Every now and then a business personage comes across our radar who is worthy of a repeat appearance in this column.
Richard Light, founder of the IT hardware maintenance company Interactive – or rather, Ricardo Pumpa as he is better known – is one such character.
Our item on Mr Pumpa in yesterday's paper hit such a nerve (who knew you all liked IT entrepreneurs who moonlight as geriatric gangsta rappers so much?) that we decided to dig a little deeper to discover more about this fascinating fellow.
And it turns out he is not the only talent in the wider Pumpa-Interactive family.
The second largest shareholder in the company is a gent by the name of Christopher Ride. A fellow who, when he is not helping to run Interactive, makes a crust writing time-travel-historical-fiction-sci-fi-thrillers. Granted, it's relatively niche as book genres go – but that's the beauty of a globalised world. There's a market out there no matter how obscure your product.
One of Ride's recent tomes, The Inca Curse, is about (and we quote): "a man transported from the future who must carry out a series of vital missions encoded in the Dead Sea Scrolls". Not sure where the Incas come in there – guess we'll have to read it to find out.
All of which proves that Interactive really is a renaissance outfit. On the one hand you've got the company's major shareholder dropping gangsta rap classics (produced on Sydney's gritty north shore) and on the other, the second largest shareholder pumping out pulp fiction. Outstanding!
