 Hi, I'm Robin Sykesby, I'm the founding CEO of Arm. Childbikes made a video interview with me which lasted 101 minutes and I've watched it. What I found is there's a lot of mistakes in there but we've left the mistakes in there raw because we think it makes more fun for you to watch. I've also showed the video to my wife and she thinks it's okay but I think it's important that I tell you the style of the video. Imagine that you're in a lecture theater with me and your students and I'm being deliberately provocative, hopefully a bit humorous, hopefully a bit challenging. Forgive me if I've offended anybody. What I'm trying to do is stimulate the thinking and be challenging, that's my kind of style. So what I'm saying is if there's something you don't like don't worry about it, that's fine. You don't have to like me. What I want to do is hopefully this video will help all the startups do a better job and it will also help people understand what the technology startup world is all about. This is very much my perspective, it's my journey. Charback's asked me these things in real time and I gave him the answers as they came in my head. The other thing I want to just make very clear, the ARM architecture was created in Acorn computers by a team led by Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson with funded by my good friend Herman Houser. You'll hear in the video Herman and Sophie and Steve have known each other for years. That was the foundation. My journey was from foundation to going public in 98 and retiring in 2007. The journey has continued phenomenally well and I'm very grateful to all the people that have continued to be hired and developed. ARM is a team effort across our planet thanks to everybody. One other little thing that had occurred to me that was missing from this video was how you create global standards and there were three aspects that I want to put across. In the very early days of ARM we participated in what today would be called an Horizon 2020 project. I work with people in Brussels and in particular George Metikides who was head of DG13, Rosalie Zobel who had the project. In that project we had my friend Steve from Manchester. We had Plessy, we had Haganook. We had Siemens Phillips. In the early days creating those standards locally was a great thing to do and also it provided a bit of funding. Later in 1998 my good friends at Cadence and Mentor came up with this idea of a virtual socket interface alliance. This was all about on-chip standards to help the system chip industry take off. In that project Fujitsu were also involved. That was global collaboration. And when we went to China we met a lot of fantastic professors thanks to all of them who converted on literature and wrote their own books in Mandarin. So the message I want to get across to everybody is that technology today is so complex that only with total global collaboration is it good enough especially if you don't have a lot of money. I hope you enjoy the video. I hope... What I want to do is not bring... hopefully get more understanding. We're now here at the Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub where we've got a startup technology evening with the Royal Academy. There's lots of exciting stuff happening and I'm sure Charbex is going to make lots more videos. But the starting point is this one. You're the judge of whether you're the audience. It's nothing to do with me, it's to do with you. I hope you find it useful and I hope you enjoy it. And today is a 26th anniversary of ARM. So is it going to be a big party? So I'm not in ARM anymore, so I have no idea. But the legal creation of ARM was exactly 26 years ago today. But it's nothing to do with Sergeant Pepper. We're here at the Royal Academy of Engineering. Yeah, lovely to meet you, Nicholas. Oh, do you prefer to be called Charbex? Charbex, yeah. Hi, I'm Robin and I'm an engineer and I'm a fellow of this Academy which is one of the reasons we're here. We're in the Enterprise Hub of the Royal Academy which is all about startups from technology. How do I see myself? I'm an engineer who's followed my passions all my life and I'm having a great time. And ARM was to the outside world my greatest achievement. I am the founding CEO of ARM which was founded on November the 28th, 1990. I retired from ARM in 2007, having taken it public in 1998. And I'm pleased to see ARM is doing great and ARM technology is everywhere. So you're the first CEO of ARM. So how do you feel? It's just about 100 billion ARM processors. It's like everywhere. So how do you feel about that? I feel great, especially as I use the iPhone 7 and I use the iPad and I have cameras. So I love the fact that all these ARM chips make my life better. So how did it happen? How did you make ARM happen? So it wasn't just me, it was a lot of other people. So the origin of the ARM architecture was in Acorn with Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber and Herman Hauser who backed the project to create the first ARM. That was the ARM one. So if you like, they got the first working prototype and to me it was a prototype because for example, it only had a 28 bit address bus. And also because if you wanted to program ARM, you needed an Acorn Archimedes computer to program it. And most people used IBM PCs. So I had also before ARM worked for ES2, European silicon structures and US2 in Silicon Valley. And through my association, I'd known Herman, I'd known Acorn, I'd known all these people a long time. ES2's business model was to build full custom silicon using eBeam machines. Great idea, raised a hundred million dollars. Bad news was the eBeam machine didn't work very well. So the business plan was broken. Full custom silicon. Yes. So how does that work? So the idea is, this is back in, ES2 was founded in about 1984. Back in 1984, this was really before the days of silicon compilation and doing system chips. So the idea of ES2 was we can build full custom silicon at a low price. That was the idea. By using an eBeam machine and direct writing on wafer and by doing shared chips on wafer, we could get a very low cost for you as a fully custom chip. And we gave this message to Philips, to Olivetti, to Saab, British Aerospace, Telefonica and we said, we can build fantastic full custom chips for you and the benefit of that of a go faster or you can get the power you can design on silicon. That was our vision. And it was about silicon compilation and direct write on wafer. Fabulous vision. Only trouble was the eBeam machine throughput was the 10th of what it said on the tin. It was the Able 150. And therefore actually making these chips using eBeam was more expensive than photomass. However, silicon compilation sort of worked, but this got us in the idea of full custom silicon and included in this, we were thinking of microprocessors alongside system chip. This was the foundation of the system on chip industry. And within ES2, we worked with the founders of Catons. They were actually Solomon Design Associates. They were the design tools or part of the design tools. We also worked with Sun Microsystems. Scott McNeely came to Bracknell to sell his workstations, right? So within ES2, I had seen the opportunity for full custom chips with processes and programming and software. And I was very aware of the Acorn architecture because VLSI technology built the first Acorn chips. They were a partner of ES2 and we all knew each other. So when the idea of spinning out arm from Acorn came along, I got a phone call from a head-under. It was actually Hydric and Struggles who said, Acorn have got this technology. They're thinking of spinning it out. Apple are interested. What do you think? Come and have a chat. I went and have a chat and thought, how can we make this work? I knew Cliff Rowe, who was in VLSI technology. I knew some people at Apple. And I thought, yeah, might work. That was the starting point of it. So where was that based? Where are you based when you're doing that? So I had two officers in those days. One was in Bracknell, the UK, because I was the boss for ES2 of Northern Europe. But I was also in Silicon Valley. I was the boss of US2. US2 was a joint venture with some venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. And I was sent over to the States to sort US2 out. And I had some learning curves there. I found that one of the ways to be successful is if you can cut your cost and double your turnover, you can be more profitable. And so I was having this fun with US2, getting more exposure to the valley. Even years before that, I had worked for Motorola semiconductors from 1973 till 1984. And the truth is, Motorola taught me everything now about segment marketing, applications, customers, all those things. I'd learnt all that from my American friends. Also with ES2, I'd been exposed to Japan. And so as the new founding CEO of ARM, looking at what Acorn had, how can we make this work? I came up with some ideas. And if I looked through my notes, I actually was writing letters backwards and forwards between myself and a very important person at Acorn who doesn't get mentioned often is a guy called Malcolm Burd. He was the technical director of Acorn. And it was his job to work out how to spin out this team. So Malcolm was the person with whom I was communicating most between about August and when I joined full-time of ARM, which was February. But the other reality is I was on board with ARM before the company was created. One of the issues I had was ES2, I was on six months notice and they didn't want to let me go. And Acorn wanted me as quickly as possible than Apple. So what we did, we did a deal where I could work days for the new company on the old company and we traded days with each other. The other thing that probably nobody knows about is the first company other than VLSI Technology to build a working chip was actually ES2, which was the company I used to work for. So I stayed friendly with ES2 and ES2, by the way, was in a period of where they had to cut costs. So I thought, well, they can get rid of me and I'll stay friendly and help them. And another thing I did to help ES2, the first CFO of ARM was subcontracted from ES2. So my old CFO at ES2, whose name was Peng Wong, was acting CFO of ARM. Eventually he became the first full-time CFO. Again, in Acorn terms, David McKay, who was the legal guy in Acorn, he was the acting legal guy for ARM. So this was all done in collaboration, friendship, partnership, and that was the whole ethos of the company. The other thing, having worked for Motorola, in my time with Motorola, I'd seen five economic downturns. And the chip industry, it's boom to bust. The chip prices are great when there's a big demand for the chips. As soon as there's oversupply, the prices crush. And I did actually say in 1990, we should make chips over my dead body. You probably heard this story before. Mike Muller, CTO said, now there's an opportunity. The good news is I'm still alive and ARM doesn't make chips. But the reason for that is that even back in 1990, I felt that chips and silicon was a commodity like steel. The only people who would win in that game were the ones who made the highest volume. Hence look at companies like TSMC, et cetera. So I had, the reality of the vision and so on was, I had experience. The founding 12 engineers also had experience. And we put the best of the best ideas together to create the business model. And what were you doing? What was your role at Motorola? And you had a relation and connection with the ARM, with Acorn already back then, right? Yes, yes. So my role at Motorola, the truth is I was in my youth, I was a research and development engineer. And I was married and I was very poor. And how Motorola got me, this is another interesting story. They said, what color do you want for your new Cortina 2000 GXL? And I said, white with black upholstery. So the joke is Motorola hired me on a higher salary and I had a car. And my first job with Motorola was as a sales engineer. So I was selling to people like myself who'd been design engineers. And a sales engineer's job is to get the chips designed in. So you're actually doing engineering work, helping your customers use your products. I would put my lab coat on as a Motorola salesman with my decoder engineers in my customers, the Thorne Consumer Electronics and the like, showing them how to design with our circuits. And what happened to me in Motorola, there was a big recession in 1994. This was a big financial crisis across Europe. And everybody else's business was falling apart. And mine more than doubled because I got my new chips designed into new applications. So they promoted me. My first promotion, I had the computer department which is focusing on ICL and computers and microprocessors. So my learning curve with Motorola was about sales, marketing and also about market segments. So my segment background was really consumer electronics but I learned about computers and other things. So my journey with Motorola, my final job with Motorola, I was called system strategy manager Europe, which was about VME boards, you know, microprocessor 68,000 based boards and software and tools as well as the 68,000 chip. And the other bit of it with Acorn is I knew Herman. His first company was Cambridge Processor Unit where he was doing designs for fruit machines, you know, gambling machines. And we were selling him Motorola parts. So like the graphics controller for those fruit machines and some of the processes. And I had meetings with, by the way, Motorola was making these chips in East Kilbride, Scotland. And I remember a trip I had with Chris Carrion, Herman to Scotland to talk about production demand and so on. So I knew Herman before he'd created Acorn and we were friends. And one of the funny story is Herman being Austrian is a very good skier. And Motorola had the headquarters for the microsystems in Munich. So I said, Herman, why don't we go to Munich, have a meeting and then we can go skiing. And I was served a cup of tea and a beautiful China cup by Herman's mum with a nice jammy cake. Okay, so Herman and I go back that long. And even this was about, I'm guessing, late 70s or early 80s. I'm skiing with Herman and Pamela, who is now his wife. And we had a great time. And Herman being a fantastic skier said, right Robin, I'll leave you with Pamela. I'll go up the mountain because Herman was a fantastic skier. He was Austrian. Pamela, you know, was from, she was a Kiwi and I was English. So he left the less good skiers on their own. And Pamela and I actually crashed on a tea bar. And there's a story that I actually caused serious bruising on Pamela's thighs, which we still talk about to this day. What's lovely for Herman and I personally is two years ago, I now have a ski shell in Switzerland and Patty, my wife and Pamela Herman's wife and Herman and I, we all skied together and had a lovely time and nobody crashed. And there was no bruising. So when we say, how lucky are we to still be friends through all these journeys? But coming back to Arm and Motorola, I tried to sell Herman the 68,000. He didn't want to buy it. And because the 68,000 wasn't good enough, he went on to get the arm designed. So the joke I have for Acorn. So, which then created my great career. So my failure at Motorola, selling the 68,000, created the opportunity for Arm, which made my great success. So one of the things I say to the kids is, if you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough. I made the mistake of not being able to sell to Herman the 68,000, but look at the success of Arm. How hard did you try? Very hard. I mean, I took him to Munich, I poured wine, we had beer, we had food. It just didn't work. And the truth is in fairness to Herman and to Arm, the problem with Motorola was, the chip actually consumed quite a bit of power, was quite expensive, and it just wasn't good enough. It was great performance, but the power consumption wasn't good enough and the cost was too much. So he didn't buy it. And one of the other things I say with technologists is, you have to listen to the voice of the customer. And if you do that, you might get a good result. And one of the things I say to all the startups I'm involved in, is customer pull is a thousand times more important than technology push. And again, this also relates to Arm with the way we invented the thumb architecture on the end of the arm for Nokia. So understand the explicit needs of the customer and give them the solution. That's the key to success. And I kind of learned that from Motorola with all the marketing workshops and all the application workshops. I think Motorola taught me how to do that. So they were shopping, they were looking for a processor, they were looking with Motorola, they were also looking with Intel, right? And there was nothing they could... So they invented their own. So they made Arm? Yeah. And that was awesome technology. But the huge success is not just the technology, right? It's also the... But the other thing is I say, if all we had done was sell what Acorn had invented, the company would have got absolutely nowhere because the problem was, so what they had designed was fantastic for Acorn, but actually useless for the rest of the world because to program the Arm, you need an Acorn computer, not... So when we looked at the start of Arm, I got the team, and I can show you that in a minute, I got the team to do a SWOT analysis. The strengths they gave us were fantastic MIPS per what? Fantastic MIPS per dollar, a great design team that knew systems down to chips. They were some of the strengths. But the weaknesses, imagine we're going to be the leading IP company and we don't own a single patent. To program an Arm, you need an Acorn Archimedes computer and there are only 100,000 of those in the world. So if you're going to be the global standard, you better do something else. So what Acorn gave us was a fantastic starting point and I think this also applies to technology. The technology worked. The other thing that Acorn gave us was the proof of concept. We could, in Japan, when we got Nippon Investment and Finance to invest in Arm, and this is, I'm very grateful to Japanese venture capital. One of the benefits they did is they picked me up at the airport and with the Acorn Archimedes computer, they took me out to Demo, the Acorn Archimedes machine to customers in Japan to show them how great the architecture was, how fast the chip would go, how lovely the graphics were. So Acorn had a working demonstrator. That was fantastic and kind of best in class. And the company, the Arm chip then was about five years old. So that demonstrator was very valuable to explain the potential of Arm, but for Arm's success, it was all the things that came after Arm that made the thing successful. And there are many people, the other thing is it's about individuals. So the thumb architecture, which was driven by the needs of Nokia, people like Dave Jagger, who's another Kiwi, he is the half inventor of the thumb architecture, as is Simon Seegers, the current CEO. So the other thing I want to say that I think is very important, all the business books talk about the great leaders, but actually the great leaders just happen to be there and they make a contribution, but the great engineers who think about this thumb idea or this patent idea or they're equally important. I think what I'd like this video to get across is teams are a thousand times more powerful than individuals. And the other thing, like a football team, you're as weak as the weakest link. You need the best person in every position. So in football, it's the goalkeeper, it's the centre forward. And what I'd say with Arm is we did have some great people. We did have a great foundation, but we had to refresh those people. We had to add new people who had to change things. Another thing I say that is very, very important to Arm, when we started Arm, because we only had 1.5 million pounds of seed capital from Apple, 250,000 pounds of seed capital from Acorn, from VLSI technology, and 1.5 million pounds of IP. The reality is of the 12 founding engineers, 11 of them thought that Acorn had cast them off because they couldn't pay their salaries and we were going to be bankrupt within a year. I persuaded one of them, Jamie Urquhart, who was the most senior, that we could become the global standard. He believed it, and you only need one, and then you convert the others. And so what we had to do, we had to work out, we had to get cash flow, and we had to get purchase orders to keep the company going. So when the board wanted me to hire more engineers to get chips better for Acorn or Apple, I said, no, it takes as long to develop the business as it takes to develop the technology. What we needed is somebody to head up the sales and marketing activity in California. His name was Tim O'Donnell. We hired Tim O'Donnell part-time, working out of his basement, as the first new person I hired. We hired another guy in Japan, Takio Ishikawa, Sam Kim, in Seoul, Korea. So a major, major reason for armed success is there's global people who became presidents of the local companies later. The way they communicate with people, the way they understand the local culture, they're at least as important as the engineers. And Tim O'Donnell, I remember, he was built like John Wayne. I'd be explained to the engineers, the customers want this. Engineers can be a bit protective of their own ideas and a bit fixed and want to do it this way because it's the right way to do it. If that's not what the customer wants, it's no good. And Tim O'Donnell, who was built like John Wayne, would say bang the boardroom, and say, this is what the customer wants. Right, that was incredibly value and far better than all the intellectual arrogance that we can find in certain people in certain places. We do need that intellectual arrogance and pureness as well, but the other bits are equal importance. So great foundation, great idea, great team, it worked. So is this American style of being a CEO? No. Did you get the training over there in the US? Absolutely, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So there's a lot of very good things about America. There are a lot of very good things about Japan. So I think I'm a kind of mongrel, internationally, I was in Switzerland as well. So there are some things about America that are very, very good, but I actually think Japan is better at teamwork than America, right? Chinese make actually quite nice tea. So as I travel around the world, what I look for is in every environment, there's something that's outstanding and the best. And what I look at is for the best of the best and learn with everybody. So the other thing I would say about America, what I'm saying is at the time of the age of 27 to 30, whatever, Motorola taught me a lot, but that was just one phase of my life. And I have learned from everybody everywhere, not just the Americans. What I would say is if I was sat in Camry's, not learning from anybody else, I don't think the business would have been very successful. So how is it back then, like the first time you met these 12 guys, right? So here's what actually happened. So, and this is being in the tumor. I'm a strong believer in the word synergy, which is the team can be stronger than the sum of the individuals. So I actually have the offer letter to take the job to the first CEO of Almond. The offer letter came jointly from Apple and Acorn via the headhunter. And I said, well, before I'll accept this job, I want to meet some of the engineers. I met Tudor Brown, who later became, he was the chief engineer and finally retired as COO. And Jamie Urquhart, who was the first head of sales, but at the time was the head of VLSI design. I met them at Heathrow Airport. And my thinking was this, here's a team of people, they've been together forever. I'm the outsider. Unless they want to follow what I say and believe in, it's not gonna work. So I said to Jamie and Tudor at Heathrow Airport, I've been offered this job. I could be your leader. Do you want me? Ask me any questions you want, right? So they asked me some questions. So being good engineers, they couldn't make a decision. I said, well, what's your decision? Is it yes or no? They said, we'd like you to meet the whole team, right? So I met all 12 of them in a pub halfway between Cambridge and where I live near High Wycombe. And this is another true story. I told my opening comment to them, my brutal honesty, they're all late, so I told them off, right? So you're all late, this is disgusting. What are you doing? They can joke about this, but it's true. I took with me a guy called Brian O'Connell, who was like my chief engineer at ES2, to interview all these people in parallel with me talking to them to check their technical ability and so on. And what I was looking for, because of ES2, which had been this great failure financially, but good technologically, one of the problems of ES2, we'd paid a lot of money for VPs of marketing, VPs of sales, VPs of engineering, we got a lot of overhead and the sales didn't happen. Part of my job at US2 was cutting the cost. So I thought, if we can start from a low base and we don't increase the cost, we got more time to get things right. So when I went to this meeting, I thought, what I'm looking for is out of this 12, who can be in charge of sales? Who can be in charge of engineering and who can be in charge of marketing? And in the pub, that was my goal. In the meantime, I had Brian O'Connell who was a friend of mine, checking them out. But the other thing I found out was what they were asking Brian was all of my weaknesses and all of my problems. So they were getting the dirt on me from Brian. So this is what happened. I came out of that meeting thinking, yeah, I can make this work. Jamie can run sales, Tudor can run engineering, and Mike can run marketing. And it's true, but I picked Mike because he's got a bit of style and he wore a purple tie. I thought he got the marketing flair. Jamie was a very, he still is, a very personable, communicative person who's also a very good engineer. And in sales engineering, you've got to talk the engineering as well as the sales. So he got the personality and I thought, Tudor's a good, solid, hardworking lad. He can fix the engineering. And he proved that, by the way, by being locked in the VLSI, building late at night, working through the night. So fortunately, I got it right. So I came away thinking, yeah, I can make this work. Got those three people. Then the other thing, I didn't have anybody in finance, and I think I told you earlier, I got Peng Wong from ESDU to be a part-time finance guy. I didn't have a legal guy. I got David Mackay part-time as the Acorn legal guy. And the other thing I say to all the startups, the team has to be perfect and the best from day one. If you can't afford the best finance guy, get the best one that you can get part-time. If you can't afford the best legal guy, get the best one that you can afford part-time. Because if they're rubbish, your company is rubbish, the team's rubbish. And the danger is, I think, people pretend they're not as brutally honest as they should be about their weaknesses. And we all have weaknesses. So I met the team in the pub. Then I kind of phoned Jamie, who was the most senior. So Malcolm Bird, who was the technical head of all of Acorn, he was spinning out this bit into all of them. He was my contact. And I said, I've met them. I like Jamie. Jamie's the senior guy. Is it okay, Malcolm, if I keep talking to him via email? And we did. And he was my contact. So I said, Jamie, I like the team. I think you can run sales. I think Tudor can run engineering. And I think Mike can run marketing. And that's what we should do. And I've got a lot of dialogue. This before the camp was created of all these ideas. And then the other thing that happened, as I said, I expect to Jamie what a SWOT analysis is, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And on this computer, Jamie actually sent this to me via email. It's 18th of December, 1990. And from that SWOT analysis, all I did is I told them what SWOT analysis is, told them the methodology. And all 12 engineers contributed to that SWOT analysis. And from that, we built the business plan and the ideas and the first brochure. And this is where it comes about the power of teamwork. And we said we've got the best mix for what? The best mix per dollar. We're going to be the global standard. These are the applications, system on chip, and all these things. That was the first Arm 3, by the way. It's the first Acorn chip. We didn't have any arm chips in those days. This is cash. So this is a CPU, really. And what's really interesting... This is 1990. This is about May 1990. Oh, the other reason I chose the color yellow, because I thought yellow was the sun and would bring us some luck and hope. There's me, by the way, back in 1990. 1991. This was about May 1991. And he says, here's the vision. Here's what we're going to do. Here's why we... And by the way, we were talking mix per what and mix per dollar. Everybody else is saying, what are you talking about? Risk micro-processes are only for workstations. No, this is all rubbish. Mobile phones will never need this stuff. Fortunately, they were on and we were right. And then the other thing we had to do, because nobody knew where Arm was, we're in a barn around the corner from Cambridge, and that's the original Arm Barn. You also need a bit of luck in business. And the farmer who started that said that every sick animal he put in that barn recovered. So he knew when we started in that barn, it was going to go well. So how was the atmosphere in that barn? How did it go? It was great. It was a lot of hard work. I mean, it was a lot of hard work and a lot of fun. So another true story, one of the history things, we had very little money, and so we had to spend the money wisely. So one of the things I bought was a Mercury voice answering system. I mean, back in those days, voice answering couldn't happen. And the reason why I bought that was we're going to be a global standard. We got to be able to answer the phone 24 hours a day. We spent a fortune on the telephone answering machine, if you like, the voice system from Mercury. We also wanted desks for every engineer's. It was open plan. And because the barn was so beautiful and had beams, I said to the furniture company, why don't you give me the most beautiful desks and chairs because it'll look nice in the barn along the beams for your brochures. And I negotiated higher quality furniture at a better price to go with the barn. And then the other thing, it was a nice guy. I needed a board room table, but I couldn't afford one. And I won the board room table with a toss of a coin. So I got the board room table thrown in. The only trouble is I'd run out of money and there was no money for bookshelves. They had to put their books on the floor. So it was an open culture. Another funny story I remember from the early days, a guy had worked me, I stayed friendly with the S2. So the guy who took over from me at the S2 was a guy called Hans Brauer, who's a Dutchman. And we did some early collaboration between Arm and the S2. The S2 was the first company to make armed chips other than VLSI technology to prove they worked. And one of the funny stories about Hans Brauer, he got locked in the toilet for a long time and there was a lot of banging and nobody noticed he was there. So it was a great environment. The other thing is my family never wanted to move to Cambridge. I've never lived in Cambridge, had a wife who was a teacher, had kids at grammar school, they didn't want to move to Cambridge. So I was literally working through to the night and the farmer says he noticed the light in my office was on till gone midnight most nights because I got nothing better to do than work. So there was, Arm was designed originally and they were thinking MIPS for the masses. MIPS per watt and MIPS per dollar, really. So they were thinking- And system chip. So the detail is what was happening was, so based on the S2 experience, the idea of getting everything on a chip, this is the system, in the old days you had individual chips on a printed circuit board. So the system chip could apply to everything and a CPU, a central processor unit could be the digital engine on every chip and with software you can personalize the chip. So the system on chip starting trend was happening and we had the best processor to integrate on a piece of silicon and the design tools and we understood software and we understood hardware and the architecture. So we had a different vision about how the industry was going to change and we thought that the basics of what we had from Acorn could get us into the right space ahead of everybody else. So it was great technology, but at which point did you think, okay, let's do the standard for the whole world? Before I joined the company. Before I really- Yeah, because the only way we could win was to be the standard because you had Intel, you had Motorola. I remember, so another true story. When I was, Arm was about 20 people, I was giving a speech in Tokyo, a guy called Bill Warrick who was the head of AT&T and we got about, you know, we were running out of cash. We got next to nothing and I said, we are going to be the global standard. And he said, I'm spending a hundred million dollars on Hubet roadmap. I've got all these engineers and Arm won't get anywhere. What happened is we did it and they licensed our technology. So before I joined Arm, I said, we have to be the global standard. Otherwise, we're going to fail. So that was the only way you could make it work. So global standard, that means- It means everybody's using your chips. So what we said is, and we looked at the application, so what is the standard? We said, embedded control, every device, printer, whatever, automotive electronics, every car. In those days, we said mobile, digital mobile phone hadn't really happened, but we got the idea of the Apple Newton and so on. So we said mobile applications. So, and it's all defining that. The one thing I did say is, we will not go into the PC space. So we will do everything except PCs because if we go into the PC space, we're head to head with Intel and Microsoft, we will fail, they've got more money. We will not attack the PC space. But Acorn was PCs. Yeah, yeah, but that's the foundation of the company. If we'd done just what Apple and Acorn wanted, we would have been bankrupt within a year. So there was not a lot of money. So that means it's probably risky business, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How dangerous was that? So very, very. So here's what happened, another true story. What I say about job security to kids is, job security is how easily can you get another job for the same salary, right? If you don't take a risk, you never take any game. So I said to my wife and kids, this is very risky, it'll probably all go wrong, but I've tried the risk of VS2, the AB machine didn't work, I'm having a lot of fun, I've learned a lot. I can always get another job. I'm thinking of taking this job. And I said to Katie, my daughter, who was about 11 at the time, Katie, I've got this opportunity. What do you think, darling? And she said, dad, I've got a six here, throw it. Sorry, I've got a dice here, throw it. And if it says six, you'll be a millionaire. I threw the dice, it was a six. So you need a bit of luck. So luck, but there was this strategy, the business model. The key was, so look, it was obvious to me that system chip was happening. I could see the benefit of a standard microprocessor. I could see the applications. What didn't appear obvious to most other people seemed blindingly obvious to me. Why? Because I'd worked for VS2 with system on chip. I'd done silicon compilation. I'd worked for Motorola in marketing. I'd seen Japan, I'd seen the world. I could see the world had a huge need for this technology and nobody else was doing it. So why should we fail? Okay, we might run out of a bit of money. We might have a few problems, we had lots. But I could, and the other thing is by the way, Larry Tesla, I should say Larry Tesla. So Larry Tesla is a fantastic guy. You've seen him on the video, give me the award. He's still a very good friend today, a bit like Helman is still a good friend today. Larry as the seat, you know, the technical visionary of Apple really got my vision. So what I was saying, he, of all the people, I could talk to Larry about this problem, that problem and we could talk honestly to each other. And I would say he was my biggest inspiration. And there were lots of things went wrong. Like joint ventures never worked, for example. We had fights among the joint venture partners. It's all hopeless, but you just need a shrink to go and talk to it. In my case, it was Larry, you know, my friend. And we'd get the roadmap out. And I remember being in Larry's office saying, could this company ever get to a 10 million pounds revenue? And we looked at the forecast and we did. And the reality is every day you face a problem. So another true story. So from the early days, one of the first purchase orders for ARM was to develop the ARM 610 chip for Apple. And we had to get a purchase order. Because Larry was my friend and he'd give me a verbal order. We'd start at the design. Tim O'Donnell, who was heading up the US, went in to get the purchase order from Apple. And Tim Rami says, Robin, I got a problem. Larry Tesla has just resigned from the board of ARM and they've left me in this room on my own. And the Apple corporate had told Larry that he'd got conflict of interest and he couldn't give me an order. That was one example of a problem. Another problem, Yamaha, we're doing the deal, right? The Shinkansen never stops running. We spend a whole day in a room in Yamaha and we don't get the purchase order and they're trying to beat that price down. And we leave and it's been the worst day ever. And the Shinkansen is broken and we have to stay in a really terrible, small little love hotel, you know, because that's the only place we can stay. We get back to Tokyo and we get the purchase order the next day. So at every stage of every day, there's a crisis like you can't believe. That is real life. It isn't, you know, it's like this great, glorious successor and all this stuff happens. It's all really, really hard work and it's all really, really tough. But when you're down, you pick yourself up and you have another go. And the guys with tenacity and hard work usually win. So when did you get the idea of doing the licensing model? The, this business model? Before we start at arm. So in fairness, so the other thing is Malcolm Byrd deserves the most credit for thinking of some of these ideas. So Malcolm is the head of Acorns he's the CTO of Acorn. And he's got to spin this out. What might the business models like? So he had the licensing idea. He thought maybe he could do this. But in his original plan, it was maybe we can do licensing. Maybe we can do, make chips. Maybe, and he had a big spreadsheet of all the things that you could do. And what I said from my experience was, and this is my interview, practically you can do this, you can't do that. And we kind of evolved it. But he, in the same way that Sophie and Steve or the origin of the arm architecture, Malcolm is the origin of the arm business idea. He also had help. So Advent International were involved helping Apple in this. So there were people in the early days with ideas while the joint, they all put in bits of the ingredients. I didn't just invent this all on my own. I evolved it, okay? The one thing I would say, as I was very passionate that we wouldn't make chips. But did you emphasize the importance of demanding a big fee first and then later spoke royalty, right? Well, it's very simple. I just said, that's the price, mate. I mean, one of the things that really helped us, so Samsung, so there's a guy called Hyang Lee Rowe, Dr. Hyang Lee Rowe, who really believed in the arm architecture. This was about, I'm thinking 1993. Samsung in those days hardly knew what a microprocessor was, you know? And if you look at where Samsung is today, but Hyang Lee Rowe, another great guy. And I said, with this architecture, you could, all these products you're making for Samsung, you could use a standard microprocessor, you could use software, you could do all this, you could reduce costs, and he got the vision and the idea. He believed it. And then he had to convince Samsung purchasing to cough up the money. And what I actually said was, by this time, I think we've got TI as a licensee already, we've got VLSI, we've got Plessy, we've got shop, we were very short of engineers. And what I actually said to Samsung, I said, I'm very, very sorry, we'd love to work with you, but we're just too busy and we need more engineers to help you. You are going to have to give me, not just a purchase order, but you're gonna have to give me $3 million of cash wired to me before we start work for you so I can hire the engineers you need. And we got the $3 million. And Samsung, I remember this very well, at that point is when we double the size of the company from 30 to 60 people on the back of the Samsung order. And that nearly killed us, I tell you why, because all the 30 engineers who are doing all the work have to train all the new 30 engineers to do more work and the company becomes less efficient for a while. And that, me, was one of the most stressful periods, that growth phase of going from 30 to 60 engineers. What year was that around? I'm guessing about 1993, four, not either two, three or four, I can't remember exactly, but in that period. So as a CEO, one of your main jobs is to hire people and fire people, right? But it's actually hire, so how do you do that? So I mean, I'll tell you another true story, which is quite funny. When we were starting this company, so my first office was inside the Acorn building, right? So I arrived to my new office in Acorn to be told, you've got to get out, you've got two weeks, we need this room. So, and they found me this beautiful, concrete monstrosity of a building that I'm about to move into. I said, I'm sorry, that is not the right building. The overhead is too much, it's terrible, I don't accept it, we've got to find some better. I'd speak to Mark and Bird, who gets somebody called David, I think, to go and find me something better and he finds the armbar. The advantage of the armbar is it's got more character, it's cheaper, it's better, it works. So that was decision one. Later, by the way, when we're doubling the size of the company, we're actually moving back into the Acorn building, because they're not doing so well and they've left some space. So we've gone back to the old Acorn building, the Waterworks building, next to the current on main headquarters. So, but as a CEO, basically the CEO has got to do everything, whatever it is that nobody else can do. So I'm doing the marketing, I'm doing the selling, because I've got all the engineers doing engineering and I'm hiring people, on the particular occasion, so we've got to go to this new building, right? We're going to need somebody who can answer the telephone, somebody who can be my PA, somebody who can do stuff, the admin side. So I am interviewing PAs who are going to do everything. They're really serious hard workers, members of the team. This lady's called Glyn Leonard, by the way. I'm hiring her in parallel with choosing office furniture and fax machines. So I'm going from one meeting with secretaries to fax machines and all the rest of it. The good news is we got the voice answering system, the furniture, and Glyn Leonard on the same day. Another funny story about the history of I'm coming back to the luck bit. My birthday is the 4th of February. Glyn Leonard's birthday is the 4th of February. And Dave Jagger, who is the inventor of the thermo architecture, so we had three 4th of February birthdays in a team of only 16 people. Now statistically that's impossible, by the way, but that's the truth. By the way, and I met the head of enterprise at Liverpool University that I met the other day. I think he's a really good guy, because his birthday is the 4th of February as well. So it sounds like those early days and the later days were quite busy. More than. So the honest truth is the armed guys actually calculated this. So I did two long-haul flights every month because the customers in Japan, California, whatever, that's what I was doing. So I'm on an airplane and some of the engineers, there's a couple of stories about me personally. I actually featured in Viz Magazine. My son came to me and says, Dad, you're in Viz Magazine. Some of the engineers put me in the section, wore a load of wigs, right? This is not a wig, it's real hair, but I was in there. And then the other thing is somebody calculated the average speed that I did across the planet in the year 1992, and it was 500 miles per hour. And that was all, yeah, average. That was all based on all the flights that I'd done and everything. And I used to travel economy as well, by the way. And the other joke I used to say to the Cambridge Evening News, you don't create a global standard by driving a desk in Cambridge. So there was a lot of flying, where would you fly? Who would you meet? So everybody, so basically you're the CEO. So in Japanese company in particular, you have to go over for the signing ceremony. So I remember going to sign a deal with Matsushita in Osaka, Japan. I flew into Japan to sign the contract on Christmas Eve, just to sign the contract because that's what you have to do. It's great honor, and you have to, you know, but we got it. And I also bought my son, who's very interested in music, a five string bass guitar. So you have to combine the personal stuff with the commercial stuff and make it work. So he got a better Christmas present. So meeting everybody, can you tell some other stories about some funny meetings with, did you meet some CEOs of all kinds of companies or who were you meeting? Sure, sure. I mean, the joke is that, so one of the things I'm more serious about these days is I'm healthier than when I was younger. I, my waist is less, I ski better, I don't drink as much. And somebody said to me, and I, you know, I have several days a week now where I don't drink. The reality is in the early days, somebody said to me, as arm, would arm be as successful today if you'd been on your healthcare program? Back then I said, no, we would have failed totally. So drinking meetings, which, by the way, you can be in a culture that doesn't drink, it could be tea, but basically the key is getting to know people. As human beings. Get out of the work environment, talk to them as human beings, find out what their hobbies are. I mean, I can remember senior Japanese friends in a guy called Mauritius and in Sharp who was our first Japanese licensee. He was a king golfer, right? Somebody else is a king skier. So what I say to people, life is about people. It's not about spreadsheets, it's not about nonsense and relationships and building trust is the key. And the key to the trust is the win-win. If we collaborate, can we both be more successful than if we don't? And basically in a partnership, everybody's got to win. The other thing about the arm partnership idea, Simon Seegers today says partnership is in arms DNA. I'm pleased to hear that, I think it's true. If you, a Japanese customer, so Sharp got us into Nintendo. Nintendo was their biggest customer than Nintendo Game Boy Advance. So partnership is about focused on your strengths with my strengths and we get a better result. That's the Game Boy. The Game Boy Advance or the Game Boy Advance? The Game Boy Advance, yeah. So that was our first successful product in Japan. But by the way, it was more than a year late because Warren East, who became the second CEO, his job was to run the design consulting business and he was working with Nintendo and Sharp. It was his first consulting order to make the color Game Boy. That's what it was. Everything was fantastic and I got a phone call from Warren saying it's a disaster. They've canceled the project. The reason why they canceled the project, they couldn't get the power consumption out of the color LCD. The project went away. Year or so later, they fixed the power consumption issue on the color LCD and it worked and it all came back. The other, the first successful armed product to ship was actually those dial-in modems. They go, that was actually our first volume selling product. The Apple Newton was a failure. The 3DO Game Advanced Player was a failure. So all the first products failed. Okay, they helped pay the rent. We got some consulting income. But the other thing I say to all the startups is, expect failure, plan for failure, be prepared and keep working at everything and something might come good one day. So in the early days, it looked like the royalties were never going to happen because all the first products were failures and I said the first successful product was the dial-up modems and the really big successful product was the headlines with the Nokia 6310. And the other thing is the time-to-money is always a lot longer than people think. And I say, in any technology roadmap, you're looking at an absolute minimum of eight years. That's the reality. And time-to-money. Time-to-money, yeah, time-to-real money, right? So what actually happened? And in the early days of armed, I said, we're going to be the global standard. When I articulated what the global standard would be, in 1991, I said to be the global standard and this was when Acorn was only shipping 100,000 chips or Vila Cypress building for Acorn. I said to be, if we are shipping, if they are shipping 200 million chips by the year 2000, we will be the standard. That was my quantification of that. What actually happened is by the time the year 2000 came along, it was 400 million. So it was twice my number, but the curve was much later. The ramp-up was much slower. It's more like that shape than it never goes the way you think. The other joke about curves is, over-expected expectation, trough of despair, that's what happens in real life. So eight years is kind of a long time, right? Yeah. And so did all the 12 guys in the beginning, did they all believe in your ideas in the beginning? No, no, no, no, no. So only you need to talk to them individually because they'll all tell you. They all got it at different times. What I've heard from the people is, Robin kept saying we're going to be the global standard, Jamie believed it, then so-and-so got it, and after a while, we all believed it. Like, I'm not religious, but I'm just saying, so the momentum, the repetition, and then we've got this design win. We've got this person license. They've got Samsung have done it. So you build, and then the confidence builds and builds and builds and builds, and some people, by the way, are more pessimistic, some are more optimistic. They all got it at different times, but that's what actually happened. And then the other thing we would do, we would do communication meetings all the time, benefit being a private, and Jonathan Brooks, who became the second CFO who took the company public, he always used to do his communication meetings at the top of a step ladder and talk about their numbers and their passions. So we had a very, and another thing in the early days, so in 1991, when these 12 engineers were spun out into an independent company, they had been promised, in their contract by Acorn, they would have a salary rise in August in the new company. That was written in contract. And I showed the company what was happening. I showed how we were running out of cash, showed them what the opportunities were, and Harry Meekins, who's the king of C-compilers, said, obviously, you cannot afford to do the salary rises. And I said, correct, Harry, but here's what we'll do. We'll postpone the salary rises from now, and when we have the money, we'll give you the salary rises backdated. And what actually happened is we got the real money, the cheque from Plessy, which was our first licensee, came in in January, 1992. And from that cheque, I all wrote them a backdated, large cheque for the missing money they had. And they also, everybody had share options. I'm a great believer in everybody in the team sharing in the upside, and the reason for that is, so again, when I joined the company, they offered me shares and share options. I said, we have to give them to everybody. And somebody said, what's the matter with him? Is he a socialist? Well, I'm not political at all. But the reason why I said that is everybody has share options. They see the upside. They're going to control their expenses better. And this also motivates all the team in the same direction. And what happened, by the way, so over going public and so on, there were delays. Some people quit too soon. And another true story, I might mention the name, but I had a letter from somebody's wife who'd left the company after we'd gone public, saying, can you give him his share options back? And I said, no, I'm sorry, I can't. So people make their own decisions. So some people missed out because they left too soon. Other people stayed. And if you look at the people who've stayed longer, who've put all the hours in, especially with the soft bank acquisition, they've made the most money out of the company. So great, well done for them, it's fine. So we all make our own choices and what we want to do with our lives. So people were patient with following your vision, right? So I think it's more than that. I think it's not so much that they were patient in following my vision. They were more passionate about what they were doing. So if I'm designing this, so one of the early chips was called Louis, which stood for life, the universe and everything. And that was integrating four individual chips on a single chip for ACON. So it was the video controller, the memory controller, the IO and the CPU and the memory, all on a single chip. So that's a really exciting project. And if you're a VLSI designer doing that, it's lovely. If you're trying to improve this C compiler throughput or whatever, it's lovely. If you're trying to get the code density right through the thumb architecture, it's lovely. So to be honest, if you are doing the most exciting stuff on the planet, you don't really care about my vision, it's irrelevant. But that's the kind of upside from the vision. There might be some good news after, but most people, including myself, we're less motivated by money than the motivation of ARM was with the global standard. We can change the planet. We can make more efficient processes. So one of the things that pleases me personally, poor people in deprived parts of the world using ARM powered mobile devices to communicate the world to improve devices and livelihoods and so on. That's the exciting bit. The money is just, to be honest, money is overrated, right? Money doesn't buy you lovers, they say. It helps a bit sometimes. But, and I think we can get, if you haven't got money, money looks to be very important. If you've got enough money, it looks less. And we're all motivated by different things. Some people want to make a lot of money. Some people want to have enough money. And personally, I'd rather have enough money and freedom than too much money and no freedom. There's another joke, by the way. I shared a house in Cambridge with Dave Jagger and Paul Egan. And we used to talk about the thumb architecture around the kitchen table. Dave says it was designed in the kitchen of our little house. I don't know if that's true, but because I was the CEO, he could come up with some ideas and we could talk about it. So, again, in engineering terms, people talk about skunk works. And so things kind of happen orthogonally and in an informal way. Same with skiing. You ski better the more relaxed you are. So I think there's a lot of nonsense. I mean, a friend of mine is Clayton Christiansen, who's a professor at Harvard Business School, who wrote the innovator's dilemma. And he says, why do all these companies, when there are 100 years, I'll go bankrupt? And he says, because of all the rubbish we teach at Harvard Business School. So that's kind of how I look at things. So there's Nokia coming, and so how was those trips? Do you go to TI and convince them? So the reality is this. So I help convince TI, but it's a team. So what we're doing is we're dealing with Nokia, we're dealing with TI, we're dealing with shop. What actually happens in practice, you have a senior person who has the responsibility of a particular relationship. So the reality is the Nokia design win was more at a senior level, was more to do with Mike Muller and Pete McGowan and Dave Jagger. I'm very little to do with me, although I had a few meetings with TI. The meeting I had with TI was discussing what were the applications within TI that were relevant for the arm architecture. And I had more discussion with the automotive side of TI, a guy called Greg Lowe, I think his name was, than I did with the guys on Nokia. I had more to do with shop, Warren had more to do with Nintendo. So what's actually happening in practice is you've got all these customers, you've got teams working things, and my bit would be signing the contract or coming at the right time to do your bit. So the other thing is with shop, and this is another true story. Mike Muller and I, to close the shop deal, I went to Japan, 10 months out of 12, to get that deal done. And I remember being with Mike Muller, because shop's got lots of engineers and it's a consensus culture, everybody has to believe it. And I remember coming out of a meeting in Nara, after a shop meeting with Mike Muller, and Mike Muller says he's hopeless, they've got so many engineers, we'll never get the deal. And I said to Mike, there was a shop sign in Kanji outside of shop. I said, Mike, take a photo of me with that sign and maybe it'll bring us luck. And we got the deal. The other thing that happens in these deals is shop America, we're very keen to work with us. So more than just shop Japan, the people who were in the Northwest of America were very keen to get on. So I personally had meetings in Las Vegas to get the shop deal with the Americans and the Japanese. So these things are happening in real time across the planet. Large corporations make team decisions with lots of input from all over the place. So did you speak any Japanese? So a little bit. That means two beers, please. And, yes, so, and the joke with my kids is my kids would know the nationality of the person I'm speaking to, because I'd be speaking to them at home every night or somewhere. And my kids would play this game on what nationalities dad's speaking to and they could guess from my mannerisms and my behaviors. Also, je parle un petit peu français. So, but all you need to know is hello, goodbye, two beers, please, you know, and smile and things like that. So when Nokia deal happened and the phones were coming out of the factory and it was working and it was stable and everything, things got pretty crazy. Well, no, not crazy. So what happened is that was the time, the real benefit of Nokia to us from a business point of view. So the day we went public in 1998 and Nokia had done some road tours in America before us. So the good news about Nokia is when we did the IPO because we duly listed on both NASDAQ and London, everybody knew who Nokia was and we explained the technology behind us. So the biggest benefit of Nokia was actually in market positioning and understanding of. So, but I mean, there was volume, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, but there was lots of other volume. I mean, so if we actually look at the detail, there was this fax modem, there was this embedded controller, there was this printer, there was this Nokia. What I'm saying to you is Nokia gets the headlines, but actually the numbers are built up of lots and lots and the other thing about ARM is, I think even today, I don't think any one customer is more than 10% of revenue. So the success of ARM is the penetration globally and the application range globally. And yeah, Nokia is a nice story, but it's just one of many. So you're talking about those modems and fax printer or something like that? Who are they, those customers? I can't even remember. I mean, the other thing is, do you remember the Diamond Rio before the Apple iPhone? So what I'm saying is what pays the rent and what gets the headline are quite different, actually. And so the- Not always the most noise is the greatest success. I mean, another story just again, to remind you of this. So my biggest partner, Apple, I thought they were really, really behind the ARM architecture and everything's great and I got my friend Larry Tesla and Apple announced this amazing collaboration with IBM and Motorola to create the PowerPC to put me out of business. Yeah, that's real life. What would they do with that? Why wouldn't they use the ARM and the- Because it's a big company and a big company has lots of difference of opinions and they don't always agree. And so the people on the desktop wanted to use the PowerPC. And in large corporations, it isn't like a religion, we all believe this. They all have different ideas, they all try different things. And the suppliers who work the best and do the best job, win. Were you trying to convince them to use ARM for- I tried to convince them. So the company I used to work for, Motorola, right? I thought these would be the easiest people to convince them, my friends. But they didn't want to, they didn't want the ARM architecture. They had their own, they were too proud. Similarly Microsoft. I mean, I had meeting, Microsoft could have been ahead of the curve behind ARM with Apple if they'd wanted to but they didn't want to do that. I had many meetings in Richmond. And lovely people. So what happens is, lots of projects happen in lots of companies. Some get supported, some get killed. That's what happens. And as the supplier, you have to work with everybody and everything. And some work. Did you meet Bill Gates? I didn't actually meet Bill. No. But so you were meeting with Microsoft people and you're trying to convince them to do what? No, I'm not trying to convince them. This is a game. It doesn't work like that. The marketing nonsense says that story. It's rubbish. What you do, you don't try and convince them. You listen to what they want and you give them the solution. And they then get the belief and they then convince their bosses. That's how it actually works. So you go and say, what do you want? That's the meeting. So you talk to the engineer. So here's what you do. So right, I'll give you an analogy. Right. So if I tried to sell you a parachute right now, charbacks, would you like to buy a parachute from me? Parachute? Yes. Maybe. Maybe not. No, I don't think you want a parachute. But imagine you're coming out of an aeroplane and you're about to die and I'm flying past with a parachute and I can attach it to your back. How much will you pay me for that parachute? Everything I have. Yeah, exactly. So the key to selling and marketing is actually understanding the explicit need of the customer and giving them a solution. And you have to have the people who kind of want the parachute, the people who want to push the power consumption curve. So it's about working with people to give them a better solution. And what, and if you can adapt your technology to create a better solution than everybody else's technology, you will ultimately win. So is the marketing manager the most important person in the company? I believe that it's not the marketing manager. That's just a title. Every engineer needs to understand marketing, needs to understand, because it's about all these things. Marketing is just a label. What does it mean? What is engineering? So we're all human beings and there's a bit of, so every engineer need marketing, intelligence and awareness. Everybody needs to understand the importance of the customer pool. So you teach this. And it's like, you remember the early days of quality control. The early days of quality control, you had the quality control department, right? It didn't work. The Japanese total quality system devolved quality to everybody's responsibility. And I believe for the best engineering, the engineer understands the marketing, the selling, the financial asset, the whole picture, and then applies the particular skills to doing a great job in this space. There are some people, by the way, not every engineer has to understand everything, but within the team, you have to have that understanding. It may be for a particular engineer, just focus on getting the power consumption down here. They do just that detail or just do the software, you do that. But the reality is, the team vision and specification and understanding is incredibly important. And it is the opposite of the way they would teach it at PRL marketing school and nonsense of social media. That's my experience. Now, one of the things that happened, every one of the first licensees of ARM were designing their own microprocessors. So for the heads of those companies, so the CEOs or the CTOs, they were the important people I had to convince personally to use. I did have to get them to have the belief in our architecture and why it was good for them. So there was a bit of what you asked me about. But the problem for them, and I remember a guy called, I think his name was Dwight York, and I think he was at Rockwell. And he said, I've got a real problem, Robin. I've got 100 engineers working on this microprocessor. And if I license with you, they feel their jobs are gonna go away and we're gonna put them out of business. So what I discuss with him is, well, you've got all those engineers. What else could they do that would add value to the ARM architecture that would make you more money? And I think in that particular case, they chose, you said, yeah, we could put them on a graphics project. So we turn those engineers who are initially our enemies into our friends because they've got this great microprocessor to put their graphics on top of and it's win-win. So one of my other business messages is turn your enemies into friends. So this is the ecosystem of ARM, which is amazing, right? Well, I don't think it's that amazing. It's kind of common sense. Maybe that's why it's amazing because the world isn't very sensible at the moment. It's common sense to collaborate on the same vision. Of course, of course. And to use standards. Of course, because it's more efficient. Saves the planet and it will all be better off. So one of my other things, you know, I do songs and things, one of the things that I say is don't fight over crumbs where nobody cares. Bake a bigger cake that everybody shares. And this is, so where the world is at, we're a very interesting time of the world. So the world is really totally globalized. In my lifetime, when I worked for Motorola in 1973, chips were assembled in Kuala Lumpur. They were designed in Geneva. They were diffused in Scotland. We had global teams working together. So I was very fortunate to get global training and thinking from Motorola back in 1973. And the semiconductor industry is probably the most globalized industry on the planet. Unfortunately, the pace of change of the world hasn't kept pace with the change of technology and we've got some problems. But I think for the future of the human race, we have to get more effective at working together. At the moment, when people are frightened or whatever, they behave in not necessarily the best way and it takes time. The other problem with politics, you know, constitutions are several hundred years old, business happens like that. So we have a few challenges. The positive side is with internet communication and so on, information can flow faster. So the benefit of the internet is people can talk to each other everywhere. The downside of the internet, rubbish and garbage can be proliferated everywhere and you've got to sift through it. So it's lucky it's great that you've got this standard design the right way and all these hundred billion chips are kind of running the same software, no? Not well, kind of. So the reality is the architecture is, so a big strength of arm, and this was in the early days, was the architecture is very well defined. There's an architectural instruction manual, there's validation suites and that policing of your architecture is very, very important. One of my frustrations, a lot of my devices have Bluetooth on them. Some Bluetooth devices don't collect very well with other Bluetooth devices and that annoys me incredibly, you know, as an engineer that that is the case. But the arm architecture, the same software, a chip made by some of the software here, whatever, the devil is in the detail. So there's a lot of commonality, but there's also a lot of difference. And to make the unique something, there might be a little bit of code here or a bit of hardware there. So what arm has created is good building blocks that everybody can benefit from and add value to. It's not quite open source, but it's a similar idea. Well, it's better than open source. So the downside of open source is how do you fund it? So I personally use a lot of open source software, but the problem of open source software, it might disappear because there's no funding. So it is a shared standard, which is controlled by arm and you have to pay some money for it, right? And the good news is you don't have to pay too much money for it. So the arm royalties are so low that it's not worth trying to cheat and beat on because it costs you more to cheat than to pay the royalties. So it's a good ecosystem model. But it only works if everybody uses it. And that's gonna work forever, right? Nobody's gonna come with a competitor. No, no, no, never say never. So here's what I say. The reality is you're only as good as what you did last week, right? So the minute, you know, the hubris syndrome with politicians in particular, the minute you believe you're perfect, you're useless. So what arm has to do is keep challenging itself. The other thing I say on technical roadmaps is you have to obsolete yourself before your competition does. So what, and generally speaking, what happens if you look at the history of computing, you know, mainframes, minis, PCs, arms, the biggest threat to arm could be from the bottom end because that's what happens on history. So how quickly arm moves into the cheaper, lower spaces is very important. I think the good news for arm is because of the business model. Because arm is partnering with everybody and because all partners want different things, provided it reacts to all of those partners, some of those partners will get it right. So there is a benefit in the arm ecosystem if arm keeps being honest, keeps challenging itself and doesn't get arrogant and doesn't get lazy. Doesn't get arrogant. So how is all these years competing with Intel because this is kind of like an arrogant company now? But so I like Intel, right? So the reality is arm has never competed with Intel. That's another piece of marketing nonsense, right? The reality is Intel is a chip company. Main strength is their factory and building their chips. They happen to have a computer architecture around the X86. Arm is an open source licensing company. They're completely different companies. The reality is Intel competes with a lot of arm partners. But again, another thing that really, really annoys me with the quality of journalism, would you believe even today after the SoftBank purchase, one of the UK newspapers say, arm's biggest chip manufacturing company has been bought by SoftBank. Arm has never made a chip in its life. So it annoys me if the quality of marketing information could be as good as the engineering, the world might be a better place. No disrespect to you, Chuck Bax. I'm sure you're doing well. But did you have a lot of meetings with Intel over the years? I had lots of meetings with Intel, yeah. And could have done something differently to be more present than an arm ecosystem? But Intel is exactly the same as Motorola. If you are the king of a space and a new space is emerging and you're going to collaborate with this new startup, you're gonna make yourself weaker in your own space. So it's very hard for you to change. So it's only when you're in deep trouble that you have to change your mind. You keep on fighting, you keep, that's just, again, that's just human nature. And that's part of the problem. This is what some McKinsey consultants talk about. There's a book called Creative Destruction, which is why the big companies fail. The reason why they fail is what's paying the rent today, they want to protect that more than get into the new space. It's very painful for change. And that's why large corporations do fail and new ones stop. That is a bit like Darwinism. It's just the way it is. But the smart companies change themselves by creatively destroying themselves to get into a new space. But that's very tough when you're a public company with quarterly earnings and everything else. But right now Intel has announced they will make a 10 nanometer for LG arm, and that's great. Great, great. I mean, I don't know if you know this, but the history of Intel and ARM, so here's another true story. The first successful high performance arm chip was called Strong ARM. It was built by digital, because digital had, and I was very involved in the meetings of digital. Strong ARM was built on digital's process, and it was the fastest ARM chip. And everybody said ARM's great, but they can't make fast chips. Through the partnership with digital, we made fast chips. Intel acquired digital and Intel got the rights to the ARM license through that contract. And by the way, I had to get board approval on every deal, and I discussed it with Apple, and basically Steve Jobs, sorry he's not around anymore, was not in favor of licensing this Intel and tried to stop me doing it. And I spoke to him on the phone, and he said, you're the chief executive of ARM, I've been home, I argue with you, and he approved the deal. So that's a little relationship I have with Steve. But, and the reason why he was worried, he loved, he could see the performance of ARM and he couldn't see, he was worried that Intel were going to take advantage of it and we were going to suffer. And he had a good point of view, we had a nice chat. And I talked to Craig Barrett. Some of the people in digital didn't want to work for Intel, because they thought Intel was the evil empire, right? And I talked to Craig about this. So here's what happened. So Intel bought digital, they made ARM chips for a while. They didn't make a great success of it. And that business, they sold off to Marvel. And Marvel made a fantastic success out of it, right? But you only do what you believe in and in fairness to Intel, they've done a great job. I've used their microprocessors. I've got nothing against Intel. They're a great company, right? And that's the other thing. All businesses make mistakes, right? It's normal. This is what happened. Did Steve Jobs say thanks a lot for, because 95% of their profits comes from one part of the devices he's talking about. So my view of Steve, so the reason how Steve Jobs came into the occasion, I had two ARM directors on my board and they used to get approval from Steve. So I only spoke to Steve if he needed to speak to me. I didn't have any reason to speak to Steve, but that's just one of the apocryphal stories of the past, you know? And there are many like that. What I'm really saying is nothing is easy. Everything's difficult. There's problems everywhere. It's normal, you know? And it's also good to be challenged, right? Steve Rayda, a valid point to me about thinking another angle of this Intel thing. And one of the things I really do believe is another true story from my time at ARM. Every board meeting decision was unanimous. We would debate extreme positions on everything. So Larry, who's a technical visionary, would want to do this. Samu was an accountant, would want to not spend any money. And I would debate, it's called evaluate your strategic options. We look at every side of the coin, every angle, and then we'd synthesize and say, what do we think is the best? We look forward. Then through the team process, we say, yes. I say, does everybody agree? And if somebody still doesn't agree, we'd say, why don't you agree? Talk it, you've got a chance. And we change the view. Because the reason for that is, in a team, if you're all signed up to it, it's gonna happen. If there's somebody, if you have a vote, and there's somebody who's against it, it's like the bad apple in the barrel, it's gonna come back and get you later. So I'm a great believer in teamwork and team decision-making. Shall we sit down, just for a second? So, we're right here. So, where were the times when Arm was just about to fail? How many times? Once, just once. 1990, so the reality is, we could have gone bankrupt in 1991. And after that, we got into a positive cash flow in year two. All right, so that's great. But that's because I wouldn't spend any money. So basically, Arm in year three was only about 24 people. And I wouldn't hire. I wouldn't hire unless you needed 200% of a person. And how were the years, at which point, Warren East took over CEO? That was too... So I think he took over in about 2001, I'm guessing. But basically, one of the benefits I had, so when Arm was starting to be successful, one of the problems I had is, where am I going to get good people from? And Texas Instruments had a big operation in Bedford, and they chose to move that down to Nice. And I got Warren, who didn't want to go to Nice, from TI. We got several key players from TI at that time. We hired Warren to develop the consulting business because in the early days of Arm, was getting the applications to work was a real challenge. So the more consulting we could do, the more we could help them with the design, the better chance they had of getting their designs to work. And also, we could get income for that. So Warren was hired to look at the Arm business and to create a consulting business that would be profitable and revenue generating, but also help create Arm Designers. That was his first job. And then the other thing that we always did it on, get is one of my beliefs. I believe very much, I got this from Motorola. I believe very much in succession planning. So I believe every employee should say, if you get run over by a bus, who's your first choice to replace you? And who's your second choice to replace you? And always have those names in the box. And always discuss them and always review it. So it so happened. I won't tell you who the first name was, but when this process started, Warren was the second name in the box. But by the time it actually came to the appointment, he'd become the number one and he became CEO. So 2001 to 2007, you were? I was chair. So the other reality is, I was chairman, CEO, president and everything forever. I just didn't use all the titles, right? Because it didn't seem necessary. And what happened is I stopped being CEO in 2001 or whatever it was, I can't remember the year. And one of the things I wanted to do, one of the reasons I want, so I was keen to be the CEO to take the company public and I was keen to be the CEO after public because you've got to do quarterly earnings. You've got to make sure it all works. And I wanted to show my replacement was ready. So I backed off when Warren was ready to drop into my shoes. And I'm a child, no problem through the crash. I've had lots of problems. So here's what the problem is. This is the public company bit. Being a public company, you're very much measured on quarterly earnings. And the problem is a deal might happen in the month of March, in which case you've hit your quarter or it might happen in April, in which case you've missed your quarter. So I could say through every quarter, you've always got a challenge. Usually the joke is I think all corporations, they make their numbers in the last few weeks of the quarter. So the pressure of being a public corporation creates pressure all the time. And you've done this deal, what's the next one? So there's problems every day. That's normal. You have to time the deals so they fit right at the right time so you can announce them. You have to try. And then they have revenue recognition to make it impossible to get there. So revenue recognition was a whole nightmare of your financial reporting system. Sarbanes, Oxley, all these things are just added complications to making the business more difficult, but you find a solution. And you listed in the US? NASDAQ and again, we duly listed on NASDAQ and the UK. The reason for that was we had a big following in America. The main technology partners were American. Apple, our major partner, was American. The origin of the architecture was the UK. Acorn, we had a following in the UK and it was Morgan Stanley that came up with the idea of dual listing. When we're looking for banks to choose, we chose Morgan Stanley. They came up with the dual listing idea. And in those days, valuations in America were higher than in the UK for tech companies. And I think dual listing was actually a very good idea. And even though everybody says, oh dear, poor old arms gone to soft bank, the reality is 60% of arms shareholding when soft bank bought it was outside the UK. So to my mind, who owns the shares, where they are, the reality is money is global. Everybody owns everything everywhere. I mean, again, I'm private shareholder in lots of companies. So money travels around the planet and it's everywhere and it's every, money doesn't care what nationality you are. Okay, stock exchanges do because they get commissioned. So listing gave aren't big opportunities? The listing, what I think is it gives you credibility. If you're not listed, you less will notice. The other reality is I've mentioned this to you before. So arm was a joint venture. And when we started arm, one of my friends whose name is Peter Smith, I had a meeting with him. He was the boss of Schroder Ventures. And I thought he knows more about companies. And I said, Peter, I've got this job offer to run this joint venture. What would you do? He says, don't take it Robin, joint ventures never work. I said, oh dear Peter, it's too late. I've accepted the job. And what that meant is the problem with the joint venture is so Acorn's interested in its chips for the Acorn Archimedes machine. Apple is interested in its chips for the Apple Newton. Arm wants to create a global standard that everybody will use to have a sustainable revenue. And the problem with the joint venture partners, they'll have different needs and different requirements. And it's quite tough to negotiate your way. This is why all the board decisions were unanimous. Everybody has to have their say and we have to make a team decision. But that's really, really hard. And so the other thing is that if you look at when arm went public, Acorn as a company was suffering. Its business was declining. And the only success of Acorn really was their shareholding in arm. People were buying Acorn shares to get access to arm. Apple was declining. It was in the period between when Steve had left and came back, it was rotating CEOs all the time. So I had kind of two basket case shareholders not in very good shape. And for the company to have a future, I thought if we could go public and have some independence, we needed to dissolve the joint venture in order to have a future. We could have been dragged down by our failing founding shareholders. And there are stories about, I mean Acorn got a bunch of money out of that but maybe it saved Apple? Well, that's up to Apple to decide. For sure, where Apple were clever, when they sold their shares, you can hang on to the shares or you can sell them over a period of time. Where Apple was smart was they decided to hang on their shares and the shares went up. So by hanging on to them and selling them on quarters, that helped their financial turn. I mean, by the way, I personally gifted because I do like doing things for charity. I gifted quite a lot of money to my alma mater, the University of Liverpool. There's Robin Saxby labs there and a management school that they use my money. The university were equally clever. They could have sold all their shares that I gave them at the same time and they hung on to them, sold a bit at a time. So Apple, so for sure, the cash from the arms sale helped Apple, helped Liverpool University and actually helped quite a lot of people. Another true story for me, I was on the train station at Beckinsfield station and somebody came up to me and said, are you Robin Saxby? I said, yes, I am thinking. What are they gonna say? I want to thank you. You made me a lot of money. That was okay. So, but now arm is not listed anymore. Do you think that might change things, how things happen at arm compared to how it was when it was listed? So, of course. So, but here's how I look at it. If we look at it as my life, I'm nearly 70 years old. I was a kid. I was a teenager. I was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You live with your parents. You go to university, you do different stuff. So, in my opinion, arm is now, it'll be 26 years old this year. So, arm is of a certain age and at this particular point in time, arm shares are no longer traded and it belongs to Softbank. But going back to the early days, seed investment from Apple, technology from Acorn, a bit of money from VLSI Technology, Japanese venture capital, Money, Nippon Investment and Finance. Then the company went public in 1998 and so, and it got into the FTSE 100. So, I just look at it, it's another phase and to some extent, it's about what the people are doing, how they're directed, what are the vision, what's the teamwork, that's what counts. Who owns the shares or, and by the way, hedge funds today. I mean, majority of shares are owned by hedge funds. They don't, they just wanna make money. So, I don't get hung up about ownership or nationality or whatever. I mean, the other thing that's really interesting about arm, I personally feel we're all human beings with different cultures, with different languages, with different whatever, but in the world of arm, when you're working together, I don't think what nationality are you or what's your culture or whatever. Sometimes I have to be a bit careful because if I ask somebody to drink who doesn't like to drink, that's rude. So, I've got to be aware of people's cultures. I've got to make an effort to do that and to get that right. But we're all products of this planet and you create the right environment, you can do some great stuff. So, 2007, you stopped being an arm, why did you stop? So, one of the reasons is I do believe that we all get past our sell-by date and I also believe in setting personal goals. So, one of the things I learned from Motorola, I owe this to them, we'd do an annual performance appraisal and we'd write like mad plans of where do you want to be in 10 or 20 years time. And I kind of wrote the arm business plan inside of Motorola, I think, when I was about 32 years old because I had this idea for Motorola with a microprocessors and creating a standard and doing systems. I actually, but Motorola rejected the idea but I think the origin of the arm business plan came from my time at Motorola and I also did personal goals and I actually said, I aimed, and although I'm not driven by money, I did say I aimed to be a millionaire by the age of 50 and I actually became a millionaire at the age of 51 and then I did say I want to stop being CEO by the age of 55 and I actually stopped being CEO by the age of 64, sorry, 54 and I said I want to stop being chairman by the age of 60 and I stopped that at 61. So, I think it's good to have long-term goals just to help you planning and thinking and you can always adjust them and change them. One of my goals now is to ski one more day per year until I die and what that means is I want to stay healthy and have a good life and skiing is going to help me do that. So, I do believe in goals and quantifying things and adjusting them and personally, I think I'm more interested in the long-term future than I'm in the past and today, right? I tend to think a lot about the future. That's what I enjoy doing. So, can we have such a revolutionary business models for future companies? Is that what you're trying to do? Is that what you've been doing? Also working with startups, right? So, let's just talk about other revolutionary business models that have come since on. So, ARM was founded in 1990. Google was founded in 1998, much later than ARM. You look at Amazon, so on this planet and you could look at China as well and there's different parts of the world doing different things. So, there'll always be startups. There'll always be new business models. There'll always be new opportunities. What I personally enjoy doing, because fundamentally, I'm an engineer and I like a bit of software and I like a bit of hardware and I even like my soldering iron and when you're looking at the oscilloscope you can see the waveforms. There's nobody arguing with you. You're in a safe place. So, I personally enjoy the journey from innovation to great commercial success to potentially change the world to make it a better place. So, what I've done, and even while I was with ARM, I had my money in venture funds. I've always liked startups and venture funds. So, when I'm full-time with ARM, I'm in a few venture funds and some of them did, including Amadeus, I've been in every fund that Herman has done from the start and that's made me some money. But now I've got more time retiring from ARM. I thought I can afford to be a bit more hands-on. So, what I have today, I've just been with one of the companies I'm involved with for lunch today, Plessy, every one of the startups that I'm in has what I believe is world-beating, changing technology. That's the fundamental thing that has the potential to improve the world. So, Plessy, I'm doing Galium Nitride Lighting Meeting Dials. Lighting Meeting Dials today are silicon on the sapphire. Benefit of Galium Nitride, potentially 10 times the lower cost, better light output, control the frequency, and I could go you slides and do so for light. And I believe that every light bulb on the planet has the potential to have Plessy, Galium Nitride Lighting Meeting Dials in it, right? But it's a long haul and it's a long slog when they're building this stuff. Sontier Sound Technology Company, and I'm gonna demonstrate these headphones to you in a minute. I don't know where I put them. This company, so Soundtech, the human ear hates phase shift, right? I'm talking to you now, there's no phase shift. Soon as you put a loud speaker or a set of earphones in there, you get phase shift. You also get frequency changes. What Sontier knows how to do better than anybody else on this planet is how to understand that phase shift and what happens and how to give you the most perfect sound you've ever heard in your life. And I'm gonna give you these headphones to listen to in a minute. You'll hear potentially this can be in every cinema, every speaker, every headphone on the planet. For sound, this is all the sound. Or every sound there is, right? What does it do to the sound? Well, I'm gonna let you hear it. Cause you're not gonna believe it. It is so clear. You can hear a pin drop. You can hear the bass perfectly. There's no distortion. And the other thing, when noise is going on outside you and you've got these headphones on, you won't hear the noise because the sound here is so good, your brain will just hear that and ignore the noise. And some of their products are already shipping. It's a licensing model. So first products are LG Soundbars. These headphones are gonna literally blow your mind when you hear how good this sound is. So all of my startups have the potential to do something really significant to make things that are better. So, and I could talk about, I've got another one, Libertine free piston engines. And free piston engines can convert mechanical energy into electrical energy more efficiently. So there's a theme. All my startups can do something great. They all happen to be headquartered in the UK. Cause in the old days of ALMA, we used to do two long haul flights every month. So if I have less journeys to do, it's easier. So they're all UK based startups. Some of them are connected to the Royal Academy of Engineering's Enterprise Hub, which is why we're here. And what I'm doing, basically you're saying to the kids, it's all right, carry on. I've made all the mistakes that you've made and more carry on, you're all right. Ignore the idiots and keep going and keep writing a few checks out. Ignore the idiots, is that important? Yes, very. Cause the idiots are, there's nine times more idiots than there are sensible people. And it's very, very easy when you're a young immature person to believe that because somebody has experience that you don't, that they're giving you a good advice. And I've found, unfortunately in my life, there aren't that many good people. I actually trust people that I meet on the ski slopes more than some of the people I meet in meetings, right? Because people don't, they might not be really idiots, right? They might be really nice people, but they behave not in a sensible way in a board meeting and they're not as good as they need to be and they're not as honest. So when I say they're all idiots, that's a bit harsh. What I'm saying is the way the world operates with marketing and messaging and communication is very inefficient. So the people who appear to be idiots actually might be quite sensible, but you never have time to find out. So there's many problems in the world. And let's say there's some also like very bad problems, but also political problems. And maybe the hope is technology will solve a lot of problems. I think, well, that is the hope, but the bad news is social media seems to be exacerbating the problems at the moment with the sound bites and the noise. So I am a little bit interested in history. If we look at the history of the human race, we've had war, we've had conflict, we've had problems, you know, the ancient Greeks, people used to sacrifice people. My parents unfortunately suffered two world wars. You know, American people suffered Vietnam, et cetera. So there's been some terrible things on the history of the planet. And even though the world looks in a difficult precarious place at that moment, I think what is actually happening is the world is saying, or the ordinary people are saying, hang on a minute. I don't understand. I don't like it. They're raising their voice. And I think we need better communication and better understanding. And I try to avoid politics because when I was at university, I was president of a hall of residence in my committee. I had one guy who was the social secretary who was right of Genghis Khan. And I had another guy who was the secretary who was left of Chairman Mao. And I thought, you're red, you're blue, you're all the same. I prefer my trans sisters. Sisters can save the world, but these politicians are just talking, right? Yeah, but imagine this is a bit of a joke, but it's also true. Imagine we had a really, so people are worried about artificial intelligence, right? We could actually program machines that could help our politicians make more sensible decisions based on data. So I think the machines can actually help. But I think it's going to take a long time. The history of the human race. Look at the age of the planet. And look at the age of the human race. Planets is billions of years old. Man is 200,000 years old. We're still very, very young. So I think we have to get smarter. And the other problem is that, so when I, my first job I worked for Anchorage Murphy, I designed color televisions, including chips. We made the chips in Plymouth. We shipped the chips in the UK. It was very local. That's the way the world was. Look at the way chips are made now and globalization. And there are some problems of globalization, global warming, shipping costs. We're not exactly running this planet in the most efficient way. And there's lots of opportunities. Actually, if we harness the natural resource that's available properly and share it, we could make the world a better place. Unfortunately, people are just learning how to talk to each other. And, you know, look at Great Britain. We used to be tribes fighting each other. We might go to separate bits of Britain at the moment in this current climate, but we have to try and remain a little bit optimistic. And what I say to all the startups, if your technology is great and your business opportunity is great and you work hard and just get on with it, you can improve things. Focus on that and don't worry about all the noise. So back when you were the first CEO of Armory, you're already thinking that humans can achieve anything they want? If to just... Well, only if... What I actually say to all the kids I talked to, I said, any one of you in this room is capable of achieving anything you want to, provided you work out what it is you want to do. Most people never work out what they want to do, so they never achieve it. And because I don't actually feel that, okay, in the eyes of the world, I've had some success, et cetera, I'm just an ordinary human being, right? I've followed my... And the other thing I believe with the kids and me as well, if you follow your passions and you're honest to your passions, you've got a much better chance than if you go to a job you hate for a lot of money. And so I always say, follow your passion. And then the other key bit is people. So people... I think without Larry Tesla on my board, I probably would have failed with Arm because I could phone up Larry, have an honest chat with him, and he could help me, right? And we all need somebody helping us, right? Whatever that is. And we need... And families and friends really, really help. And they are... The unsung heroes are a thousand times more important than the heroes in the textbooks. So if there are these potential technologies that will save us, that will save the world, how do you identify where they are? And we hear the Royal Academy, right? How do you... How do those potential... The key thing is the people you're dealing with, are they being brutally honest, or are they just creating a lot of noise and smoke scheme? They... So my standard interview question to people is tell me the biggest mistake you've ever made in your life, right? If they can't articulate that, that either means they're lying or they don't know what they're doing, right? So that's a good one. Then also tell me what's your biggest achievement. And through a very simple process, you can establish who's sound and who's... You occasionally make a mistake, but there's some fairly basic things you do. So you're looking at the person, not the... Everybody can have a lovely presentation with lovely graphs, but it can be rubbish, right? So it's about people, that's it. And so with the Royal Academy, so I'm a fellow here and I'm in a mentorship programme, and I said one of the things I decided I would never get involved in mechanical engineering because I don't understand it. But this guy called Sam, who's the boss of Libertine, who's doing the free piston engines, I'm having all these meetings with him. I think this guy's really good. He's really sound, he's really solid. I go, Sam, would you like me to give you a check? I said I would never do this. But because it's you, I'll give you a check. And he says, yes, please. So you actually back people. That's what you do. And you can have your views about what you will and won't do and of course you always break the rules. All right, well, we're out of light, so... But I mean, we could talk more. We could talk, yeah, it's something we forgot to talk about. No, no, so what we might do for another occasion, so all these startups are really interesting and so is the Royal Academy of Enterprise here. But one of the things we need to do better is turn great technology into commercial success and your promotion of that could be a good topic. I mean, if you could come to my talk of the academy, I'm really excited about all these startups. What I'm saying is, so Arm has done this and we've done it, wouldn't it be lovely if we could create another 1,000 arms? And there's no reason why we couldn't do that if we get organized. So you're optimistic about the future. Donald Trump just got elected yesterday and Brexit and softback and you're optimistic about the future. Well, why not? I'm still alive and there's great stuff happening, okay? And if you look back on the history, I was very against Margaret Thatcher attacking the folklore line. So if I look back at the history of politics every day in every newspaper, there's something that's really, really upset me. So the idiots, well, I'm sorry to say, politicians really, they are voted locally. They have to get elected and most of the people who are voting for them and the politicians, they cannot have a global perspective. So the reality is we live in a totally globalized society, completely interdependent on each other. Unfortunately, our politicians are not allowed to live that way because they're voted locally. So they have a slight challenge, right? My personal view is that politics and political systems have to go through some serious change. They are not fit for purpose today. And the reason why I'm optimistic, I think this is a route to some serious change. It has to be. And what do politicians do? They waste money, they take us to war, they promise things and never deliver. But when you talk to them one-on-one, they're not bad people, they mean well. But the political process and system doesn't work for a world that is incredibly interdependent with the internet and everything else. So the problem, and again, I have a friend of mine who's a former American ambassador here, Phil Adra, says one of the problems of America is we live in a 21st century economy, but with an 18th century constitution. So the problem is the political system is out of touch with where we are today. That's the problem. And the reason why I can be optimistic since these people are not really totally stupid, they just look like it is to me with the sandbites on the television. That's, I'm very unfair to them by judging them that way. They, we're going through a transitional period. And that's how I can be optimistic. And the optimistic thing is that the people of middle America and the people of middle England are equally unhappy. And all of this is about their voices getting heard. So that's a good start. And technology can help. Technology can help. But the other thing is technology is also to blame. So the problem is technology has the potential to help, but it also has the potential to be devastating. So nuclear energy is an example. You can have the bomb or you can have power. So technology is just a tool, as I say, to break the rules and to improve things. That's the opportunity. It's man who makes the decision on how to apply technology. And so people who can be afraid of technology as well, if you don't understand something, you can be afraid of it. One of the things that worries me about technology, every human being on this planet is using their mobile phones. And they're not at all aware of security and all sorts of things. And my friends, who are not very technical, all the things they worry about in security to do with their mobile phones, they shouldn't worry about. And things they do worry about, they don't think about. So I think we need some more education. So I don't believe like technology is great and fantastic and people are stupid. Basically, technology has a positive role to play potentially or a negative one. Donald Trump was elected maybe because of Twitter. Well, that's what they say. They're all saying it's social media's fault. I feel some responsibility for this with all these armed devices. So I joke the world's problems are caused by the armed success, right? But poor people are using armed devices to improve their livelihood, improve crop yields or whatever. And I think through the history, I mean, you remember the Luddites against the machines, you remember the wheels. So throughout the history of mankind, technology has presented both opportunity and problems, right? And again, if we look at health, if we look at new applications for technology, so better use of energy, better food. But one of the things with Plessey's Gaelim Nitride Light Emitting Diets is producing lighting for crops to grow through the night. So there's opportunities there, but equally, technology can displace jobs. So one of the worries in the artificial intelligence community is less assuming all the cars are going to drive us and we don't need chauffeurs anymore. So technology presents problems and opportunity, but it's how human beings adapt that and use it. And I stay out of that. I don't like politics very much. But do you sit there or do you ski? And you think people in Africa are using the internet the first time on a non-parallel phone? Yes, yes, yes, and I've seen them. And the other thing is that, and my wife and I, by the way, my wife is actually a, we do some charity things. My wife is a trustee of a charity called the Camelay, which means together as one, which is a charity in Togo. And we've got the health clinic there and we're using solar energy and we're improving the quality of those people's lives. So that's a positive bit. But the world, I think the other thing with the internet now, in the old days, there were problems going on that we were not aware of. And now, whenever there's the slightest problem, we hear about it. So I think we're a lot more aware. I don't know if you've seen the stories of Churchill. Churchill was prime minister and his deputy, Attlee, was having an operation and Churchill had actually had a stroke, right? And he didn't tell the queen. He told the queen he'd had a cult, right? I mean, so there you have the greatest hero of here telling lies, you know? So what I realize is nonsense has gone on forever and that's part of human nature. And we should try and understand it rather than judge it.