His first ever piece for a newspaper was, in fact, a front-page report for The Daily Telegraph on the bloody Romanian revolution, as their Budapest correspondent had gone on holiday."I was driving the BBC correspondent John Simpson around in my Mazda," laughs Denton "He had this amazing way of getting through checkpoints. As we got close and the young, kid soldiers started freaking out, he'd roll the window down, tell me to put my foot down and then he'd hang his camera out of the window and shout 'BBC, BBC' as we drove past. They were too surprised to do anything."Denton spent four years in Eastern Europe writing for the Financial Times and The Economist. When he returned to London, despite his pleas of wanting to write about technology, he was given the investment-banking beat. In fact, this was to make his journalistic career, as in September 1995, a young trader called Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank. "I was getting secret memos under the table in a bar in the City, all the stuff that you dream journalism is about but rarely is," says Denton, animatedly.In the late 1990s, Denton finally got his opportunity to write about technology and was sent to the States It was here that he began to get itchy feet. "I'd gone from being proud of my career to terribly embarrassed that I'd been with the same employer for eight years.

On the West Coast, they would look at you as if you were missing some crucial gene – your enterprise gene."I did this profile of a 25-year-old out of Harvard who'd made a million dollars, employed all his school friends, and it looked like fun. The last piece I wrote for the FT was a profile of him, which ended: '...and you know what, guys, this looks so much fun, I'm off, too'."Denton is perhaps better known for his role in First Tuesday, the networking phenomenon that rolled out across Europe at groundbreaking speed and defined the internet in Europe. "It was a creature of its time, but a pretty amazing creature," he says.Denton co-founded First Tuesday along with Adam Gold, John Browning and Julie Meyer, in October 1998. "It was set up because of a lack of conversation, apart from anything else," Denton explains. "When I came back to London there was no one really to talk to."However, two years later, the founders famously clashed over the sale of First Tuesday "We didn't all agree," admits Denton.

"Adam and I pushed through the sale and rammed it through over objections It was unpopular and it was unsentimental. It was a cold business decision, and one that I think, with hindsight, proved to be absolutely right," he says, before skirting around a question of whether he still speaks to the other founders."I get on with most of them. The problem with First Tuesday was that it had too much opportunity. I wish we'd been more ruthless as a board, and ensured that we'd just focused on one thing. It was never designed to be a business, and from the start I always called it the accidental company. For a while, it felt a bit weird, as First Tuesday grew more dramatically than Moreover."So all told, Denton hasn't had much free time in the last three years. He freely admits: "I'm quite obsessive – if I'm interested in something, I'll be interested in that and nothing else." He says that he's taking some time out to travel and write.

But that all depends on how you define "time out"...He's off to Budapest for fun, he says, before admitting that he might meet some local software developers while he's there. "I'm terrified that I'll lurch into another company straight away, which wouldn't be a good idea I don't think it's healthy to jump from one to the next. You want to plan, you want to think, and I want to go on holiday."But Denton's concept of a holiday is a little different, too. "There's a 12th-century village in Italy that's kitted out with a high-speed internet connection I'm going to go there with my laptop I was also thinking about somewhere more tropical. A beach hut where I can e-mail, write and get a tan at the same time.".