In the 1849 Californian gold rush, very few prospectors ever made money. But the people who did were those selling pots and pans to the prospectors, the modern equivalent of which is designing Web pages for publishers. Grice agrees: he's out of the pots and pans business now.
"While I was doing that I began to investigate the ideas behind Personal Email, how people perceive the Net and how it can be something useful to them," he says.
This desire to make the Net relevant to ordinary people's everyday lives is the philosophy behind the services Personal Email provides. Net-heads bang on about the Net being open and free, but Grice doesn't see it that way.
"All the people on the Net now, who use email, are the people who would be there whether it cost ú10, ú20 or ú100 a month," he says. "They can afford it or, more often, their companies pay. The next wave is your Mum, my Mum, people who will use it only if it can do something for them, if they can see how it applies to their everyday lives."
Grice talks about wanting to see much more "openness" on the Web, but he doesn't mean some Kalman-esque "information wants to be free" philosophy. He wants to see email and the Web made much easier to use for non-technical people. "If you keep one address and you can get easy access, email can become like the telephone, a part of everyone's lives, not just for the technological 'haves'."
Not that he believes the Net has some intrinsic good to which ordinary people should be exposed. Rather, that the Net can provide answers for some of things people want to do, such as communicate with geographically dispersed friends and relatives and look up local information.
"People are put off the Net. They hear horror stories or they are just dismissive," he says. "But when you look at what they really want to do, you can apply what the Net can provide and show them it has some answers. Package up those answers into a set of easy-to-use services and you've got Personal Email - personal to what an individual wants from the Net."