How Stewart Snow Navigated a Series of Successful Startups To Become Brafton’s CTO
Technology is constantly changing — because of innovative minds working behind the scenes. At Brafton, one man helps guide our team into the digital unknown with confidence. Stewart Snow, our Chief Technology Officer, uses technology to make Brafton’s geo-diverse business an operational practicality. He also oversees the creation and implementation of Brafton’s Software-as-a-Service offerings — meaning he’s no stranger to solving complex problems.
Today, he’s a powerhouse in the industry, but his journey started in childhood when his dad brought a computer home for the first time. All before the days of the internet and modern web-based software, Stewart learnt his trade in software by exchanging software hacks with friends — seeing if they could fool each other into breaking into their computers.
“Technology is what my DNA is built on,” he said smiling.
But how did Stewart go from being a kid learning computer basics to leading the AI solutions charge at Brafton? Read on to learn our CTO’s origin story.
Booting Up: Getting His Start in IT
Stewart’s resume is chock-full of startup success stories going back to when he was 18. While studying at the University of Surrey, he developed the UK’s first political information analysis information service called DeHavilland. Within a month, he climbed the ladder, quickly taking the lead on the technology side of things as the CTO.
“We suddenly had this whole company full of people using all this software I’d put together,” he said incredulously. “And I was still studying at university at the time, which was quite strange. But it just grew and grew and grew and became a really successful business.”
The opportunity to develop his skills while working alongside business leaders enabled him to speak to both the commercial and technical aspects of development and management. Through this, he created a language outside of the overly complex jargon commonly spoken within IT communities.
After growing it to where he and the team wanted, what had started as four men in a garage in the late ’90s then sold as a very profitable and successful business to a PLC in the mid-noughties.
But his startup prowess didn’t end there. In fact, he was just getting started.
He spent seven years as CTO and technical director at Adfero, a content marketing, public relations monitoring and consumer news business. While there, he helped build and launch hundreds of separate software platforms and services. They even built a completely automated TV studio and computer-automated editing suite that could film live talking-head videos, edit them and push them out onto the web in minutes.
“It was amazing, ground-breaking tech at the time,” he added.
Then, he took on the role of managing director at a video production company for five years, producing videos for investor relations services for publicly listed companies to communicate their financial results. While serving as managing director, he got involved with sales, account management, bookkeeping, HR and more.
“It was super powerful spending time in this role and learning the nuances of the trades outside of technology,” he said.
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Loading a New Opportunity: Getting Started At Brafton
Because of his experience with startups throughout his professional career, Stewart understands what it takes to make a business run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. When Brafton was looking for someone to head its technology and software development teams, Stewart was the perfect candidate.
He started working at Brafton in 2016, jumping head-first into all things digital transformation. What started as hundreds of separate spreadsheets and individualized operations became a streamlined, digitized process that Stewart helped create — what we Braftonites call Atlas. Atlas is a large-scale microservices-based internal SaaS platform that controls and coordinates thousands of content marketing projects across a geographically diverse workforce of 18 countries and most time zones.
“It took a team of 30+ people prior to Atlas to coordinate this work, and do a simpler version of what Atlas now does,” he said. “Especially since our workforce has pushed beyond office walls and is a truly global scheduling challenge.”
But he didn’t just do what he thought was best, ignoring everyone else in the business. He spent lots of time talking with account managers, writers and designers to learn what they needed and provide the best possible digital management solution for everybody.
“Anybody can come up with a fancy box of tricks that looks and sounds good, but if it doesn’t easily connect to what people want to do or need to do, it won’t work,” he said. With this mentality, he’s ushered in a new era of digital operations, helping bring our Brafton processes up to speed with client and project demands.
Currently, Stewart is working on creating revolutionary generative AI solutions that will change the industry forever. He and a team of internal specialists are developing ways to create our Brafton offerings with AI, whether that be an advanced blog, case study, infographic or more — the possibilities really are endless.
He’s working on solutions to enable content marketers to create the copy they actually want, both efficiently and timely. His vision is to give users AI tools that can facilitate a whole content-marketing team’s worth of production, strategy and analysis.
This resource will be available at contentmarketing.ai — our client-facing AI platform that allows companies to elevate their content marketing using this generative AI model — something he’s extremely excited about.
“I love my job,” he said. “I spend time with friends who might complain about going to work on a Monday morning — and I think well, no, I’m looking forward to it. I love building things, and working with our teams to create amazing solutions to solve interesting problems.”
Outside the 9 to 5: What Stewart Does After Logging Off
As a self-proclaimed workaholic, Stewart loves waking up every morning and jumping into the workday. However, when he’s off the clock, he knows how to have fun — if you consider extreme sports a good time. One of his most exhilarating moments? His 40th birthday: Running seven half marathons in seven different countries in seven days. While his hobby of running Ironman races and swimming long stretches isn’t for the faint of heart, it is a breath of fresh air for our main man.
And speaking of fresh air, Stewart also casually mentioned that he learned to fly a helicopter during the COVID-19 quarantine. So, while everyone was off baking the perfect sourdough loaf, he was taking to the skies, earning him a spot as a private helicopter pilot.
“Last Friday, I flew to France for the day,” he laughs. “I’d never done that before, so it was a good challenge.”
Whether he’s figuring out a 9th-dimensional software structure problem or discovering new uses of generative AI, Stewart loves getting his hands dirty, using his skills to arrange technical puzzle pieces until he finds the right fit. We can’t wait to see what he builds next!
