Karl Robinson, managing director of Mistral, the Brighton-based internet service provider (ISP), is nursing a cold and is nervous about having his photo taken.

"It reminds me of being little and my mum making me take a brush to school to make sure my sister's hair looked nice for photographs," he said, cradling a mug of Lemsip.

This seems a good time to ask where his distinctive flash of silver hair comes from. "I don't know," he said. "But a lot of people think I dye it. It just appeared when I was 17. I had a Mini I used to get in and out of far too quickly and I think I must have banged my head."

I said it made him look like Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four comics. "More like Pepe Le Pew," he retorted.

Karl now drives a BMW, which is more in keeping with his achievements at Mistral.

The company, which had eight staff when he joined as the sole salesperson in May 2000, has started 2003 by moving some 40 employees into new offices in Tower Point, North Road.

It finished 2002 by making a second acquisition and being placed 24th in the Sunday Times ARM Tech Track 100 for the fastest-growing unquoted technology companies in the country, after growing sales by 123 per cent in the two years to 2001.

Cold or no cold, Karl's enthusiasm is apparent as he explains the firm's future plans, including further expansion, and his thoughts on the internet.

Karl was born in the Isle of Man and that has influenced a number of key decisions.

He said: "I chose Lancaster University partly because of its location. You've got a four hour boat trip from the isle so I didn't want to go much further when I reached dry land.

"I knew I didn't want to go back after university because I would have been sucked into financial services."

Although he studied marketing and French for four years, which included a year working in Paris, on leaving university he applied to join the police. His asthma meant he was unsuccessful, which was "a pity because I wanted to feel I was doing something that had some worth other than a monetary one".

However, a move to Horsham started a chain of events that eventually led him to Mistral.

After a short stint with Eurobell "planning when and where the company should dig up roads to install its cables"

he stumbled into IT almost by accident.

He said: "This agency guy phoned me and said I was the ideal candidate for an IT sales job. I told them I wasn't interested - I didn't want to be a vacuum cleaner salesman."

But the promise of a company car, a laptop and a mobile phone was too tempting for someone just out of university and Karl joined Brighton-based Rocc in early 1997. He left after 18 great months.

He said: "By that time I was confident I could sell and, of course, the internet was booming.

I thought I'd like a bit of that' even though I knew very little about it. I wasn't sure what the recruitment guy was talking about - I didn't even know what an ISP was - but I went with it and got interviews."

He joined PSI Net, commuting from his home in Brighton to London. When the time came to move on, Mistral's founder Steve Spink offered him the sales job he held until becoming managing director in 2002. He admits he was nervous about joining, because of the sole responsibility for sales.

He said: "At times I miss the cut and thrust of selling now I'm in charge and at times I don't. I enjoy meeting clients and doing demonstrations but I do not miss prospecting or shaving margins to match other companies. Anyone who says they do is lying."

Life away from the office has also been busy. He has recently bought a house in Woodingdean with his fiancee Urszula, whom he will marry in the summer.

He enjoys mountain biking and has tried kite surfing, although he admits he hasn't been able to spend us much time outdoors as he would like.

He does like the internet though and, more than this, believes in it. "The internet is the second most important form of communication after telephony. One day it will overtake it.

"The dot coms are the dot gones and the days of thinking up a silly name for a site, flogging whatever you liked, raising huge amounts of venture capital and then spending everything without ever making a penny are gone.

"They were a flash in the pan, the internet is not," he says, as he shows me out of his office, eager to get back to work.

One suspects he is no flash in the pan either.