Very PC boss defends Dragons' Den slaying

 

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Posted on 5 Aug 2008 at 11:26

Very PC boss Peter Hopton has defended his appearance on last night's Dragons' Den.

Hopton entered the studio asking for £250,000 for a 5% stake of his company, but found the panel in an aggressive mood and spent the majority of the interview on the defensive.

Peter Jones attacked the company's power consumption calculations, accusing Hopton of overseeing "a pretty averagely crap business", while fellow dragon Duncan Bannatyne claimed: "I've never heard such rubbish in my life."

Very PC's managing director claims he suffered at the hands of the editors. "I was rather fuming, because when we actually filmed it we had Peter Jones saying all sorts of stupid things, but it was two and half hours of filming cut to fifteen minutes," Hopton told PC Pro this morning.

"We wanted to do an awareness piece, but at the same time if we could get some investment it was a bonus. Hopefully, whatever the outcome, people are now thinking about how much energy their computers use and will think twice about buying their next computer, whatever that happens to be."

Two of the main charges levelled at Very PC concerned the green credentials of the products, and the lack of proprietary technology inside, but Hopton claims they missed the point.

"We explained our green principles, about how we make them energy saving... Okay we buy off-the-shelf parts but that's because if we bought our own custom boards, it would cost billions," he noted.

"What they didn't get, or what wasn't shown, was how we modify the parts to make them as energy efficient as possible, which is a bit of a pain. We modify the BIOSes, we add software, we wouldn't want to be in the business of manufacturing circuit boards."

Reader backing

Very PC has also found support on our forums with qpw3141 commenting: "I was mightily unimpressed with so-called 'expert' Peter Jones. You produce an extremely power efficient PC and he starts wittering on about putting in dumb terminals. You could do it all even more energy efficiently with an abacus at every desk. Most applications simply don't have dumb terminal software available to run them.

"They may have been right about the company being a little overvalued but there was no need for them to get their panties in such a bunch!"

Very PC won PC Pro's Environmental Innovator Award just last year, in which the company was praised for its "holistic approach to producing a green PC". Click here to find out why the company's Treeton PC earned our recommendation earlier this year.

You can watch a replay of the show on the BBC iPlayer. Very PC appears about 32 mins into the programme.

Author: Stuart Turton