Everyone has a story. This is mine. There’s no need to go digging for dirt, as its all here. Warts and all. The good bits and the bad bits of me.

I was born Alexander Ireland in Chertsey hospital on 17th December 1978, around 6.06pm in the hospital’s psychiatric ward, as the maternity ward was closed. I’m told I screamed louder and longer than all the other babies. My parents moved to Liphook on the Surrey/Hampshire border and brought me up there, where they still live now 20 years or so later. Both were from very wealthy Surrey families, with my father working for Estee Lauder’s purchasing division and my mother as a housewife-cum-secretary. I have one sister, Joey, who was born 3 years later.

I was a very strong-willed child who was very badly behaved and extremely disruptive. Looking back the violent energy I always had flowing through me could have been symptomatic of ADHD. I remember the strange feeling of hating my parents from when I was very young, and was effectively adopted by Grandmother, who was the first and only person I bonded with for my most of my life. My parents were fanatical and fundamentalist born-again Christians and avid Maggie Thatcher supporting Tories. My paternal grandmother’s active interest in spiritualism and witchcraft always made for an entertaining afternoon tea.

I was abused heavily throughout my childhood, and my mum suffered terrible depression. My parents were as incompatible as they come – one was an emotionless ghost, the other an affection-starved neurotic romantic. I’m a bizarre mix of the two opposites, which often leads people to tell me I’m like 2 people, or have a split personality. That’s usually an evil Hyde-style inner brat and more philosophical Jekyll, which make up a rather unusual dichotomy that often torments me more than helps me.

Daily life for us was arguing and violence, all day, every day, for 20 years. There are few blacker places to grow up in the Western world. There was no affection, no compassion and no privacy, but plenty of manipulation and punishment. You never opened up simply because anything of weakness you confessed to would be thrown at you the next day. It seems strange to describe it like that as we all got so used to it that we knew nothing else. Nobody could control me, and I never slept despite the sedatives they put in my food. I know now through therapy that I wasn’t an evil kid, and that I was just reacting to my environment.

Our upbringing was Christian, meaning a large part of my life was spent in Sunday school and witnessing the hypocrisy and corruption of middle class churchgoers. I went to Haslemere Preparatory School in Surrey until I was 11, where I was a year or so above my age. I used to read newspapers and encyclopaedias obsessively when I was little, spent hours laying cables everywhere and drove my parents nuts by always inviting Jehovahs Witnesses in for religious debates. My Nan died of a heart attack when I was 10, and I never full recovered. I shut down and the last tears I cried were at her funeral. I still grieve her now but the bursary she left us did me more damage than she ever would have intended.

The earliest memories I have are of being abused and abandoned. My father would crush my neck on the floor with his knee so I couldn’t breathe and demand that I give in. I refused and screamed at him to break my neck because I would never capitulate.

My secondary school was the prestigious Churchers College in Petersfield, and it was where my first entrepreneurial leanings appeared. When I was 13, I set up an “alternative tuck shop” for buying sweets and porn mags and essentially put the official tuck shop out of business in 3 days by undercutting them on everything. I hated school with a passion and was nearly expelled more times than I care to remember. By the end of my last year, I had been permanently excluded from all but one or two classes, banned from all my friends’ houses, was a 40 a day smoker, had a real problem with setting fire to things and blowing them up, ran the most ridiculous parties and had tastes for all the drugs mentioned in the warning leaflets we got in RE.

I learnt a lot about relating to people from different backgrounds simply through spending time with posh twats all day, and then having proper fun in the evenings with local friends who went to the local state school. I hid from the world by playing guitar and was very good at it. Up until my early twenties I always saw my future in music, although everyone else wanted me to be a doctor. I certainly had the handwriting for it, although the prospect of spending another 10 years in school made me feel sick. My best friend kept snakes and his dad was a gunsmith, so we were never short of toys that we shouldn’t be playing with. We didn’t exactly do a lot of family things, and my dad’s family in itself is spread across continents, which is a very appropriate sign of exactly how much affection there is within it.

Somehow I got all my GCSES at very high grades, despite smoking between exams and not even bothering to revise even slightly (I was more interested in girls). I went on to Godalming College but was already wanting to leave and do my own thing. I hated it there as well, although it was slightly more relaxed. I’d managed to get a driving licence and consequently written off 2 cars and gained 18 penalty points. To cut a long story short, things got worse and I’d gone on from spitefully arguing with teachers to not even bothering to turn up in the first place. My only interest was discussing the best ways to manufacture bombs and illegal drugs with my rather demented chemistry teacher. And I was very, very good at it.

I miraculously escaped with a bunch of A-Levels at a very high grade, again with no preparation whatsoever. University wasn’t going to be for me, so it was time for a gap year. I thought about working with animals and doing an apprenticeship in pyrotechnics. I deferred my unconditional offer from Hull University to study Drug Design, Pharmacology and Toxicology (what a surprise!) to spend time with the girl I was with. Nobody told me university is about getting drunk, doing drugs and sleeping with half the campus for 3 years. I thought it was more school. If I’d have known that, I would have passed my A-Levels at 12.

Somewhere in there around the age of 17, I was so disgusted by my father that I changed my surname to Cameron, at 8.45am, still drunk and high, in a Solicitor’s office in Liphook. We picked the name out of the BT phone book because everyone was too trashed to think properly. He returned the favour by getting me a pair of black Adidas swim shorts for my 18th birthday, 3 days late, in the middle of winter. It would have been hilarious if his indifference wasn’t so hurtful.

My parents finally did what they should have done decades before, and divorced acrimoniously when I was 18. My mum reached the end of her tether and in desperation had a series of affairs and moved to Los Angeles to live. She asked me to come with her, and I often wonder how things would have been if I had accepted. The separation was a relief, but the experience of having your security torn from you is a deceptive and invisible cancer that we were repeatedly told didn’t concern us. Neither of my parents wanted me (my mum strenuously denies this), but I was familiar with that simply as they’d spent every day for the previous 10 years finding ways to get rid of me somehow (boarding school, care, relatives etc). And that sounds amusing, but it was a very serious intention of theirs as they didn’t want me around anymore.

By now I was numb and couldn’t feel anything. I was a smouldering mass of hatred and my sole mission was the total wholesale destruction of everything around me. I’m not joking. People went so far as to say that I wouldn’t see my 17th birthday simply as I was on a path of rampant self-destruction that any rock star would have been proud of. I’ve developed a reputation for being able to out-argue almost anyone and had an acid tongue that meant I was renowned for putting people down in one sentence. I also had no idea of any of the essential life skills I needed: managing money, cooking and simple domestic processes. I still struggle.

I was a very, very angry boy and even considered psychotic by a number of professional people who examined me. My second entrepreneurial venture was dealing illicit drugs, and sadly in the same time period managed to clock up a substantial criminal record in petty offences, which made me top of the Hampshire Police’s “Most Hated” list from the way I arrogantly went at them when I was detained in their cells. I’m not proud of it, but the reality is that it actually taught me an enormous amount about market economics, and we were as “ethical” as we possibly could have been. I have knowledge of drug culture that few others have as a consequence.

I fell in love for the first time when I was 19 with a girl called Jemima, who eventually broke my heart after our relationship deteriorated. I was devastated, although the vast majority of the pain was self-inflicted. She also discovered a lump on my neck which led to the diagnosis that I had an overactive thyroid. It was a pivotal time in my life, as the new business I’d started wasn’t working, I’d revolted against working 9 to 5 and made the decision after we broke up to travel to Africa. Her and I never spoke again. Within that time I’d received alternative unconditional places at different universities to study law and information technology design, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with them from the nausea.

But it was formative in more ways than I ever knew it would be. In the same time I discovered the Internet, and it was the encyclopaedia I had always dreamt of that immediately captured my imagination. I had very little PC experience so sat up night and day teaching myself everything there was to know about it. I designed websites, hacked my way through a whole load of computer systems and realised it was the future of everything. The dotcom years made me stand up and take notice, and I made the decision within myself that I wanted to be someone. I found a passion.

So out of a very painful year I started a new one by fleeing the nothingness of the UK and flying to Uganda to teach voluntarily in a boys primary school, which was a beautiful and harrowing experience. It changed the way I felt about those who taught me and was extremely humbling as I saw children die and those with nothing give everything they had. I hated the group of stuck-up retards I was with, and whilst I was out there made friends with local IT buffs who insisted I come back to help them develop East Africa’s fledgling internet community. My 21st birthday was spent in Lamu, a beautiful desert island off the coast of Kenya, and I saw in the Millennium a few hundred miles down the coast before heading home.

And I did go back, with my sister’s boyfriend and co-conspirator, Shaun. We lived there for another year, making more lifelong friends than I ever thought was possible and saw horror that most should never see. Interestingly, we lived with the country’s roaming MI6 officer who we later found out was gunned down by rebel AK-47 fire. It couldn’t have been a more transformative time in my life, as it gave me the courage to go further than I thought I could. You can take the man out of Africa, but you can never take Africa out of the man. We escaped with our lives, but not much else.

By the time I got back, I’d decided I wanted more. I went full pelt with my CV and within 3 interviews for web design positions in London, had 2 offers. I chose to work in Farringdon for a little known marketing company. I was 22, and having spent so much time in the city, moved there permanently to the East End. As time went on I began to hate what I was doing, although the work itself was interesting as I was getting more and more technical by the day, buying 3 books a week and reading them on the train. In a few months I knew all there was to know and was bored. I could design any web system backwards and was slowly being poisoned by the environment. Eventually I was signed off work with nervous anxiety and couldn’t do anything as my hands would shake so violently the moment I tried to concentrate or felt the strain of any concerns.

The resulting few years after that were a matter of experimentation, where I became disillusioned in every job I took. It was a slow process of learning I couldn’t be the 9-5 white-collar worker my father silently wanted me to be and made me feel I should be. I hated each one and they all ended in conflict and acrimony. From Farringdon I left to join NEC to work on 3G video, which despite the enormous paycheck was the darkest and most dreadful environment I could have ever walked into. It was the only time I couldn’t physically bring myself to get out of bed to go to work. I drunk myself into a coma every night and threw money at anything that would distract me from the emptiness. But it was also around the time I met Amanda, the female version of me at that time in my life.

I was lucky in leaving NEC to be able to walk into another job doing what I was passionate about: interactive TV. The earlier years I had specialised in streaming video, and I’d always harboured an interest in the “forbidden” nature of how red button applications were put together. What I didn’t know was that my real passion lay in when the 2 were hybrid to become IPTV. I took an internship at a small start-up called Mindhouse and moved in with who turned out to be the flatmates-from-hell in Hampstead.

But yet again I was incompatible, as I was more interested in innovating than being a coder in a cupboard. I had developed a small obsession with Amanda and our cursory romance was slowly developing into a fully-fledged love affair. The trouble was she lived in Norfolk. We identified with each other at a basic cellular level and grew closer, and I ended up falling in love with her over time. She was a beautiful girl with a tragic past and a very sensitive heart. I was a little boy in need of purpose and found a communion with her at a time in my life when I was uniquely vulnerable. To this day I’m grateful to her for her understanding and patience with me whilst I grew. Indeed, I wouldn’t be the person I am now without her nurturing and support and I owe her an enormous amount for what she probably sees as small things that were huge to me.

I jumped ship from both Mindhouse and the flatmates-from-hell to get back to Hampshire. It was meant to be a temporary move whilst I decided on my next step, but around the same time, a number of problems were developing back around my family. My sister had started a relationship with the father of her yet-unborn child and my mum was falling to bits having to deal with her methadone-enslaved husband. The idea of going anywhere near them again was painful enough, but it was meant to be, as I found out.

December that year took me to MTV, which again started romantically and radically spiralled downhill when I discovered their policy of active censorship and woefully under-funding anything they do. A pattern had developed of lovey beginnings and disillusionment. The plans others had for me were crashing directly into my own, which were clearly in another direction. I was headhunted for a small porn/gambling broadcaster called Cellcast (creators of the highly prestigious “Babestation”), and happily accepted. During the year or so I was there, I learned to set up TV channels from scratch and helped launch the first interactive systems of their genre.

I could have avoided such a sorry waste of time making other people money if someone had taken the time earlier on to identify the things I couldn’t see in myself and helped nurture them. Looking back I realise I had no support from anyone at all, at any stage. It was impossible for me to determine the right route to fulfil my potential as long as everyone expected me to work it out for myself, which is why I try to point out the same for the people who are close to me. In fact, I was living other people’s agendas as a victim.

I’d just had enough by that point and offers of freelance work were pouring in. Amanda and I were reaching a painful point in our relationship and were seeming to go from trauma to trauma. She had been having ovarian surgery and lost a baby she craved. We never really recovered. We started to drift apart and the distance took its toll.

So I set up Digital TX Ltd and took the plunge into virtual self-employment, and never has a feeling been more liberating. I took on a whole load of freelance projects but cash was still tight. We found a semi-built TV studio in London and strangleheld the deal from all other rivals whilst negotiating the price to 25% of its original shop value. Despite fighting on and approaching a number of investors, we walked from the deal simply because we discovered duplicity in the accounting. I found out later they “borrowed” our business plan for the facility and its now worth in the region of £16 million.

Life in consultancy is always difficult as you’re continually hunting contracts to scratch out a living. And my journey has reflected my personal development and highlighted my inexperience and naivety. There were huge periods where there was no money at all and literally only pennies to rub together. But there have been massive successes and spending sprees. I wouldn’t go back and change anything. I learnt the equivalent of 10 years MBA studies from the simple act of being ballsy enough to try it. I made mistakes that cost me potentially millions, but I look back now and laugh.

The day the world changed for me and I found my mission was in a park in Ealing, on a sunny day out eating ice cream with Amanda. I read an Intel white paper about how new video technology meant DVD-quality pictures could be sent over normal phone lines (IPTV), and something just clicked inside me. Everything I’d shown an interest in came together – streaming video over the net, red button software, the internet and more. I talked to hundreds of ISPs and they all said they didn’t have the resources to do their own TV services, as much as they’d loved to. So I built a plan to create a “white label” system they could rent. I got mentors and approached investors.

I worked every day until the early hours and learnt as I went on. I worked on retainers for clients and did small projects to make ends meet. Digital TX now has had around 60 clients and I built a network of nearly 10,000 contacts and shelves of business cards. I talked with the movie studios, record labels and a large chunk of the finance industry, bringing on temporary developers when I needed to from temporary office space. It was never the end game though. My nephew was born and it changed the way I looked at children forever. My sister had been wrestling free from a manipulative bully of a boyfriend who we ended up taking a restraining order against, and having him charged in the high court with over 10 serious offences.

But I became obsessed with making my plans succeed and the inevitable crash came when my body decided enough was enough. My nerves were shot to bits and in a particularly dreary August, I suddenly stopped sleeping. And I didn’t sleep for another 10 days, not even a wink, despite all Amanda’s efforts to nurse and rest me. I worked on adrenaline until I could barely lift my arms. Just before I was hospitalised, I was finally diagnosed with severe anxiety and clinical depression and prescribed Amitriptyline, the only antidepressant my body would accept. Mentally accepting the diagnosis was harder than sleeping, but it seemed to fit very well. My sister and I have always lived with heavy hearts.

Meanwhile over time, Amanda and I had gone from bad to worse, with a situation that had disintegrated into domestic violence and abuse. We were barely functioning anymore and I was a coward. I should have ended the relationship earlier but felt guilty and afraid of what to do next. Eventually the time came on a cold September afternoon on my way to the airport where I stepped out of her door in Ealing and never came back. The new few months were incredibly difficult as we both suffered immensely. I spread my wings and got to know a lot of new girls even though I swore to myself I didn’t want another relationship for years.

My plan was about as smart as it could get, but I soon realised although we could get the funding, it wasn’t a long-term business. In early, 2006, and after much internal tribulation, I took the terrifying step to abandon the plan and focus on only one part of it, the so-called “content bridge” and get an incubation team to help me develop the concept. It took a few weeks to work out that what I had was a million times bigger than a simple computer system and that I desperately needed more commercial savvy. The white label idea was adopted by 2 well known market players, one venture capitalist and a CRM company. Both now value their businesses at more than £20 million each.

So I productised my consultancy business, and started writing industry articles to bring in more sales leads, as well as registering on MySpace to experiment with my own personal writing and meet a few new people. I created deals that made people a lot of money, although I couldn’t share it as I wasn’t appropriated FSA-registered to share in the spoils. The articles I wrote went all over the world into the biggest companies. I was asked to speak at industry events. People were responding to the personal things I’d written about very enthusiastically. Even more were approaching me for help with their own careers and businesses. I staked my ground and developed a vision for the future around opening up TV with the same philosophy that underpins the internet.

What emerged from the ashes of my IPTV platform concept was something far greater. In fact we gradually realised that we’d solved a problem the world had scratched its head over since the internet began, and it was the most revolutionary idea the media industry had ever known. We moved everything to Mayfair, toured every company in the book, started work on building a team and getting it to maturity as a business. We named the platform “Prophecy” and incorporated a company (“BEL”) to drive it forward. The person I’ve started to become has overtaken me as I’ve effectively become a character from a movie. I’m a guru, genius, messiah and figurehead leader now apparently so I’m told.

Elsewhere, my mum and I have always had a volatile love-hate relationship, despite me being more similar to her than anyone else. She is a married to a recovering heroin addict and has an annoying penchant for picking up strays. I recently helped her set up her own telemarketing company and we’ve become much closer since she got to financial and emotional independence through it. My father and I have never had a relationship, and the lack of patriarchal bond is one of the reasons I have a notable lack of regard for authority or process. My sister has always been the favourite but we are very close. Her son, Zair, is my favourite person in the whole world and I’m immensely proud of her.

So when I look back now I can see it all coming together. I’ve got the girl, I’m healing from what I’ve suffered, the company is on track to change the world, my family is stabilising and my public profile is getting more widely noticed every day. Someday in the next few years I’ll be married and have a little family, and for the first time in my life it’s not something I hold in contempt but am truly excited about.

And I’m only just getting started. I have more fire under the hood that I can express in words. Every success is making me more rabid than I was the second before. The plans keep getting bigger.

Watch this space.

• What I survived was horrific.
• We live out unhealthy patterns of behaviour that we can’t see.
• Without purpose and mission, we are lost.
• If you don’t take time out to refresh your spirit, you burn out and break down.
• The most painful periods in my life were actually the most transformative.
• Hard work is not the same as progress.
• I needed nurturing and mentoring from a young age.
• Ideas are very different to working businesses.