Entrepreneurs: When you’ve dodged mortars in Basra, building tech start-ups holds no terrors

Two businesses exemplify Public’s investments. Well-established job skills-matching specialist Adzuna has just landed a multi-million-pound Department for Work and Pensions contract, while Flynotes, a company started by a GP with an idea (and not much else), provides a platform for medical consent, for instance for operations.

Korski and de Carvalho’s partnership is an intriguing one. The former, who sports a thick beard with grey flecks and a chunky smartwatch, appears relaxed, talking at length about his vision and career. De Carvalho is clipped, measured in a sharp suit and clean-shaven. Their contrasting careers hold a clue to their unlikely union.

Korski, who grew up in Denmark, Switzerland and the UK, admits his life in public service has its foundations in romance. “I fell in love with a Bosnian refugee at university who said I should come and help her rebuild the country after the devastating war. I imagined that Orlando Bloom would play me in the film, but unfortunately she left me and I was stuck in Sarajevo.”

He ended up working for then UN Bosnia representative and former Lib-Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, before stints as an adviser to Hamid Karzai’s government in Afghanistan, the Basra gig, and a role in President Bush’s administration. He returned to the UK when his wife, a diplomat, suffered and beat a brain tumour. He later became an No.10 advisor promoting digital public services and attracting allegations he was too pro tech firms including Uber. He left amid the regime change following the Brexit vote.

De Carvalho, meanwhile, brings a City background to Public. His career has traversed investment banking, private equity (with Lion Capital) and working for his wife’s medical tech firm Doctify. He dedicates 30% of his time to his job on the board of Heineken, where his mother Charlene’s life was transformed when she, with reticence, took on the family company from Alex’s late grandfather. He is immensely proud of the beer giant’s achievements, but admits “it’s a huge responsibility, it made me grow up faster than other people. The reason I took the [finance] jobs I did was to not get hoodwinked by bankers, lawyers, financial engineers”.

Together, the duo appear determined: “You look around the world and think there’s a lot of things that aren’t right, not being supported by politicians and public services. We’re addressing that in a small way.”