that repeatedly revised its assumptions, and choices about where to direct the influence that followed. Those choices deserve to be considered individually.

The failed brainstorm remains a useful place to begin. An afternoon with no new idea produced a reason to examine an old one. Much of Galbraith’s account of building Redgate rests on that willingness to let experience interrupt a plan. The paper aeroplanes achieved very little. The listening did rather better.