Ajaz Ahmed is the Founder of Freeserve, the UK’s largest ISP, now owned by Orange. His eureka moment came when he bought a computer at PC World in Leeds and nobody in the store could tell him how to get onto the Internet.

After much persuasion by him, Dixons launched Freeserve in September 1998 and it became the UK’s largest ISP in just three short months. It floated just nine months later with a market cap of £1.5bn and entered the FT 100 soon after, in March 2000 it had a market cap of £9bn.

Ajaz was one of the three founding executives to launch the business, seeing it through flotation and the £1.6bn sale to Wanadoo. Ajaz held the position of Business Development Director until April 2001 when he left the company to pursue a variety of business interests. He now sits a number of boards and is Chairman of Callserve, Europe’s Largest independent VoIP Company, he also sits on the governing council at Huddersfield University. His most recent venture is a new privacy browser, Browzar, over 250,000 were downloaded in 192 countries in the first week.