Simon Waterfall Co- Founder of Poke and Site Guru in his own words....

"I did my first degree at Brunel, I studied industrial design, it was a four year course and then I did my masters at the Royal College of Art, in pure product design and about two months before I started the RCA I was exhibiting at New Designers and this guy just came up to me and said ' I need that designer' , he found me at the bar, in a green skirt, blue Mohawk and a Walls Ice Cream Tee- shirt, I said of course, come in on Monday.  I phoned up my mate who I'd just moved into a house with, he'd just finished college , he was at RCA two years before me, and I said 'you know we'd talked about setting up a company someday, well we've got out first client, they are coming in on Monday! So out of our dining room, we scrabbled around hired from one of our mates a Quadra, and we said to him, just sit in front of it and tap, 'what happens if he asks me anything? Just tap... ' and we bought a big clock, because time is money, borrowed £200 off his dad and a fax machine and we set up in the dining room….

Before the web…

I can remember, the web was just around, for years our first work wasn't websites, we had email addresses but no one to send anything to, it was like phoning yourself. Because we were designers and worked for the design industries we didn't want to work for anyone one single product design company, we had a lot of rendering skills, computer and technology, we  thought lets work for all of them , and that was the start of it. there was 2 of us, then 4 then 6...I was still at college. I remember leaving college and the one thing that the RCA does very well is all the tutors / professors must have an outside full time job and I didn't tell them that I was working, they found out in the second year and in the second year they had 100 Years of Design at the RCA, this huge exhibition and a book that came out and in the last chapter, the last 3 pages was the future of design, and my company was in it and I hadn't told my tutors, and you'd think in a normal college your tutors would go' good on you son' but some tutors had a problem and I find to this day annoying.  

Finding people to employ....

That was the best thing about the RCA, I guess because between the 2 of us we had 4 years of contacts and the best thing at the RCA is the lift, you just go up down, meeting people.
That inquisitive sort of nature is, you've got to know why your going there, and we went there to make contacts. The thing with industrial design is one person didn't make that 20 people did, at least so it was interesting, we knew who we wanted to speak to and how we wanted to speak to them and just used everyone's contacts, because of course there wasn't any companies or universities teaching those skills so much, in the end we had a joint collaboration with a big London university to have a course within our company so that the graduates would get the  Honours degree and be trained on the job, because its was the only way they could keep up. So Deepend was 2 of us, 4, 8, 16, 32, we then had offices in New York, Toronto , every week I to, Prague, San Francisco, Bangalore, Sydney. In 2000 I did 111 days away, It's like I was  baggage: I was the pitch bitch. That all went under in 2001….

9/11

We were pretty much the last multinational out there, all the others had gone under, Razorfish, Oven, and we had a choice, either scale down and cull everybody and survive or look at it and expand into a big advertising network because they do digital so badly.. had offers and 2 weeks before we were going to sign  9/11 happened and a week after we were meant to be signing, these people aren't even buying paperclips anymore let alone a multinational...it was the number one agency in the U.K for 3 years running, the number one in the world in 2001, then its gone within 3 weeks.. Deepend was part of deep group and so 6 continents 9 offices, also 7 other brands, we had to start other companies to enable Deepend to do the things that it was good at, so we had a company called Airtight to do the strategy, we had  
the backend in Bangalore, we started an advertising house called Glue, Media 21 a media agency, Relish a PR company to talk about it, Poolside which was a training company in collaboration with the universities to train people eventually to swim in the Deepend, because if things don't exist you have to make them. We had 350 people working for us.

Then when it went under I signed on for 3 months. Everyone's a paper millionaire till you have nothing, I had insurance on my mortgage and to get that you have to sign on and say you're looking for work, ok I'll sign on. Creative director It was so sad, I got everyone a job, mourned at the death of it, instead of running away and getting another job made sure I dealt with it there and then , and so still to this day I still go to everyone's weddings and christenings and its still a family, and more importantly from that you think what did I train as, what did I enjoy? I didn't enjoy being a piece of luggage, I'm a designer.

I had my first company when I was 16, a games company programming commodore 64 and Amiga games. 'Heroes of the Lance' was one of mine, a friend of mine found a review of it the other day and its appalling.
We'd have meetings with big businesses from the U.S Gold and they'd fly over and say ' Gee, I love what you're doing with this old retro schoolboy look'.
I've always worked for myself, I've always been a creative director and so after Deepend it was like... ok who do I want to work with? And I really wanted to work with some of the directors from Deepend and Nick Roope, so I tracked him down and he had his partner Ian Tate and so there were 6 of us, sitting round a coffee table saying what shall we do? And we said  the one thing that we don't want to do is repeat ourselves, and its so easy as a designer to repeat yourself, and we said if any of us catch ourselves saying the same thing or doing the same work or talking in the same way or using the same philosophy - poke the finger at each other and stop it. I said it and Ian went ' that's our name! 'Poke'. Poke is internal statements to all of us to say don't do it.
When the internet started, it was all about getting permission, it was 5 years of telling people why they needed a website, not even doing websites, education... we didn't want to spend another 5 years saying we want to do it different , it needs to be self selecting, so we teamed up with Mother the ad agency. Mother at the time was born of an era when you took a system and you removed the keystone and you tried to make it work again, so you had Daewoo car with no dealerships, Egg a bank with no branches, Muji a brand with no brand, Mother was the ad agency with no account handling. The office itself was quite exciting, it had a moat round it and a caravan hovering above it. The only thing I needed to get from them was their attitude; you don't go to Mother for the normal advertising route. Their creativity is great and they get permission and the trust to do that before hand.

Poke me if you've heard this one before...

We said that we'd never be bigger than 12 we are now 52 and said lots of things we've never done, we didn't have a website for about a year and a half, didn't have a logo or cards for 2 years, just had a random generated slogans on our website. People said' your never going to get any business like that we said if people are put off by that that's our drawbridge, that's our caravan and we're very lucky that this last two years we've been voted the number one agency in the U.K by Revolution magazine surveying all of the clients all the 100 in strategy creativity, thinking. Creativity is such a rocky process its important to enjoy it.

On becoming a Digital President of D&AD

I am the next president; I've already made the hat, bought gloves, the suits going to be excellent obviously...

I've been on the executive panel for the last two years, and you get a year in, you're a year as Vice or deputy, I said I'm not going to be deputy I'm going to be President of Vice. I'm changing the constitution! I'm going to be the youngest president, and I will be the first digital president.

They've made another category called 'other'. My speech was something along the lines of 'how dare you, I spent my whole time being branded in 'other' and I will spend my entire time showing you that digital is nothing to do with 'other' its the bridge that connects the two, you don't go to a website to look at a web, you go there to do something, to get communications or branding or creativity or entertainment, that is both design and advertising. They voted me in and I am now the establishment. Shit.

Its all going to be digital, I'm going to bring electricity to them.
We are looking for partners, partners in sponsorship, partners in education. D&AD is a charity so.....
There's a million reasons why you should enter it, It's like what we did with Deepend, you get to speak to and educate, the people who are coming through, because those are going to be your employees, then your mates and eventually your clients. I know designers that have won the student award, won the main award, gone all the way through and are now the judges. Its an incredible heritage and people that have had that want to give some thing back.

After the Presidency?

I think you get to live in Provence. I made £65 at bar mitzvahs last week  that's not bad for folding money, better than the £43 on the dole.
I guess I'll be fat and middle aged surfing porn on the net somewhere".