Peter Wilkinson is Yorkshire to the core. He likes watching Leeds United, visiting his weekend place on the moors and values his privacy - so he will not have his picture published.
He would rather not face travelling to London and you would probably have to put a gun to his head to persuade him to visit Silicon Valley. But despite all this, the Harrogate based 46-year-old has become one of Britain's most successful internet entrepreneurs.
In 1998 he sold Planet Online, the internet service provider he and colleague Philip Taysom founded three years earlier with backing from Yorkshire property tycoon Paul Sykes, to Energis for £75m.
He then engineered Dixons' hugely successful Freeserve internet access provider, from which he still receives substantial royalties. Last month he agreed to sell Sports Internet, in which he is a 44% shareholder, to BSkyB for £301m.
Now Mr Wilkinson and Mr Taysom are back with another business. They are planning to roll the former's computer company Storm in with their remote data storage business VData and possibly float the combined group.
VBak is an online back-up service for large companies in case disaster strikes their systems. Mr Taysom points out that big firms do not adequately back up their data. "Businesses are relying on computer technology and information more and more but when did you last back up your computer?" he asks.
More than 300 people work for Mr Wilkinson's various businesses in Harrogate and VData is expanding so fast he has taken over National Power's former central computing site next door to house all its data security units.
Nearly all his employees are from Yorkshire and very few leave once they arrive. Many of them worked for Systime with Mr Wilkinson back in the 1970s when it was based in Leeds and was one of Britain's largest computer firms.
"Up here it's a different mindset to London," says Mr Wilkinson. "We're not all ee, bah gum. Wages aren't that much lower and good technology people may be becoming thin on the ground but the quality of life is much higher. You're minutes from some of the most beautiful countryside in the country. It doesn't take you two hours to crawl home through the traffic.
"There's a culture of loyalty. You never see people reading the job pages of the technology press in their lunch hour. They don't feel they have to move south to further their careers. If anything we're taking on people moving north. As long as the dust we keep sprinkling continues to turn to gold I'm hopeful our staff will stay with us.
"Sure there are disadvantages of being up here. If you're running a public company you don't get as much time to schmooze with the analysts and brokers as you would like."
Planet started out in Leeds and Mr Wilkinson is confident the city will continue to go from strength to strength. "Leeds is a go-ahead city. It's a well regarded commercial centre and technology companies grow up around centres like that."
