John Snyder is one of many entrepreneurs in the high-tech cluster around Cambridge who commercialised technology originally researched within Cambridge University.
In 1992 he teamed up with Martin Porter and started Muscat, the natural language search software company, which commercialised "concept-based" searching. John built up the a strong customer base of international corporations over a five year period, before negotiating the sale of Muscat in 1997 to The Dialog Corporation, the large aggregator of online business information. In 1999 John took a small team of three engineers and built a 300 million document index of the internet in just 12 weeks on a small cluster of Linux machines, launching it as the WebTop subsidiary of The Dialog Corporation. Through 2000, he grew the WebTop team to 40 plus staff and the internet index to 500 million documents, drawing on new ideas of P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. In 2001 he "retired" to Cambridge University as Director of Business Creation.
John is a Partner of CAP Partners LLP, a new fund manager, authorised by the FSA. He is also a Cambridge Angels business angel and has invested privately in local technology companies. John serves as a Board member of the East of England Development Agency and continues to be "Entrepreneur In Residence" at Cambridge University.
