👋 Hey, I’m Jeremy Brown

I’m passionate about helping people thrive 🌱

My mission is to cultivate environments that unlock the potential of people in teams to achieve remarkable outcomes for them and their organisations.

• I love to build great teams and products.
• I’m an engineer and a product person, and I’ve also worked in sales.
• A buddy and I went on a bike trip from London to Cape Town, but after three years, we never made it there!
• Instead, we started Limbe Labs, one of Cameroon’s first startup incubators that helped founders with seed funding and mentoring.
• Likewise, I helped build Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs (read more about my thoughts as I left).
• Furthermore, I have held various tech leadership roles, including CTO and Chief Product and Technology Officer.
• Finally, I have led distributed and multicultural organisations of over one hundred people.

Hear more about my journey on these podcast episodes here and here.

My weekly newsletter is the best way to stay updated on new content.

I provide advisory and mentoring services. Please get in touch if you are interested.

Social Media

I post a bit on social media. Currently, I am focused on and posting on LinkedIn. I'm also on X/Twitter (I've paused using it for quite some time) and Threads (mostly a placeholder account).

CV for humans

LinkedIn is my CV. If we’ve worked together, I would love to be connected with you.

CV for geeks

These days I’m a hobbyist coder. Check me out on GitHub.

More about me

I have an incredibly diverse background. I started my career as a software engineer working on the operating system of Symbian smartphones, then delivered software solutions as a consultant - before spending time in pre-sales engineering and sales. I have come full circle back to engineering and building products. I love to build products and believe that my product is the people and the system they operate in. If I can create the right environment, those people will create amazing products that people will love.

Having a profession that only requires a laptop and an Internet connection, I’ve indulged in my passion for being a global nomad. Though my origins are Firish (Finnish/Irish), I’ve spent little time in either country.

I love all sorts of sports and have done a few seriously. I learnt to row at school and rowed competitively at university and later at a local club in Manchester. It’s allowed me to compete at the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta. I was even a category winner of the Head of the River Race in London and many other races. When I started travelling for work, I took up fell running and have completed several marathons and fell running ultramarathons on and off-road since. Today I’m more of a recreational runner and am more likely to be found out on my bike.

I’ve been riding motorbikes for years, and this passion culminated in taking a sabbatical while working at Accenture to ride through Africa on a motorbike in 2008. Check out www.2wheels2africa.com for more information on that adventure. While travelling, I saw the possibilities and started a company with a few friends in Cameroon. It ended up being quite an experience, buy me a pint of IPA, and I’ll tell you all about it!

I also enjoy following the other football team from Manchester, Man City. I developed a taste for the roller coaster ride of being a City fan at the University of Manchester when they were yo-yo-ing between the divisions.

Why do you use “tenfourty” as your handle/username? People ask me that question so often I thought I’d answer that here. Tenfourty is a variation on the term “the 10 / 40 Window”, which describes an area of the globe in the eastern hemisphere located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator (see map), an area that in 1990 was purported to have the highest level of socioeconomic challenges. I was born in this area and have spent most of my life growing up, living, working and travelling there. It seemed like a pretty good handle/nickname to me in the early '90s when you had to have a “handle” on the dial-up Bulletin Board Systems I visited in pre-Internet days. With the advent of Facebook, most people seem to use their real names, but I still like my deliberately misspelt handle.