Richard Daws was still a student at Leeds Polytechnic when he and a group of friends started a small travel company running skiing holidays.

But Victoria Real was not destined to become the next Thomas Cook.

Instead, from a profitable sideline in souvenir videos, the campus-based business turned into a film production company producing niche sports footage for ITV.

Victoria went on to become an Emmy award-winning pioneer of interactive television, with an impressive list of clients including the BBC, Pepsi, UEFA and the Scottish Parliament. It also produced Channel 4's record-breaking Big Brother web site.

In 2003 Richard and remaining co-founder Rob Love sold Victoria, which had moved to Brighton, to Dutch entertainment company Endemol and made their fortunes in the process. What started in 1990 as a wide-eyed student adventure had become part of the media furniture.

Richard is now director of Komedia Entertainment, part of the arts and live entertainment venue in Brighton's North Laine, for which he has big plans.

Richard, 38, is married to one of Komedia's resident comediennes, Kate Van Dike, who has just given birth to their first child, daughter Adelaide.

The past 13 years sound like one hell of ride.

"Yeah," says Richard. "We waltzed out of polytechnic thinking we were these bigshot television producers who were going to travel the world and make loads of money."

Things didn't quite work out like that. In the next four years, Victoria started covering bigger events - they made a documentary following the British Olympic sailing team in Barcelona - but it was hardly a mine of riches.

Richard recalls: "It was all great experience, precisely the kind of thing you need for you CV. But we weren't making any money and it was really touch and go at times."

Victoria's big break came when London-based Videotron, now Cable & Wireless, asked them to create an interactive viewing service for the 1994 World Cup.

It was a chance for Richard to employ some of the engineering skills he had learnt at Leeds and put Victoria Real at the vanguard of the interactive media industry.

He says: "The service allowed people to do everything Sky interactive does now, such as picking camera angles or choosing which player to follow during the match. It put us at the front of the pack and we got a reputation in the industry for being leaders in the field, although it wasn't widely available - only 100,000 people in London had access."

Victoria moved away from Leeds to be closer to London.

"We ended up in Lancing," says Richard, "the media capital of the world. It was great, actually, because we were right on the seafront and we were still making windsurfing documentaries."

Later Victoria moved to Brighton where, in March 2000, it was approached by Endemol, which was interested in buying a 50 per cent stake in the company.

Richard wanted to grow the business and thought a partnership with a bigger company was preferable to floating on the stock market. The decision raised eyebrows at the time.

Yet, soon after the deal was struck, the dotcom bubble burst.

"It wasn't down to any foresight on our part," says Richard, with a wry laugh. "We were being shown all these graphs showing us how massive our profits would be in ten years. All we could see was a line going up and up. I am sure a lot of other information technology and media companies at the time swallowed all of that and lived to regret it.

"It was a huge decision and one which we laboured over. Our business adviser told us once you give up equity, you effectively lose the company, so we had our eyes wide open."

Soon afterwards, Victoria was given the web site contract for the first series of Big Brother. Richard had already seen how popular it had been in Holland and Germany.

He had also seen how the web sites in those countries had buckled under the barrage of hits they were receiving. Fortunately, Victoria's web site did not suffer the same fate.

Over the 64 days of the show, Victoria streamed 26 million live video feeds through the web site, allowing fans to watch the housemates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In the second series, when the public wanted to know if Paul and Helen would sleep together on screen, the site reported an eye-popping 745 million hits in ten weeks.

Richard sensed it would be a hit. He said: "It was like nothing that had been on television before. It was absolutely cutting-edge and very innovative. It might be neither of those things now but at the time it was a leap forward.

"I thought the first two series were great - the first because it was so new and interesting and the second because the contestants had seen the first series and that changed the whole dynamic.

"It was just huge, largely thanks to the tabloids, who decided to give it equal and blanket coverage.

"There was no real rivalry between the Sun and the Mirror - they both just went for it."

So what about the future?

Richard is committed to raising the profile of Komedia. He became interested in the Gardner Street venue through his wife, who performs in The Treason Show, one of Komedia's best-loved and longest running shows.

He said: "I realised there was a lot of talent on show at Komedia and I wanted to help them make the next step up - to put them under the national spotlight.

"Our biggest success so far has been Count Arthur Strong, who has a regular slot on the Mark Radcliffe show, but there are plenty more out there."

He is also in charge of Komedia Edinburgh, which runs the critically-acclaimed Aurora Nova venue, named The Guardian Best Edinburgh Venue 2004. This division of Komedia has already produced numerous Perrier Award-nominated Edinburgh Fringe shows and is forging close working links with the BBC.

In five years Richard wants Komedia to be a nationally recognised organisation, with venues scattered across the UK and a reputation for high-quality productions.

The energy which helped him make a success of Victoria Real clearly hasn't deserted him - even though his hours of sleep are now dictated by a baby girl.

He says: "The people who succeed are those who have talent and are prepared to put the graft in. I want Komedia to be the best, not the biggest."