Second Part

0:09:07 The first company I was involved in with Hermann Hauser was the company I sold to Cambridge Ring, one of four companies that were sold to them altogether; that started about the same time as CPU, the company that most people know as Acorn started as well, which was started by Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry; they were in the same place in Market Square as a company called Orbis that I had set up to sell the ring technology, and we amalgamated these companies into one very quickly; I was the smallest shareholder; there I switched to doing work on chips for the computer company rather than working on the ring; Acorn did very well at first then Olivetti came along and took a majority stake; I was one of the directors and they asked me to start an industrial research lab. for them directly rather than work in Acorn; meanwhile I had set up a company called Qudos (quick design on silicone) which had some CAD software for designing chips so was actually a manufacturer of simple chips by using electron beam prototyping onto a surface, each chip one at a time; that joined the living dead though it still exists at the Rutherford Lab.; it could have been a spectacular success but not every one of your companies is so; the thing that we missed was that the hardware side was a very capital intensive business and quite hard and the volumes weren't there as you wrote each chip at a time; the CAD side of the business could have gone global but we didn't prioritise that and now it is a company called Cadence, nothing to do with us; that was about 1985; Olivetti Research Ltd. was set up as a separate company though the budgets came from Olivetti much of the time; I was the C.E.O., the only time I have been; this was all in parallel with my University work first as an assistant lecturer, then lecturer, reader and professor; in terms of my academic colleagues here in Cambridge my career is the most industrial parallel one; when I have started something I have gone with it and done it for a reasonable length of time rather than designing the technology, launching it, and leaving it to others; the research lab. was going very well but Olivetti was not doing so well; we decided we better do something about returns otherwise we would be dead; we started spinning out companies, where you get some research and do it, you assume your team is good enough so you have something that is exemplary; you then offer it to the sponsor, the business unit, and if they don't use it they get a cut, but you try and licence it or open source it to keep it going in some way; technology should not be hoarded; we fell into that cascade of maximizing opportunity by doing all this stuff and at the same time we started getting other sponsors for research in addition to Olivetti; we were not competing with the University; I said to everybody who worked for me (there were about sixty) that if they wanted to be academic they could do the same thing that I did and work simultaneously at both; we didn't pretend to be part of the University but were an applied lab. with more resource; that worked very well; Digital Equipment Corporation and Oracle funded us, we had quite a few suitors and eventually Olivetti sold the company to AT&T and we became the AT&T lab.; Olivetti spawned Virata - Telemedia Systems (which helps with fast editing of multimedia materials), Adaptive Broadband (a wireless company), which spawned Cambridge Broadband (another wireless company of which I was chairman) started in 2000; the industrial lab. was shut by AT&T in 2002; the bad news was that it was completely unnecessary as two people wanted to buy it and it was trashed by its American owner; the good news is that it carries on in several companies, three of which I am chairman, and director of a fourth, because the projects in that industrial lab. were strong and the teams were strong; the people have stuck together, not competing with the University there was a great premium on teamwork in that place; my three companies are RealVNC, a software company, Ubisense, a location technology plus software company, Solarflare, a chip company, and they in turn have spawned Aventiq of which I am chairman, which is another chip company; I am on the advisory board of yet another of these spawned companies; I was directly involved in about a dozen companies in my career and about four at the moment; there is a culture that does go back to Acorn and to the Olivetti Lab. which lasted rather longer than the Acorn culture in its own way; in summary, Acorn did very well and went public; Virata went public and was very successful; some joined the living dead, nothing wrong with that, and some are at the races, and who knows; the ones in play right now are a very motley lot of wonderful companies; what I am talking about is the diversity of each one so for example the 10Gb Ethernet chip company has over $120,000,000 of venture capital; Ubisense has extracted a lot of angel capital and as far as I know is the biggest funded angel company in the UK, £8,000,000; angel capital is personal investment by individuals; RealVNC was originally open source material which now we sell a version of VNC technology for which over 100,000,000 licences have been taken; it was profitable from the beginning and we have kept it small; all this runs in parallel to the University; there is a price to pay on both sides for doing the two; on the University there is not any accommodation for doing the other though I think it is important for the University; on the industrial side you tend not to go with it right to the top level which you could do if you only did that; you are offsetting your risks and enjoying two different worlds; I also do some farming which is quite different; through the University it is non-techie friends who are just as important as the techie friends, but there is a price;  you surround yourself with good people and build a level of trust where delegation works; in the University the Computer Lab. takes no time at all compared to running a company; I have just done my fiftieth Ph.D. student and have good post-docs.; it doesn't always gel well in a university system at large, but in Cambridge where you have a strong team group, and on the industrial side I was only C.E.O. of one company, although I did it for sixteen years; you have a broad University radar screen where you can see what is happening in cognate disciplines, your immediate research group which, if healthy, is producing results, the company that is focussed but also part of a multinational side, financing side, knowing how to raise capital

20:49:00 Cambridge is getting less good because of Government pressures, competitive pressures; I am established but a newcomer is confronted with the situation as it is; with my immediate research group it is OK as I can fix consulting etc. for my post-docs. and without that they wouldn't exist in the University; it will be interesting how this develops in the next ten or twenty years; this is compounded by the subject moving on; when I started there weren't hundreds of companies; however, we are still in the University able to do stuff but it takes a little more thought; in the Computer Lab. we have a theme in my own research 'Computing for the future of the planet'; what it asks are what of the engineering or operational approaches to solving some of the major problems, and what role does computing play in it, indeed is computing part of the solution, and indispensable for solving some of these things; imagine observing the real physical world using sensors in great detail and then using that data to optimise some energy cost or something, then feeding that back as a pricing mechanism or just information, that might be an example; if you think of those developing countries, the platform they will have is the mobile phone computer; it may be that by enabling much more wealth creation in that world their standard of living will increase so they won't have so many children; so a method of dealing with population growth among other methods, at least it is one I can do something about; that is a line that is easier to do in the University because even in a large company with loads of money, like Google or Microsoft, even there it would be at the periphery; we have that in the Computer Lab. and I lead the team from behind as it is very important for the Head not to lead from the front

25:01:05 My family: my wife, Alison Smith, her time is just coming with biofuels and how to do it and what does it mean, and GMO organisms and growing things that are appropriate for energy is one of her lines; two children aged thirteen and twelve, a boy and girl; also have a farm with wheat and barley of about 180 acres which I manage