 Welcome everybody, and what I hope is that there's something in this for everybody, right? So, I am an engineer, I did study here. When I graduated here in 1968, engineers didn't get paid very much money. They still don't get paid the best money, but they get paid a lot more than I did. And some of my friends, they went off to be chartered accountants, because they, the chartered accountants got paid twice as much as engineers. But I stuck at my engineering. I started in research and development. And one of the things I believe in is following my passions. And I always had a passion for electronics. I had an electrical outfit when I was eight. And I had a radio TV repair business when I was 13. And all I've done is follow my passions. And I think, I say that to the kids, I tell them, if you can find what your passions are, you can follow them. You might have a chance, right? And as the Blink 182 song says, life is too short, too much long, right? So, you better make the most of it. And basically, I did my R&D. I gave a talk to the Royal Television Society called TV and Chips. It was a joke. They were microchips. And I gave that to the Royal Television Society. And threw that motor over high in me and gave me a lovely company car. And so one of the other things I say to the kids, I am a fan of the IET. I joined this institution. Because, yeah, I graduated. A professor here was named as Professor Meek. He was the president of the IET. And he says, you should all sign up for this. You get it, right? So, the only thing I want to give you is, you sit exams. You get worried. You have spreadsheets. But life is about people and contacts. So, it's lovely to be a little more. We started on the company at the end of 1997. The key thing, and this is how I became so on the inside speed, had lots of failures in my life. And eventually, I got it right. Getting it right is all about failing and picking yourself up. So, this is the story of the ARM architecture. From a non-technical of you, ARM is a microprocessor. It was also a company. And Acorn, a company, some of you know, the BBC, Michael Computer, the Acorn Archimedes, a friend of Michael, Herman Houser, who was the CEO of Acorn, some while back, he decided that the team there would build a risk microprocessor. And risk is reduced instruction set. Computing. The idea of risk is it goes faster than six. So, they designed this chip called the ARM-1. And basically, they got a great team of R&D engineers and they got a great chip. But actually, they only made about 50,000 computers a year. And there are a lot of competitors there, like Intel and every major electronics company, Motor only, Zylo, National 700, all the Japanese companies, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Samsung, they're all building their own chips. So, Acorn had a chip that was pretty good. But the problem with R&D for a little company like Acorn is how do you afford to pay the R&D costs and how do you take the business forward? And actually, what was happening was the Acorn Archimedes computer was really losing market share because along with it was coming Apple and the PC. And in reality, Acorn's market was people who watched the BBC microcomputer program. So, their business wasn't going the right way and they had an expensive R&D team. There was a guy at Apple called Larry Tesla, who was the chief scientist of Apple, and he liked this R architecture. And he wanted to use it for a product called Newton. And Newton failed handwriting tablets. So, again, he ran the word failure. But yeah, the Newton turned into the iPhone. So, in engineering, generally speaking, you have one or two failures and if you like it, you might get some success. And usually my view of the start of a new technology to success realistically, you're looking at a minimum cycle of 10 years or more likely 20 years. So, learning how to fail and pick yourself up, I think is part of good engineering. So, what happened is Larry was interested in this technology and Apple were interested in it. And VLSI technology, which was another American company, were building these chips for Acorn. And VLSI said to Larry, Acorn are thinking of spinning this technology out into an independent company. And that's where I came along. In the summer of 1990, I got a headhunting phone call saying, Acorn are thinking of spinning this out into a joint venture. Apple are thinking of investing, but unless they have a CEO, it's not going to happen. Can I have a chat? So, I had a chat. And I still have the paperwork of the dialogue I had between about August and December of that year about the startup and what the business model would be. And that was my major contribution, I think. So, I think that's the other message. I had worked in the semiconductor industry from 1973 to, we created R again in 1990. So, I had 20 or years of experience in the semiconductor industry. I was actually president of an American company, US2 in Silicon Valley, and also experienced in Japan and Tokyo. And I was the season, if you like, in a Vodicom's semiconductor veteran. And what I'd say to anybody who's thinking of starting a business, good technology is important, but people who understand the market, the competition, the customers are probably even more important. Because, actually, the world is full of great technology, but it isn't full of how to acquire that technology to meet a customer need, and I think that's where I was successful. So, what happened is we formed a joint venture of the 28th of November 1990. I was the first CEO. I was actually CEO, president, chairman and everything. We just had to roll engineers and me. And I did the marketing brochure. I did the PR. I did the travel. I even took my circuit diagrams at the meetings in Japan because we're a very small lean and mean startup. And so, that was the foundation of R. And the first product we created was something called the R6, which, and the R610. R610 was used in the Apple news. And the first few years, we were honestly struggling to stay alive. We had made 1.5 million pounds of seed capital. And that money was due to run out within a year or so. The truth is that 12 family engineers of Acorn thought that we'd all be bankrupt and Acorn would cast them off. But I persuaded one guy, Jamie Archott, who was the most senior of the 12 engineers of the team in Acorn, that we could become a global risk standard. So, my vision was, what if we all became a global risk standard and we'd turn everybody's surprise. We did it, okay? And then, all things happened. So, our first license to pay this money was a G.C. Blessing. And then after that came Sharp in Japan. And then after that came Cirrus Logic in America. And Texas Instruments and so on and so forth. And what happens is the early years, the years one, two and three, and they're the ones we really struggle to start to get successful momentum kicks in. And we had, after, by about 1994, 1995, everybody was queuing up wanting to license on a weak tonical. One of our weaknesses was the conventional chip technology had what flows you into computers and stuff, they had good code density and a risk computer doesn't have good code density. What that means is the size of the program to do a particular job in assist technology was smaller than in a wrist technology and that meant the cost of the wrist memory footprint was more expensive with risk than sisk. So we invented something called fun. And I think that is the most important invasion of arm. It happens, the jerky is the thumb fits on the end of the arm, by the way. And it's the 16th implementation of a 32-bit arm which dramatically improves the code density. Another weakness we had, we had major competitors like MIPS particular like Intel, like Motorola. We didn't have a very performant arm chip. We had chips that were good at low power and low cost, but we didn't have high performance. So we teamed up with Digital and we did something called Strong Arm which actually was strong and powerful and fast, and that's how we got there. And then Intel, by the way, bought Digital, that was another interesting charge. And in 1998, we went public. We duly listed on NASDAQ and London and that was a good idea because American markets at the time value technology more than London markets. And then in 1990 out in paper I was wealthy. We actually created 200 millionaires in the year we went public because I was a great believer in share options. All employees had share options. But I do believe again, in life, you know, there's like a boss, there's like a everybody in the team should make a contribution just to keep the boss doesn't mean you're any good. You might be good for something, but there will be other people that are good at other things and it's about the team. So I believe that share options in a startup are a very good idea because startups, you pay less salary, you work longer hours, you do more work, there's going to be some upside somewhere if you make it successful. This journey it took about eight years to be a public that looks like we had it happen, we'll ever go public, we'll ever make money and that's another risk and something else that also helped is we were in a European collaborative project called the open microprocessor systems initiative that I actually shared and we were getting in years two, three and four, about 400,000 pounds a year from Europe and without that project we probably would have gone by a trip. So this is another interesting issue we have at the moment in this world. I'm not like a white about any politics, but what the European collaboration gave us as well as money was we established an on-chip stand and bus called AMBA within this European project. So I am a fan of European R&D projects. And then what happened is so after we went public in 98, I stayed CEO immediately after that. I'm a great believer in succession planning and I stopped being CEO of 54. I did that a year earlier, I swear more on this ago and I said I wanted to stop being chairman at the age of 60 and I think I was 61. So I do believe in planning. So Warren took over as CEO he is now the CEO of Rolls-Royce one of his some of the odd item we're still good friends. I retired from in October 2007 and Simon Seeders is the current CEO while he's some of the other employees of that employee. And you probably noticed in September of 2016 Softbank acquired on for about 23 billion pounds I think, which is for a 1.5 million CEO investment. And this Simon is now on the main board of Softbank. So in the life of our private company, money from America money from Japan, we've got Japanese investor as well in about 1993 he's always been a global company and it just happens to be owned by some Japanese this week. Anything can happen in the future. And that's I retired from in 2007, you can click on that and see the milestones and the history of our going forwards. How did it happen? I am a very big believer in SWAT analysis. Strength, weakness, opportunities and threats. I think you can apply this to anything. Whatever it is you want to do. If you do a SWAT analysis, I think it's a very good staff and it's a tool I love to promote all over. And I got this team of 12 founding engineers to do SWAT analysis. So I don't know what SWAT was. I didn't actually contribute to this analysis at all and you've seen they did it on the 12 founding team who had virtually no commercial experience. They were all engineers, came up with some analysis. And what they said is the art architecture is low power, it's good batteries, it's low cost, it's cheaper actually, it's simple and it's small. And this 12 man founding team was flexible, responsive, dynamic, successful, enthusiastic and they had extensive systems expertise. Because basically they had designed the Acorn Archies computer in chip so they could do the chip layout but they could also do the software they did the operating system called Wiskos. And in this 12 person team, they had to be all men but it could be different today, they had a broad experience and that was pretty good. Weaknesses, zero market share, zero market profile, zero revenue, zero marketing expertise, limited resources. If you wanted to program an ARM chip, you need an Acorn Archies computer and we want to be the global standard and there's only about 100,000 Acorn computers out there, that's not going to work, is it? Didn't know much about characterisation, testing and manufacturing and there was a reliance on one family manufacturing so they had one part of their VLSI technology and nobody else had made an ARM chip. What do we see as the opportunity? We see digital mobile phones but at the time, digital mobile phones hadn't arrived, they were still analog at that time but we said portable. The big market for microcomputers is embedded control, that means everything, and you print it in camera all the bits of stuff in your electronics product and that was the volume market, automotive cars, radiation hard, that again fuels and we said again, places and partnership, Japan and the far east, the European project and then mine, silicon manufacturers, silicon users, silicon distributors wouldn't get a bit of money from them because they were the only part they didn't have any money because Acorn didn't really have a lot of money, although we could get a bit out of them and some consultancy, threats, big riots, that was every semiconductor company on the planet, Texas Instruments, Intel, National Semi, LSI Logic, Toshiba, 150 competitors all with hundreds of millions of dollars to kill us. We're going to be the world's global standard and an intellectual property company and we don't have any patents, earlier that's not so good, small team relying on individuals we're working very long hours, existing commitments, so for the foundation of the company we had to do this chip for Acorn which is a floating point accelerator that used half engineering resource for the company and only 500 of those chips were ever sold so that wasn't particularly good and we had a single customer of trust and that was Apple and we had no control over our income, so that was the foundation swap that these engineers did, so this is where I came along with my sprints so with all those weaknesses the only way we're going to succeed is if we become the global standard really, and I actually said we will be the global risk standard with the words I used everybody said I was mad, I probably am, but anyway we did it and everybody said what's he talking about, how can we do that, we've only got five shillies and six and so we'll be bankrupt, but Jamie said yeah I think we might do it and then we also said we need to create a partnership business more in order to succeed, we needed to create a community to have standard architecture to make this work we'd turn our enemies into our friends we needed to develop some of the marketing skills of the founding engineers so in my previous job which was US2, this was a startup which was doing direct work on the way for e-beam stuff and that was about US2 the technology didn't work and I had to fire most of the people there to try and get to break even if I was doing that I thought well if you start leading a mean and growing the business as the income comes in that's better than having to fire everybody so with this 12 family team I put Jamie in charge of sales he was the head of the OSI I put Mike who got more purple time I put him in charge of marketing and I put a tutor in charge of engineering and we just did it basically start from building a patent portfolio we got some external patilations and we got that building and then software design tools on the PC we did that and then the key benefit of ARM which is where the technology was better than anything on the planet we have the best mix for what which is performance over power consumption and we have the best mix for dollar which is performance over costs and that's how we could win and everybody say you can get some of our phones you never need a risk architecture fortunately they were all wheelerite and then the other key thing is we'll enable this chip to be embedded within a system chip and we'll turn it into a standard and then we identified key and uses so the people we got the money from were the semiconductor companies like Plessy the OSI shop, Texas Instruments Samsung, OSI logic but we understood what the users of their and customers were in order to make sure the architecture fitted with those needs so with Apple which was doing this new chip supply was Plessy and VLSI our first Japanese licensee the big design one was the Nintendo Gameware Vans Nokia which was the first really successful product it was Nokia Nokia 6310 and that's why we went to the firm architecture Samsung, I had a meeting with Samsung in about 1992 at a guy called Heinle Roe and he is a really great guy Dr. Heinle Roe and we talked about the effort of embedding risk processes in everything that Samsung made and he got the idea and they did and that's been hugely successful for Samsung if you look at where Samsung is technologically today that was almost the foundation of their success similarly with Nokia the Nokia 6310 at the time over to Ericsson and Motorola so win win win win win is the business idea and then OSI got into destruction so so from the starting of on we also thought about the community who is going to add value to this architecture so we had silicon partners these people who built chips we had design support partners who could give consulting design advice software partners people like Microsoft people like real time operating system companies training partners systems partners standards bodies and so on again Ericsson is part of that and basically we turned an architecture which had one chip supplier technology one customer acorn and no software really into the global standards so at today's date I'd like to thank you all because you've all got lots of on comments in your pocket doesn't help me anymore for some reason I don't have any shares but every time you buy a chip with ARM in it ARM gets a few cents of royalty so the business model was about licensing the technology for a few million pounds and every time somebody uses a chip a few cents maybe ten or twenty cents and so the good news is the total number of ARM chips sold on the planet today is more than a hundred billion so the ARM architecture is by far the most popular architecture on the planet so they can enter on everything else and we kind of did it and what I say is since I graduated here and I struggled with my exams and I'm still alive if I can do it anybody can do it but what I would say is you've got to have a vision you've got to think beyond the possible and back up to reality and there's nobody who doesn't use ARM today clearly in itself so what are the lessons and this is where technologists in particular I think struggle with still the existing markets and understand believing, teaching and customers their needs who are you competition is the learning process I'm very heavily involved in quite a few start ups and it's quite normal for start ups to not pay enough attention to the competition to learn about their own technical advantages and not think it through properly another reason why I believe ARM was successful and this is part of my international experience I have the board particularly able to say cry more engineers and you get, cry more engineers and you get I said no I had a guy called Tim O'Donnell in Silicon Valley who had worked for me before at US2 and he actually insisted on me hiring you he wouldn't leave my swimming pool in my hotel in the Sheraton Silicon Valley into my and I was with Tim in Hawaii just the other day for Halloween in Hawaii which is a fun place to go for Halloween probably the best place to go for Halloween I do recommend it street parties there are pretty good and Tim was an applications engineer but what I said to the board was it takes as long to develop the customer as it takes to develop the technology we need somebody in Silicon Valley so we hired Tim as employee number 18 when they were telling me to hire lots of engineers we hired Sakio Mishikawa which is trying to manage Woky River in Japan, Japanese as a back employee number 33 in Tokyo we hired a guy called Sam Kim in Korea we hired a guy called Jun Tan in China and so on so these people again it's about cultural stuff it's about language and the classic British thing it's fly and fly out as soon as you've left it's sort of changed so you need and then these people become currently presidents later so on I think has over a thousand engineers in Bangalore now so if I really believe very strongly that unless you go to the world unless you go to be successful, forget it and if you look at where China is today or India is today versus where they were all and stuff it on that momentum is gathering more and more pace and any staff anywhere can do good stuff and then the other thing is is more important than technology if you can solve an explicit need of a customer you might get a photo of it supposing I wanted to sell you a parachute would anybody like to buy a parachute I guess you're not too interested can you imagine if you were falling out of a plane and I'm coming by and I can click a parachute on your back and I say how much will you give me for that parachute so that is the explicit need not the customer if you understand that you might get some successful visits and technology has real value when you solve a real problem so the parachute saves your life so it's understanding the customer's problems and doing a better job to solve them than the incumbent suppliers can solve and then one of the things about me is I try to be brutally honest it causes me a lot of trouble sometimes but brute honesty is about what do I honestly think doesn't mean I'm right, it just means these are my opinions now challenge them and within the team we have a culture of challenging each other so we have this ability of challenging ourselves and going through but be honest be realistic, be down to earth, be pragmatic and the best person to challenge me of course is my wife so partners are also very helpful firm feet on the ground in the department is another good idea and then the other thing is when I start up you need the best finance people you need the best lawyers but you can't afford them but what you can do you can get them part-time and so the first finance director of ARM was a guy called Payne Wong who was from Malaysia originally he had been my finance director for eight years too and I got him doing the finance work for me part-time then when we could afford him we hired him the founding lawyer of ARM and the patent agents and so so again in the team you are as weak as the weakest link and it's the same football team if the goal team has no really got a problem so you need every position covered and then the other thing is if the team is really good and I think we did this with ARM say there's 12 people in the team you should get an output greater than 12 if the team is working well so this is called synergy so I believe in a really good team that's what you want to do and since there are not so good you've got 12 people you get an output of 4 if you like that's what most of real life does and the larger the company the harder it is to be successful so a small team is easier than a large team the bigger it gets more people involved more communication problems you have and then the other thing is you need different people at different times so I'm very happy to be retired from ARM so be honest about rotating changing people and so on and then the other thing which I really do believe in this is what I'm doing music now to see how impossible it is think beyond the possible and like up to reality you're going to get a song later and you can tell me the honest truth by the way if you don't want a song you can tell me I won't be heard some observations people often focus too much on technology push while in customer pool and that's the classic engineering mistake is the most important thing to do if a customer claims or something and you make some margin out of it you've probably got the right answers and the right solution if you haven't got any customers start again purchase orders are the most important thing and to succeed you have to be the world's best at something it doesn't mean you're the world's best at everything but in our case it was mixed for what mixed with our I'm going to embed and crawl unless you focus to be the world's best at something I'd say don't bother life's too short it's as weak as the weakest link this is the other thing that's hard as the boss when you promote somebody you believe in them and they're not delivering and it's hard to be realistic about finding more change but be as good for them as they can be and then I also believe in every board this time on which it adds we would debate everything we'd have violent arguments people consultants would come in and say this is the most important meeting we've ever been to that's because we were being honest thinking about venture capital money is time to money most venture capitalists they want to see a return on investment in four or five years time but in hardware related technology business to get real value that's one of their problems so if you can get angel investment that's got a long term horizon you're probably going to get a better chance and then understanding your total ecosystem so just an example of that so we're selling chips using those chips in their phones Vodafone is the operator there's services and applications that go on top of that see the whole picture because the devil is in the detail and if you're just looking at a little piece something will happen that you didn't expect that's what I mean about the whole ecosystem and this is another message for today that I realize so in business you know call me right back get the purchase order overnight the pace of business and making decisions is very quick and it's global and it's real time 24-7 welcome back to academia it's a bit different because you're working on a long term project you've got more time, you're doing a project you take several years maybe it can run at a certain space until it's going to the critical time where you've got to get your PhD and the world of politics something I don't understand but we decided to do something and it still looks like we're doing it on a political one so what I realize is it's not that business is right or politics is right or academia is right what I say is just recognize the differences and try to be honest about where they work together and they run at different speeds and then keep it simple and learn by doing and beware the drug of funding what I mean by that is you just keep getting the money from Brussels to do the project and actually not doing anything with you it's the drug of funding okay so where is on today so I retired from army in 2007 but more than 100 billion ships shipped in the microprocessor architecture on time arms recently signed a license agreement with the Chinese to do the world's fastest super computer so that's pretty nice, I didn't expect that to happen really more than five just about everybody is connected with armchips you know people that need to be working up by their apple alarm clock or get their email or their wallet message so we have seriously impacted the world in some cases one of the things that made me feel really good I was in Morocco in a very poor village and people were using their mobile phones with armchips for commerce and improving quality of their lives again things like controlling water so there are many nice applications of arm technology and I'm actually getting to a talk that arms hosting with UNESCO at St. James's Palace on Tuesday trying to use technology to improve the world always on what was connected storage in the cloud are very important today and it worries me that nobody thinks about that internet of things is the new buzzword basically means everything is connected to everything but it's okay until the security goes wrong and somebody steals your car and the cloud collapses and you don't know where you are but there's an opportunity there and the other thing I'm quite personally pleased with today is the Raspberry Pi which is another Cambridge startup and the micro of it are getting programmable micro computers into the kids' hands and I've got a couple of Raspberry Pi because I like playing in my lap so that's where I'm at today now looking to the future and this is where I am personally if I look at the startups that I'm involved in they're not doing what Arm is doing they're doing some new stuff so one of the things that matter for the world up tomorrow energy efficiency, right? we waste so much energy whether it's air conditioning or heating or lighting or whatever security, I don't think we even stuff to think about the reality of security I think everybody takes it all for granted but potentially it's a nightmare it's also an opportunity if you've got stuff in one for the clouds, healthcare another big error, servers the amount of these servers that serve Google and Facebook they actually run them next to power stations because they take so much power connectivity, robotics and artificial intelligence cloud over machine learning so the other good news for kids who are graduating today there's even more great stuff to do because when healthcare and medicine cross so the world is just starting in terms of this technology there's lots of great stuff going on so Sensual City I don't know if you know about it but I visited Sensual City the other day it's just down the road the idea is it's about sensors and connecting things and doing great stuff and stuff it's on me there, doorstep in the book it's fantastic I personally put some money into the role of the Academy of Engineering as an enterprise the Academy of Engineering has been good at creating PhDs and professors and all the rest of it creating jobs we've got about 80 startups and we've entered and again, if you think of a startup you can get free help and you can go a hot desk and what have you and then the other thing, and this is the kind of journey and it's because it's Christmas but this is my new hobby I have many new hobbies basically what happened is I was the academic speaker at University College London thirty-fourth fifth gala dinner of the computer science department and I thought the last thing that kids need is an academic speech so two and a half years ago there's a guy called Carrie who plays guitar from Gama and there's a girl called Nina from Brazil and I went over and said, when you have me out of a jam I'm going to try and give my lessons to my speech to music and we'll turn Umi into cruise bus so then Carrie said, why don't you write some songs and come into the studio I've got Umi who's my fellow teacher here so I'll start my camera lessons with Umi and what I'm going to do and suddenly I gave a lecture last week at the University and somebody said, can I get you a song somewhere so in the last week I've put some songs up in Bandcamp so if you want to download these songs they're all up there so robinandfriends.bandcamp.com and you can write me a and what I'm going to do now because as it's Christmas and as I love Liverpool the song I've decided to tonight is Che Che Liverpool and Che Che Kool-Aid is a Ghanaian folk song which is like for the kids it's like hide and seek up in there Che Che Kool-Aid and then if Che Che Kool-Aid meets Liverpool I'm going to get here is my story you have to listen carefully to the words I met my wife here took me to this place bombed out, yeah certainly it's grace investment, post war the keys to an open doors every night plastic glasses with a fight bass guitarist with a scar just a number don't let it get you down so you can tell my age doesn't get me down at all in fact I've got more freedom in my age to do more than I want so thank you for listening we're all different we've all got skill every human is really important just going to work out what it is you want to do if you can you've got a chance I wish you all lots of luck we're also sharing that down here song