Tink Taylor

Co-Founder & President Dotdigital Group plc

Last Reviewed: September 25, 2026

Executive Summary

Tink Taylor (legally Ian Rhys Taylor) is co-founder and President of Dotdigital Group plc, the London-based, AIM-listed company whose customer engagement platform lets marketers run email, SMS and other cross-channel campaigns. The business began in 1999 as Ellipsis Media, a web agency, and became a software company around the email product Taylor ran, dotMailer. He sat on the boards of the group’s companies from 1999 until January 2020, including a spell as interim chairman, and has since held no directorship. He remains one of the company’s largest shareholders, with 29.8 million shares, or 9.65%, at 30 September 2025.

Career Highlights

• Appointed a director of Ellipsis Media Limited in November 1999, months after its April 1999 incorporation, and served as company secretary from 2000 to 2009.
• Took charge of the dotMailer email marketing product, the business that gave Ellipsis Media its later name and became the core of Dotdigital.
• Director of the listed holding company, Dotdigital Group plc, from January 2009 to January 2020.
• Acted as interim chairman before stepping down from the board, with the company saying at its December 2019 AGM that he would continue to do consultancy work for the business.
• Named by Dotdigital as Co-Founder & President and listed among its substantial shareholders with 29,776,667 shares.

Professional Journey

In a 2019 interview, Taylor said that he worked for Sequent, the computer systems company later acquired by IBM, while at university, building intranets, websites and web tools. After graduating he worked as a windsurfing instructor in Greece. There he built a website for the windsurfing school, and some of its clients asked him to do similar work for the companies they worked for.

That work led to Ellipsis Media Limited, a web agency incorporated in England in April 1999. Taylor was appointed a director that November and became company secretary in April 2000. As he tells it, the agency built three products: dotEditor, a content management system; dotCommerce, an ecommerce platform; and dotMailer, an email marketing tool. Facing larger competitors, the founders each took one product, and Taylor took dotMailer. He said he chose it because “the recurring revenue it delivered enabled me to plan for the future in a very measured and controlled way.”

The email product became the business. Ellipsis Media Limited was renamed dotmailer Limited in 2008, and in January 2009 Taylor joined the board of the listed holding company, formerly West End Ventures plc, which became Dotdigital Group plc. The group later moved from ISDX to AIM and widened from email into a multichannel platform. Milan Patel, who joined in 2007, became CEO in 2016. Taylor stepped down as a director of the operating company in 2015. Co-founder Simon Bird left the group board in August 2018.

By 2019 Taylor described his role as Founder & President. He said it covered work with international teams, speaking at events, strategic partnerships, and working with the CEO on scaling the business. He also acted as interim chairman. At the December 2019 AGM the company said he would step down from that role but continue to do consultancy work, and he resigned as a director of Dotdigital Group plc on 17 January 2020.

He still has a formal place in the company. Its investor relations site names him “Co-Founder & President”, and its 2024/25 annual report lists him as a substantial shareholder with 9.65% of the shares. That year Dotdigital reported revenue of £83.9 million and bought Social Snowball Holdings Inc. The board today is led by CEO Milan Patel and Non-Executive Chairman John Conoley, and Taylor is not among its members.

Education

In a 2019 interview, Taylor said he holds a first-class degree in Computing & Information Systems. The institution is not named in any source reviewed, so none is recorded.