PROFILE - SAFI CAPTAN

Winner of this year's Worldcom Young Business Achiever Award, 29-year-old Safi Captan grew his Surbiton-based software house, Compulogic, into a #4 million company in just two years. Here he talks to Catherine Toole about his other passion, music.

"I started writing music when I was 14 or 15. My father insisted that I learnt classical piano when I was 10 and of course I couldn't wait to give it up but then I discovered that there were other types of music than classical! I hooked up with a drummer and guitarist at school in Watford and we did a few gigs and that was it for me.

I guess I've always been pretty creative, which is why I enjoy writing music. I used to be in a writing forum writing music to score a film.

We'd record in studio dead time, which is between 10pm and 7am or 8am, so we'd get to use the studio for free. I wrote some music for a short film staring John Hurt called McHeath, which won a Short Film Award at Bafta, an amazing experience, so I've got this little statue around here somewhere ...

As I child my family travelled around a lot and I went to an American High School. Then I went to do a BSC degree in Computer Science at Schiller University in Waterloo. I got into computing almost by mistake. I was standing in a queue at the open day and they asked me what I wanted to do, so I said 'computing'. I'd done a bit of basic programming at school, you know, boxes flying across the screen and all that and I thought, 'That'll be fun, that's creative'.

I don't think it's unusual to write software and music, you find that creativity is at the core of both things. In fact, I know quite a few people who write software and are also musical, or artistic in some way.

Also music is a great de-stresser, maybe not writing music because that can be very stressful but singing, definitely. I love to sing!

I had to leave University after one year for financial reasons and got a temp job as a junior programmer at Luncheon Vouchers in Surbiton. After three months they offered me a full time job. I was earning more money than I'd ever had before, so I said yes. After two years with them I went to Alders, then to an insurance company and then to TTSI, which produces software for the shipping industry. There I met Thorgeir Einarsson, who became my business partner and co-owner of Compulogic.

Thorgeir has become like my elder brother, he's an entrepreneur, a hard worker, a good organiser, good with figures. We balance each other out: I concentrate on where the company's heading with technology and using what I call my God-given Mediterranean sales ability!"