Webster was working for a Caribbean law firm in the Cayman Islands "doing capital markets transactions and essentially teeing things up for the global financial crisis that followed 10 years later, for which I sincerely apologise", he jokes. "While I was there, I met this nice Kiwi girl who was working as a pirate wench at the Captain Hook Seafood Grotto."
The next thing you know, they're married, have four children and she has brought him Downnder to use his business skills for the benefit of her home country.
I may be doing Mrs Webster a disservice - in addition to her time as a pirate wench, she carved out a career in marketing, working for Schroders Investment Management in Britain and Hong Kong and co-founding both Webster companies, Coast New Zealand and Elegant Solutions.
Coast manufactures top-end beanbags, a peculiar line of work for an investment banker and lawyer. Says Webster: "I was just over it. I have a very low tolerance for bullshit and there is a very high quotient of bullshit in investment banking." The outdoor beanbags were initially created to sell to the boating fraternity during the 2003 America's Cup.
But "the conclusion that both Nicola and I came to was that what we really wanted to do was to create a brand - Coast New Zealand - and the first and best-known product is the Marine Bean, the outdoor beanbag".
It's a profitable business, selling to outdoor markets in Australia and New Zealand and the global marine market. "We're selling around 6000 beanbags a year and they retail for $500 each - so you do the math; it's a small business."
But he hopes the second business, Elegant Solutions, will become much bigger. It grew out of Webster's frustration at handling product logistics for Coast.
"We're manufacture, wholesale, retail and e-commerce," he says. "The main problem was the labour intensiveness of [product] fulfilment and the shipping process, particularly because we were using multiple carriers. The second issue is customer service, particularly with e-commerce."
Webster describes himself as a generalist and someone easily bored, so he set out to write his own software - a skill picked up in investment banking when creating financial models.
"While I did not start out as a software designer, my frustration with backward analogue fulfilment processes drove me to develop StarShip, an application which allows businesses like ours to offer world-class fulfilment as part of the everyday service."
StarShip is a desktop dashboard upon which orders can be generated and tracked, with green lights to indicate all is well and red lights to signal a problem, whether with customs or the carrier.
When the red light glows, "I know I've got a problem and I usually know before the customer knows," he says. "The last thing you want is to find out there's a problem because your customer called you."
Webster describes StarShip as a computerised "franking machine on steroids" - he doesn't even have to google the address. He types in the name and StarShip finds it and prints the label.
The basic version was written in 2007 but, realising its potential, Webster brought in Elegant Solutions business partner and IT entrepreneur George Plummer last year.
"George started and sold a company called Masal - he has experience in program design but also in starting and selling IT companies," Webster explains. "So he's not just a geek, but an IT specialist."
StarShip has been rebuilt and is now on the market. Early users include meat provider Neat Meat, cheesemaker Whitestone and a range of small businesses.
