A Minecraft server was my first management job
Before any real company, I ran a Minecraft server called CaptureCraft from twelve to fifteen — a thousand players, a team of moderators, and real money coming in. It was my first taste of being in charge.
I know how this sounds, but one of the most formative business lessons of my life came from a Minecraft server. It was called CaptureCraft, and I ran it from when I was twelve until about fifteen. At its peak it had over a thousand active players a month. I was a kid, and I was quietly in charge of something real.
Every day I’d come home from school and, the second I was through the door, jump straight on. There was always something to do. Plugins to manage. Hardware to keep an eye on — making sure the server had enough allocated to it that it wouldn’t lag or fall over when a crowd showed up. Little fires, constantly. I loved it.
And it made money. People donated in exchange for small perks and accolades inside the server — a rank, a cosmetic, a small bonus. Nothing huge on its own, but it added up to well beyond pocket money. It was the first time I understood, in my gut rather than in theory, that if you build something people care about, they’ll happily pay to be part of it. It was a demo version of a business — me dipping my toes in without realising that’s what I was doing.
The part that shaped me most wasn’t the money, though. It was the people. I had a team of moderators to coordinate, disputes to settle, standards to hold. Managing a moderation team at that age taught me more about people than anything else I did as a teenager — and I didn’t always do it well. Sometimes I got stressed, or handled things clumsily, or learned the hard way that being in charge of something doesn’t mean everyone agrees with you. But I was learning to manage something, and that’s a muscle you can only build by actually doing it.
This was all before I properly got into programming. It wasn’t long after CaptureCraft that I started writing my own plugins for it in Java — the first real code I wrote was in service of a world I already cared about. That instinct, build the thing you wish existed, is the same one that later became Find My Bus and everything after it.
Looking back, those were my first steps into all of this. Not a company, not really — but the moment I realised I liked being responsible for something, having a say in how it ran and living with the consequences when I got it wrong. Ridiculous as it sounds, a Minecraft server is where I first learned that about myself.