Tim Norris-Wiles is an experienced, UK-based technologist who has worked for almost 20 years at the forefront of data, digital media, marketing technology, advertising and AI. This website acts as his personal playground, blog, and CV. If you can't be bothered to read it, then just point your LLM or agent of choice at the site or even the llms.txt file provided here.

Early Innings

Tim's career in tech began as an IT administrator, after flunking a media degree in Manchester and coming home with his tail between his legs, and a fairly large student loan bill to clear. By chance he ended up working as a first-line helpdesk operator for one of Europe's largest food manufacturers, solving problems across a user base of ~3,500 employees and covering everything from hardware issues, non-technical users struggling with Excel formulas, and mainframes that kept the manufacturing lines on.

It was in IT support that Tim realised the commercial teams were the ones leaving the office and going out for nice lunches with clients, and that they seemed to be making more money. So after 3 years, an ITIL certification, and about 50k password resets he went back to university to study this thing called "The Internet". Tim obtained a BSc (Hons) in Web Technologies from the University of Lincoln and majored in Entrepreneurship, Frontier Technologies, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI)... all areas that have gone on to underpin his career choices since!

Cracking into Commercial

In 2006, after driving a 1988 Fiat Panda from London to Mongolia, Tim did what so many others do in the UK and headed down to London to find a career in tech, landing a job at WebFusion which was one of the UK's largest hosting and data centre operators. This was his first foray into sales, helping consumers and enterprises to take their first steps online through managed services hosting, dedicated server sales, and slinging rackspace like it was going out of fashion! Tim did several years at WebFusion (which was absorbed into HostEurope Group and later into GoDaddy) before accidentally starting a shift from racks to apps, and finding his way ever closer to those business lunches he had so desired...

The Adtech Era Begins

In 2010, convinced that AWS was going to eat his lunch (and commission cheques), Tim took a role at AOL within their ad serving division ADTECH... a well regarded German bit of kit the company had acquired 3 years prior to compete with Google's DoubleClick offering. Here Tim developed a love for the digital media industry, consulting publishers and brands on everything from ad serving, to rich media, video, audio and eventually programmatic with the launch of AOL's Marketplace / SSP offering. He went from individual contributor, running a book of around $3.5m ARR across UK and Ireland to then managing a team of sellers across all UK/IRE publisher technology sales for the business. Many excellent lunches were had!

In 2014, Tim jumped from AOL to a then-little-known Data Management Platform (DMP) called Krux, riding a wave of 1st party audience excitement to help both publishers and advertisers leverage their data signals in ad campaigns at huge scale. Beginning in an EMEA Commercial Director role, he went on to run the DACH and NL markets for Krux, launching the business into these regions and making them the highest revenue contributing markets in the business. Krux sold to Salesforce for ~$800m in late 2016.

Getting into Martech

Some three months post-acquisition, Tim was afforded the opportunity to launch the Customer Data Platform (CDP) mParticle into the EMEA market. A ground up startup expansion into the region was something that excited him greatly, and it represented an opportunity to go broader than ads and move into the mobile application space, and into core CRM. Tim built mParticle's business from 0 to around 20 staff, and was a hands-on GM and VP Sales who supported on every deal the company did in the region. The business was hugely successful, securing clients like Marks & Spencer, Klarna, Sky, NatWest, SNCF, Joe & The Juice, Discovery Networks and more.

First Taste of Consulting

After 4 years building and running mParticle Tim ventured out to consult with earlier stage tech companies and to help brands with their data strategy directly. This was an awesome period of his career in terms of breadth of knowledge and remit, but also getting exposure to the nuances of seed-stage startups, creative technology, BI and analytics and video production. Key engagements during this time included acting as first GTM hire at Clarisights, a marketing BI tool for performance media teams, helping to bring QuickFrame to the UK / EU, a creator marketplace kind of like Uber for video production, and sub-contracting with ArcaBlanca and Canton Marketing Solutions to help on CDP selection and roll out for a FTSE100 company in the UK and a DAX business in Germany.

Habu, PrivTech, Cloud Everything and Another Exit

When Matt, Mike, Ted, Jess and former colleagues from Krux came knocking with a new idea, it didn't take much convincing Tim to jump in and establish the European operations for Habu, an innovative data clean room startup. As Managing Director EMEA, Tim was first hire in the region and had responsibility to grow the Habu brand, secure first clients and pilots, and educate the wider market on a highly technical but valuable product area.

As with all startups there was turbulence, and Tim spent around 3 months as interim global Chief Revenue Officer at a critical juncture for the business. A great, if crazy, experience, managing reps as far away as California whilst pounding the virtual pavements of Europe (ugh COVID era... lunches alone).

Habu was a cloud native application, backed by Snowflake Ventures and architected entirely differently to what had come before in Tim's career. This meant exposure to cloud-sales models, partnerships and operating channel programs with the likes of Microsoft, Snowflake, Amazon and Databricks. Tim was a regular on the conference circuit during this period, speaking on panels and in interviews about the reality of clean room adoption, decentralised approaches to data collaboration, and the intersection of clean rooms and retail media.

The company was acquired by LiveRamp in early 2024 for ~$200m.

Sticking Around to Learn Big Company Stuff!

After this acquisition, Tim decided to sit tight instead of jumping ship. A big mistake he had made after Salesforce was not sticking around to learn how publicly traded businesses operate and scale. A whole different motion to understand.

For ~2 years Tim operated as a global specialist on LiveRamp's data clean room product, supporting commercial leads across LATAM, UK, EU and APAC to win deals through technical differentiation. He acted as a hybrid commercial and solutions consulting lead for this period, working on LiveRamp's highest profile clients and deals including L'Oreal, Tesco, Woolworths, Financial Times and more.

Tim was lucky enough to give keynote presentations around the world for LiveRamp, including at RampUp down under in Sydney where he talked on the topic of creating a sustainable data economy by prioritising privacy-first architecture. He also continued to contribute to industry media, writing on topics like the maturation of clean rooms, CTV data challenges, and the role of clean rooms in data-driven TV.

Back to Startups and the AI Era

As is so often the case, all it took was one email to trigger Tim to get overly excited and decide to roll the dice on a startup again... this time squarely in the field of AI... to help Jon, Mike, Soren and Dave at Neuralift AI. Since January 2026 Tim has been leading Go-to-Market (GTM) for the New York HQ'd company, with a global remit.

Neuralift is one of the most exciting applications he's had the fortune to work with, focussing on deep learning neural networks for customer segmentation. It discovers things hiding deep in client data, removing human biases by running unsupervised learning to re-cluster large datasets in order to maximise value extraction for clients. Tim's day-to-day now sits at the intersection of enterprise AI sales, marketing stack architecture, and cutting-edge data science... working directly with partners like Databricks and NVIDIA, engaging with frontier LLM providers, and getting hands-on with model training, tuning, and deployment pipelines. It's a long way from resetting passwords, but the thread of making complex technology useful and commercially viable has been there from the start.

Want to get in touch? Find Tim on LinkedIn or explore the blog and showcase.