David Renton: ‘Tech has given me a newfound self-worth’

We had a computer, growing up, but I was never… I just wanted to play games on it. I didn’t really, you know, engage in how it worked; I just wanted to… I didn’t really have an interest in how it worked… I played a lot of rugby, that was my main focus at that time in my life…

I am a serial pivoter! Raw truth of the whole thing, there’s probably a more sanitised version of this story that you could tell potential recruiters maybe 🤣 but I will give you the honest, raw truth of this one, Ioana.  So… well, in school, I didn’t I engage really in academics… I was… I was… pretty good at rugby. And I got away with a lot in school – I wasn’t under pressure to perform as…  in academics, which is, you know, my own fault. I accept that now. But at the time I was, you know, young and not very clever. So leaving school I didn’t have a career plan at all.

I worked on a night club door because I was a big fit guy. You know, it was easy work. I love to talk to people. So I got on very, very well at that profession.

After that, I worked for a company that sold very expensive vacuum cleaners so I would travel country going to people’s homes, take the machine apart and clean it and polish it up and put it back together. And that would be their annual service. And I really love this because I was travelling and talking to people and it was great. 

An opportunity came up just around the corner from where I was living at the time, to work as a barman, and I spent five… four years working as a barman. So again, it was a people thing, but it was, it was it was an occupation of convenience, it wasn’t planned… 

So yeah… Then I moved back to Galway and I met  my now wife and we had we had our first son and it wasn’t very… you know, when I moved back to Galway, I fell into the doorman. A nightclub doorman position, again, more like a host, but, you know, with a security jacket, so because again, convenience,  people, easy to get, walk-in, not very intellectually challenging, but could be considered a little bit cool, you know. So, again, fell into that, and then, when we had Jack, in my head it wasn’t the life of a man who was a father. You know, you need to be at home, especially in the daytime hours. You can’t be sleeping in the mornings because you’ve been working till, you know, 4:00 in the morning….

So I stopped and I had to get an apprenticeship. In school, a local business gave me some work, as work experience, as a part of my curriculum in school –  working for a cabinet maker who made kitchens.  I was putting things together and I was quite dextrous. So they said, oh, I didn’t realise you would actually be doing some work here. I thought you’d be just carrying things. And I said, no, I’m quite enjoying this . Again –   building, creation, people – I love this. So that stuck with me. So fast forward to when I was 25 and we had Jack, I said, oh I enjoyed that memory, still. Maybe I’ll try and be a cabinet maker. It’s a trade you know, so my son can say ‘My dad is a cabinet maker’. So… You know, I don’t want my son to say my dad is a doorman – I’m not saying there’s something wrong with being a doorman, it’s just that in my head I needed to be at home, I’d made that decision. 

This is one of the times where being very good at one specific part of the job can really work against you. I got very good at spray finishing so I would put the lacquers on the thing. So I got stuck in this one room. It’s a sealed room where you put the sprays on everything. So I would just have a line of stuff to finish and it was very isolating. And I’m more of a people person, I need, I need to interact with people and I like to, you know, be out and around to be a part of a team and work very well in a team. So that was quite isolating… 

Yeah, there was a moment when we decided, we as in me and my wife, decided that I should pursue a career in technology. I did a course, a university course that would allow you to get a place in university. It was an evening course, it lasted one year, and I did quite well in this course – in maths, surprisingly, because when I was in traditional school, maths would not have been on of my stronger subjects… But I discovered that it was more of an attention thing than an ability thing; possibly a motivation thing… At the time I had no job, our oldest son had been diagnosed with a very rare genetic condition, he needed a lot of care and he had to be brought to Dublin every week for treatment. So every week I would drive to Dublin, and then he would need more care in the house, more appointments down here (we were in the discovery moment of this horrible disease, trying to find out… ) so it was very easy to slip into unemployment saying ‘I don’t have enough time to have a job AND take care of my son’ so we were surviving… we were just getting to terms with  this condition. So I think maybe we had just got used to  the condition and at that point I was like ‘I got more to give, I can give more to the world, I want to be more, a part of the world, not just a passenger…’ 

No, it felt like a ‘now’ kind of decision, at the time. But looking back, it was always there. My wife says: ‘I could see it in the making, you were just slow, David!’ 😀😉

I remember, I had a path worn up and down to the entrance person’s room in the university I was always asking: Have I got a place? aI really want this! What’s happening? I want this!!