Land and Expand Ltd.

Our passion for building technical communities can be traced back to 2007.

Our founder, James Parton, was a frustrated product manager working in new product development within O2, the leading mobile provider in the UK at the time. It was clear to him that O2's waterfall product development processes and desire to act as a gatekeeper for all innovation were no longer fit for purpose.

This was the beginning of a two decade obsession of creating community around products and services.

His solution was O2 Litmus. This was O2's first developer program. Litmus was a combination of a new suite of network APIs, combined with a preselected group of O2 customers, ready to test the new products and services created by independent software developers. 

The success of O2 Litmus led to an opportunity to create and roll out a global developer program for O2's parent company, Telefonica. The program was named BlueVia, and successfully positioned Telefonica as a thought leader in the apps and services market, driving innovation on Telefonica's infrastructure and generating millions of euro's in revenue.

James then joined Twilio as their first hire outside of the USA to create their European Business, implementing and localising Twilio's developer led go to market strategy. His 5 years at Twilio ended with the high of Twilio's IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in June 2016.

​

In 2017 Land and Expand was engaged to launch and establish The Bradfield Centre, a new tech hub located on The Cambridge Science Park, owned by Trinity College. It was an intriguing challenge to develop a community playbook for a physical space. The goal was two-fold.  1) Attract start-ups to choose the centre as their office space. 2) Create an asset to serve the wider regional tech ecosystem.  The Bradfield Centre has successfully established itself as the premier tech hub in the East of England. Its resident members have raised £1.5bn in venture funding, and the centre has hosted more than 1,500 tech events.

In 2021 James co-authored the bestselling Apress book “Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program” with long-term collaborator Caroline Lewko. Due to the success of the book, Land and Expand and Reverve Communications created DevRel.Agency, which supported a wide range of startups and enterprises with their Developer and technical community strategies between 2022 - 2025.

​

Clients included Qualcomm, Intel, Digital Ocean, IBM, Payrix (Worldpay), Salad Technologies, Bitmovin, Swirld Labs, and Infobip.​

​

As part of his community role within the Cambridge tech ecosystem, James founded and co-hosts Cambridge Tech Podcast, which delivers weekly local tech news and long form interviews with local founders, innovators, and ecosystem players.

​

If you would like to talk about your community building needs, book a call.