 Here at the Amadeus Capital Partners' Office here in London. Hi, I'm Hermann Hauser. I'm the founder of Acron Computers, which spanned out ARM. So how do you feel about ARM? And so this is huge, no? There's like 75,000, 75,000,000. ARM is my proudest achievement in my life. And as people probably know, there is a cumulative sales number of ARM of over 70 billion ARMs in the world, which means that on average, there are 10 ARMs that have been sold for every person on Earth. So I interviewed Sophie Wilson, and she said that it was a plan, that it was MIPS for the masses. So she said she was not even surprised. But are you a little surprised what happened? The actual phenomenal amount of numbers of ARMs that have been sold worldwide in the end did come as a great surprise to me. I knew it was going to be very successful because of the outstanding properties that ARM has in terms of power consumption and the simplicity of the instruction set, which was very well received by the industry, but that it would become the dominant microprocessor in the world was not something that I expected. It's gonna be an interesting feeling to have, right? You walk around the planet, you walk around anywhere, and you just know that you had a part that it happened, that all these devices are using ARM. Yes, well, it's very satisfying to give lectures anywhere in the world as you suggested. And I can count on over 90% of the people in the audience having one of my products in their pockets because we've got a 95% market share in mobile phones and most people now carry mobile phones with them. So back then in Cambridge, how was the atmosphere? How did it feel to go to the office every day and how do you define all these guys that you were working with? Well, you know, if we look back at history of how the ARM was created, it was one of the most exciting and satisfying events in my life when the ARM chip came back from the Foundry and I bought two bottles of champagne to celebrate. We plugged the ARM in the development system and of course it didn't work. So this was a great disappointment. But two hours later, they called me back into the R&D department and told me that it now works. Within two hours they managed to debug a completely new chip and it actually said, hello world, I am an ARM which meant that the ARM worked, the circuit board that they had constructed worked, that the software that they had written for a processor that didn't exist until then worked and put up the note, hello world, I am an ARM. So then we opened the bottles of champagne and we had a very good time. So when you're talking about the strategy back then of computer companies having to do their own silicon or they would fail, right? Yes, I gave many talks at the time when I argued that there will be two types of computer companies, those that have learned how to design on silicon and then those that will be dead and I wanted to be one of those companies that designed on silicon and that's what we did. Originally we didn't want to do a microprocessor. From the beginning of Acorn computers we always had custom chips for video, for the serial IO and it was only later when we realized that the 65 or two microprocessor which was an 8-bit microprocessor, very good microprocessor also used by Apple too and we used it for the BBC microcomputer but it just wasn't powerful enough for all the new software and all the new ideas that we had. So we went out and looked for a 32-bit processor. We actually liked the Intel 80 286 quite well but they wouldn't give us just the die and we accused them of doing a stupid pinout because they put both the address and the data bus on the same pins and we argued that you couldn't make a sensible computer out of that because we needed low latency because we always multiplexed the screen and the main memory on the same DRAM chips which was a very efficient way of building a very fast computer with very good graphics and they wouldn't allow us to have the die and do our own pinout. If they had allowed us, we would have never done the arm. So the only reason why we did the arm is that Intel wouldn't sell us the 80 286 die so that we could do our own pinout. Back then, were you meeting with people like Andy Grove or some other people at Intel? I did meet Andy Grove at one of Estetizel's conference. I remember having breakfast with him but that wasn't the discussion. At that time, we didn't work on the arm yet and because Acorn was such a small company that never really went up high enough in the Intel hierarchy. It was some lower level managers that made that decision. So that was a close thing, right? Intel didn't want to work with you, so you made arm. Yes, so we said, well, the story actually that I always tell is that Intel actually said when we asked them whether we could just buy the die, they said, look, get lost. So we said, well, you get lost, build your own because we were arrogant enough at the time because we were very successful at Acorn. We were the first company to go from zero to a hundred million pound revenue in just five years. So we were a great success in Britain. So we dared to produce our own microprocessor. Little did I know that it was going to become so spectacularly successful. So Intel actually said get lost? I tell it, they didn't, I'm sure they didn't actually said get lost, they said, look, why do you think that Intel would sell you the die? You know, we are a chip company, we sell you the chip if you wanted, but you can't tinker with our chip. We're just to important the company for a little British company to change our chips. So that was the story about Intel. And then there was Apple starting around the same time as Acorn, right? That's right, just a year earlier than us, I think. And it's probably not widely known that the survival of Apple actually depended on ARM. And this is a story that John Scully tells, not me, if you Google John Scully's biography of Steve Jobs and ARM, you'll find a paragraph that says that Apple would have gone bust had Apple not been able to sell their one and a half million dollar investment in ARM, which bought them 43%. And they managed to sell it for 800 million at the time when they were in deep financial trouble. That was before the iMac and stuff, who's in the 90s? Yes, that was during the time that John Scully was running Apple. And Apple was in great difficulty at the time before Steve Jobs returned. And Steve Jobs used ARM a lot, and the iPod and... He used ARM everywhere. It was, of course, in the iPod, which became a great success. And then the iPhone and then the iWatch and all the A-series, the A4, the A5, and the A6, they're all, of course, ARM-based microprocessors. So did you meet Steve Jobs back then in the 80s? I did indeed, yes. In the early 80s, Esther Dyson's conference and the agenda conference was where everybody met at the time. So Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, they were all at these conferences. We often had dinner together. So it was an interesting time because all these people, of course, weren't famous yet. And so there was this guy called Larry Tesla, right? And he was instrumental together with you and together with VLSI, starting the spin-off. That's right. Larry Tesla was in charge of the Apple Newton and he made the decision to make the investment in ARM. And the thinking was because you were a small company, you would actually support it. What was that? Yes, it was an interesting decision because he was actually working with AT&T Microelectronics at the time. And AT&T Microelectronics was a $2 billion company and they had a processor called the Hobbit, which was actually quite a good processor, very comparable to the ARM. But he was very frustrated in his relationship with AT&T Microelectronics. And AT&T Microelectronics had done a microprocessor before that they then didn't support. So Larry was very worried that AT&T will do the same again with the Hobbit, that they'd have a good product, but they wouldn't know how to sell it and therefore they will discontinue it, which is actually what happened. But he trusted a small Cambridge company and it was extraordinary for a senior Apple manager to think that way. He thought, well, that little Cambridge company has nowhere else to go. They've got to make a success of the ARM. And that's what they did. And that's why he was willing to change from the Hobbit. He had already, he had a Hobbit design and changed to the ARM design partially for that reason, partially because of course the ARM was lower power, which was important. So how did you pitch to Larry Tetzler? How do you connect with him or get into these discussions to have him? Did he just show up because he knew about it or did you actually go? No, we were working on a, there was a Cambridge startup called Active Book Company. And he wanted to work with us on and find out what we were doing at the Active Book Company. And I told him it was ARM based and showed him what the Active Book Company could do. And then he was getting very interested in the ARM because he realized it was a really very powerful process that was exactly what he looked for for the Newton project. And he had the power to do that investment, 1.5 million? 1.5 million was nothing for Apple at the time, yes, he did. He was nothing? He didn't even have to ask the CEO? No, no, no, he did ask Scully, yes, whether he could do that, but... Do you know what kind of discussions they had or he just said, let me do it? It probably was a very simple discussion as I'd like to make this small investment in Cambridge and Scully said, ah, sure, go ahead. And then there's Bill Gates. Did he visit you once, right? Yes, he visited us at Acorn. This was before ARM. And I remember Sophie Wilson showing off his BBC Basic to him. It was clear that BBC Basic had many features and was running a lot faster than MS Basic, the Microsoft Basic, which Bill Gates himself, was the only program that Bill himself wrote. And, you know, Bill was impressed. Was impressed, but so you were better than Microsoft? You were better than... Oh, we were clearly better, we had a better basic interpreter but we also had a much better operating. He wanted to sell me MS-DOS and I could tell him, Bill, we can't take such a retrograde step. Look at our operating system, which actually is a real operating system. It was miles better than his operating system at the time. Of course, he improved his operating system later. And I could sit him down and say, by the way, you can write... If you're a schoolboy in British school, you can write star I am Johnny and you're logged on to the local area network. And then you can use the same load and save commands as with the floppy disk. And it all goes through the network to a server and Bill's reaction to that was, what's a network? We've never sold a computer at ACOM computers without a network connection because that's one of the great strengths in Cambridge. We have a close relationship with Andy Hopper, who is now the head of the computer lab who invented the Cambridge ring, which was one of the leading networking local area networks in the world at the time. Yeah. And then there was Apple at the time doing the Apple I, maybe Apple II and stuff like that. And would you say, do you want to answer? Or maybe you can... Yeah. That was my wife. Yes, Pamela, yes. Let me just get it. You don't have to cover it. You don't have to cover it if you don't want to. Okay, see you later. Bye-bye. So there was the Apple. I'm sorry, this is my question. Yep. How do you think the ACOM was comparing with what Apple had back then? Well, at the time, Apple II was one of the most popular computers in the United States. And we had the BBC Micro, which actually in the UK had a 60% market share. And one of the reasons for that was that the BBC Micro was just miles better than the Apple II in every respect. It ran twice as fast. It was black and white in color. It mixed graphics and text on the same screen, which the Apple couldn't do at the time. The Apple was also only black and white. And it had a network connection, which Apple didn't have at the time. So we had all the advantages at the time over Apple. But of course, Apple then brought out the Macintosh, which became a great success. So it was a good price also compared to what Apple had. Yes, and it also was a lot cheaper. A lot cheaper. Yes. So you were much better than Apple, much better than Microsoft. Yes. Much better than Intel. Yes. But why were you not able to... I don't know how to say, but kind of like kill them in the US? That's a very good question. And I've been asked that many times before. And there's a very simple answer to that. And that is just the size of the British market. We dominated the British market with a 60% market share, but that was nothing compared with the US market. And we had a very naive way of going into the US market. We started our own subsidiary. And we didn't hire the right people. We spent a lot of money trying to preserve one of the great advantages of the BBC Micro that it had lots and lots of connections. But because it had so many connections, it was very difficult to get past the FCC regulations. They had very stringent emission regulations. And because we had all these connectors, and they were radiating like hell. So it took us a lot of time and a lot of money to re-engineer the company, to re-engineer the product. And by the time we put the product on the market, it was already too late and we actually lost a lot of money in the US. So is it just the FCC? Like putting a barrier kind of anti-competitive or not really, but I guess they would have let you in if you passed the test, I guess. But is it just the FCC or is it like a different style of business? Because maybe those companies in the US are more cunning or more aggressive or more, you know what I mean? Like, they become engaged? The delay was the FCC delay because of the particular engineering approach that we had taken with hindsight. What we should have done is just close down all the connectivity that we were so proud of because the computer itself was much better than the Apple anyway without the connectivity. And I remember that the Apple actually was very worried about our computer. I remember people on the board saying, well, they are the most serious competitor that we're going to have. But because of the delay, we never got traction in the American market. I think if we had brought out the product a year or two earlier, then we could have become a serious competitor to Apple. And Intel became a huge business also selling on chips. I guess it's just the business model, right? They have a business model of making all our money and... Yes, well, the main difference in the business model between Intel and ARM, of course, is that Intel is a semiconductor company that sells chips. ARM is a licensing company that just sells license to other manufacturers to produce the chips. And that turned out to be a major strategic advantage because the fight was actually not of Intel versus ARM, but was Intel versus the rest of the world because all the semiconductor companies in the world have ARM licenses. So Qualcomm, Apple, Toshiba, Sony, all these companies have ARM licenses and they produce their own microprocessors. And of course that's much cheaper for them because they don't need to buy the processors from a semiconductor company. And the royalty that ARM gets is quite small compared with the margins that of course Intel can command. And so the ARM was originally designed for a computer, for a PC. Yes. But then Nokia came in and kind of shipped the whole focus for ARM and mobile, right? And it's still kind of mostly focused in mobile. That's right. Yes, the ARM was designed for the BBC Microcomputer as a successor microprocessor to the 65 or two with which it has a lot in common. And power consumption was actually not one of the main design objectives other than we wanted to make sure that the chip would fit into a plastic package because the plastic package was a lot cheaper than ceramic packages and we didn't want to have a heat sink. So it wasn't really that the ARM was designed for portable computers that were battery powered, but we wanted to have a low power device in our BBC Micro that didn't need a heat sink. Little did we know that this became such a huge difference to other processors that it was the ideal processor for mobile phones. At that time, we were 20 times more power efficient than Intel and other processors. It really was a spectacular power difference that we managed to achieve at the same performance. So, and you also had the fastest performance, right? We had the fastest performance and that was the reason, just that one component, that ARM processor was the reason why ACON could survive against Intel and PCs for another 10 years. So the company continued selling its PCs, which were much higher performance than the Intel-based computers and had much better graphics than Intel-based computers for another 10 years. And your team designing this first ARM chip and the following, they were like geniuses, right? They were. I mean, Steve Febren, Sophie Wilson in particular, the two people who made the original design. Of course, there was also a big silicon design team, but the architecture was defined by these two people as opposed to 50 people, which typical microprocessor groups at Intel or AMD would help design an architecture. So, because it was such a small group, as far as I know, it's the only processor in the world that was designed by just two people. And that made for a very harmonious and very usable instruction set. And that instruction, it must be said that the instruction set was a stroke of genius by Sophie Wilson. The instruction sets of RISC-based computers are normally simulated for many, many months as IBM did. They simulated the RISC architecture for a whole year, simulating how Unix and the C compiler would run on their RISC machine. We didn't have a mainframe computer, so we asked Sophie what the instruction set should be and a week later, she had written down arguably one of the best instruction sets in the world and she did all the optimization just in her head. So, how was she back then and Steve Ferber, could you try to describe, would they like geeks? Or would they like... Well, there were both members of the Cambridge Microprocessor Group, which was a student group that was interested in microprocessors and microprocessors was such an exciting development in computing that all the students wanted to be working with microprocessors and there was a very vibrant microprocessor group that actually produced little kits that they actually produced little home computer kits themselves. And Steve had one based on the 2650, Signetics 2650, I remember, and Sophie was known as the CMOS guy. He was an expert at CMOS chips. So in those days, CMOS was not yet the dominant process. There were NMOS and PMOS products as well and bipolar projects. So that's how I got to know them when they were still at the microprocessor group. So you were walking around the university and you were doing your things nearby, right? PhD in physics? Yes, I did my PhD in physics and when I finished that, I met Chris Curry and we started Acorn Computers together and he, I remember, I said, Chris, it's a good idea to start a company but what are we gonna do? And he said, well, it's all happening in microprocessors. Let's do something with microprocessors. And that was our business plan. That was it. And then we went to the local bank and wanted a loan and the bank manager said, it's very good to see these young people start companies and then he did his due diligence and said, now, which college did you go to? And it was the bank that was opposite King's College. So I could point out of his window and say, this one. And he said, oh, very good, here is 10,000 pounds. Get started. And that was how the business was financed. There was no venture capital at the time. And how much did you invest yourself? You and Chris Curry, is it fair for you? We both invested a lot of money. It was first 50 pounds each and then we doubled this to 100. So the total amount of money that ever went into Acorn computers was 200 pounds. But would you say that making computers is related with your PhD or not really? No, other than, of course, all the semiconductor industry is physics-based and I did my PhD in physics, but I had to learn about computing and microprocessors. I remember one of the first things I did is I bought Adam Osborne's book on microprocessors because I didn't know what a microprocessor was. And it was actually a very good book, explaining in great detail of how a microprocessor worked, what the arithmetic logic unit was, how the registers were organized and what the store architecture was. So that's what I did. And then there's this movie called Markerman where you were... Were you really fighting with Clive Sinclair? Oh, yes, because Chris had been working with Clive Sinclair before. He left Sinclair at Radionics as it was called and then Science of Cambridge and because he didn't want to work for Clive anymore, and then we started Acorn computers. But that has always been because Sinclair produced a product called the ZX80 and then the ZX Spectrum. And we had the BBC Micro. There was a local fight between these two companies and who could sell more computers and who could bring out a better next-generation machine. Is there any chance that you could have merged you and Sinclair and kind of like Toucan Apple instead, like focus on... No, we had completely different philosophies. He was in the Z80 camp. We were in the 65 at Toucan. And it was actually quite healthy that there was this competition. We created a lot of energy within Acorn by knowing that there is a competitor in the same town that is also very good. So, could you describe a little bit more what is your role in ARM being spin out and how was the meetings and when you found the CEO and all the other stuff that happened to spin it out? Well, when I met Larry Tesla, who was looking for a processor for his Newton machine, that's how the ARM... Well, actually it started three years earlier. So we decided at Acorn that we really needed to spin out ARM because nobody would buy a microprocessor from a potential competitor because we used the ARM in our own computer, of course. So another computer company would always argue, well, they will always have an advantage because they're designing the ARM. So we decided to spin it out. We almost had a deal with Thompson in France for a European educational microprocessor. We almost had a deal with Siemens. Siemens was looking at the ARM, but in the end it didn't come through. But it was only when we met Apple that they were willing to invest in ARM and then we could spin it out. And then we found Robin Saxby to be the first CEO and that was another fantastic decision. I'd known Robin for many years before and because he was a sales manager for Motorola and he was trying to sell me the 60,000 as a follow-on to the 65 or two, but we decided to do the ARM. And then Robin went to the US to do US2 that was a direct right silicon company that was founded by Rob Wilmot and we managed to get him back to a head-up ARM and that was a fantastic decision because he bonded with the team extremely well and built a great company from a few million revenue to a value of $10 billion. And did Olivetti also have a role in pushing you towards spinning ARM out? Yes, I did. Many of these meetings I did together with El Serino Piolli, the vice chairman of Olivetti and we went together to Thomson and to Siemens and then we did the Apple deal. When it didn't pan out with Thomson and Siemens, were you a little bit disappointed? No, we were very disappointed because we knew that the ARM was an outstanding processor with fantastic characteristics. And I think the people in Thomson and Siemens understood that. They just couldn't understand how they would market the microprocessor. That was the sad thing. They couldn't see themselves make a business out of it. So how are those guys at Apple and VLSI, whether you're sitting around the table, everybody together, or was it mostly Acorn staff? No, it was actually the investment decision was done in a very memorable phone call where Larry Tesler said, okay, we're going to make this investment and VLSI technology was on there as well. And VLSI wanted some special deal. I forget what they wanted. And Larry Tesler said, nope, I'm not going to do this and put the phone down. And then VLSI came back and said, yes, we agreed to the spin out that was agreed between us and Apple because VLSI was only a small shareholder, only 5%. So VLSI was investing a little bit, but they were a foundry? Very little, but they were the first foundry, yes. And then the first British foundry was Plessy. And then there was those 12 people who decided who was going to be at arm. Like they were from Acorn, right? Yes, they were all Acorn employees. Well, Acorn was going through quite a difficult period at the time because sales weren't going so well. So some people decided like Sophie Wilson decided to stay at Acorn because she was really at the core of the Acorn computer architecture, not just the microprocessor, but a number of the other people who were in the arm design team because we had lots of silicon designers as well because of my philosophy of designing on silicon. That whole team was spun out and became arm. And Steve Ferber went to become professor of computer science at Manchester. Were you trying to get Sophie Wilson and Steve Ferber on the arm group or not? No, Sophie really was quite, it was really the heart of the Acorn architecture, which wasn't just the chip, but it was the whole computer architecture. So we were very keen to have Sophie remain at Acorn. And so Olivetti came like two, three years before to save Acorn, right? That's right. Acorn had gotten into financial difficulties at the time and Olivetti took a majority shareholding in Acorn. And I actually became vice president of research for Olivetti, which was a wonderful time that I had actually moved to Italy for three years to Ivrea, which is Olivetti town with my whole family. Did you already speak Italian before you moved there? No, but one of the conditions that I put on taking on the job was that we would be allowed to take a language course in Perugia, which we did. So it was a wonderful time learning Italian in this beautiful town. And we much enjoyed our time there. So your whole family speaks Italian? A little bit. The problem with Italians, at least in Ivrea and the people that we mixed with is that they all spoke very good English. So we didn't, I mean we can get by in Italian, but our Italian isn't as good as it should have been given we lived there for three years because especially on the R&D side, we mostly spoke English. So this spin-out, Arm LTD, this happened I think around 26 years ago, right? And so how long did it take before you started realizing, whoa, this is becoming huge? Well, it took a while because it wasn't until Nokia, of course, because to start off with, Arm only had two customers. That was the Apple Newton and the Acorn machine. And the Apple Newton was not a great success. And Acorn, although it was a reasonable company with revenues of about 70 million or so, the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands a year or maybe close to a million a year, not really enough to sustain a microprocessor company. So it took something like five years before suddenly Nokia came in? Yes, and it was, of course, we were surprised that Nokia would want such a powerful processor that was designed for a PC. And they said, no, no, we really want to have a very powerful processor because we want to improve the user interface and the features that we have in the mobile phone. And then they said, well, but we don't want to buy from a small Cambridge company. We buy from Texas Instruments. And then Robin decided, so if you licensed Texas Instruments, we might buy your chip. And then Robin decided that this was really the right business model for Arm to be a licensing company. So I guess he was flying around, trying to convince everybody to do Arm chips? That's right. And then the minute the first licensed deal was done with Texas Instruments, he then went out and did other licensed deals with Plessy in the UK. And now we have over 400 licensees, basically every single semiconductor company in the world now has an Arm license. So it's awesome, right? It's just, it's so huge. And so you meet once in a while with Sophie Wilson, Steve Furber, and those guys in the beginning? Yes, we do. And we just recently met again at the Cambridge Computer History Museum, where Mike Muller, who is the CTO of Arm, gave a little presentation. And it's a very nice group of people. And the amazing thing about the 12 people that spun out from ACORN is that some of them are still there and running the company, like the CTO of Arm, Mike Muller. Yeah, he was just doing a keynote last week and talking about the future. And so the future, can we talk a little bit about, because I saw you was, you were talking on BBC at one point when the, so can we be hopeful about the future of, let's say, UK technology, right? It's not just Arm. Like, what do you think about the future? Yes, well, I was very disappointed by the takeover of Arm by a soft bank, because I was very keen for Arm to remain a UK company. And there was no reason to change the ownership of Arm. Arm had a billion dollars of cash, was cash generative, has a management team to die for. They made all the right decisions over the last, you know, 26 years, there was no reason to change. However, you know, out of all the acquirers, soft bank really is probably the best choice because of Masayoshi-san, who is very passionate about the internet of things. I had a long conversation with him during that period of Arm being bought by soft bank. And he reassured me, and I think he means it, that he will leave the management in place, but he's also willing to invest in making Arm the success in the internet of things that it deserves to be. And so we've got a fantastic opportunity here with Arm because Arm is already used in probably over 90% of the internet of things worldwide. So there is the basic building layer, hardware layer is already Arm. And the opportunity, I think, is to create the internet of things architecture on top of it with a security layer of the data access layer, all those sort of layers, protocol layers that you need on top of it to make sure that the internet of all the different implementations of the internet of things can talk to each other freely, are secure, and can interface easily into the rest of the computing environment. Because the internet of things, I think you were mentioning that you've been doing some talks, we talk about five, and this is the sixth one now? This is the sixth wave, yes. I've got a talk called Five Waves of Computing, which a year ago changed the six waves of computing because they always asked me what the next wave was. And the five waves are the mainframe, the mini computer, the workstation, the PC, the smartphone, and the cloud. People often shouldn't forget, of course, that the usefulness of the smartphone comes because of its connectivity with the cloud. And then the sixth wave that is just about happening now is really the internet of things and machine learning. And the machine learning bit is very important and goes with the internet of things because it's the availability of the data that we're getting with the internet of things that will allow all kinds of really great improvements in our relationship with computers to happen. In particular, the changeover to voice. So we've just seen a very dramatic change in our relationship with computers because of touch. Who would have thought that a touch on phones and on iPads would make such a great improvement in the way we relate to computers? Well, this is nothing compared with the change that is just about to happen with the Google assistants, with Siri, with the Amazon Echo. Within the next five years, we'll see the most dramatic change in our relationship with computers enabled by voice. So we just go in any room and we start talking with the walls. Exactly. So one of the things that I got right in the five waves of computer talk when people asked me about the next wave, my slightly cheeky answer was no computers. And what I meant by that is you do not need a computer yourself because wherever you go, there will be a computing environment. And you can just talk wherever you are, you can talk to the computing environment and the computer will support you. And in a way, the biggest fight we're about to have is the fight for the personal assistant for that person in the computer that really understands you, that not just in terms of understanding your voice, but also understanding your intentions, your preferences, what you like to eat, to where you like to go, and so on, who you like to meet with and who you are trying to avoid. And this is very helpful, of course, in planning your life. And you were talking about each of these waves that had a leader that was not able to survive for the next wave. Yes, this is true. This is a surprising result of studying these waves of computers that at the beginning, there's always a lot of competition. And we always end up with either a monopoly or in the case of the PC wave, a duopoly between Intel and Microsoft. And then the people who dominate that wave always miss the next wave because neither Intel nor Microsoft has any appreciable market share in the smartphone. The change over from the smartphone to the internet of things might be different because the internet of things is so differentiated that there might not be a monopoly. On the other hand, there might be a monopoly at a much high level, maybe at the personal assistant level where there will be a hierarchy of suppliers of all the lower level stuff, like the interface to the lights and to the heating system and all the other internet of things. But the architecture might be set by people like ARM or Apple or Google or Amazon. But it's quite huge, the internet of things. If Masayoshi-san was talking about trillion devices in the next 20 years. Yes. So that's a trillion ARM processors. Yes, it is. So it might be quite useful right now to invest a lot of cash into speeding up research and development. Yes, and I think this is one positive aspect about the soft bank takeover of ARM that Masayoshi-san has said that he's willing to invest in building up ARM into the key company in the internet of things. And if that can be pulled off, as I think ARM absolutely can do that, then ARM could become the first $100 billion company, tech company in Europe probably. Because potentially a little bit the issue with Europe kind of is that the cash is not as accessible or I don't know, like people are not investing as aggressively as company like Apple goes and puts a billion dollars to Sharp or whoever makes displays and you know, just gets iPhones out before others dare invest the kind of money into new things. Yes, sadly we don't have technology companies in Europe of the same size and with the same financial firepower than the US and this is one of the disadvantages of the European location. But are you positive about the future in Europe, in the UK? Yes, I am. Well, in the UK it's just scored a fantastic own goal with Brexit, I've never seen a country trying to harm itself as much economically as Britain is and let's just hope that at least we don't get a hard Brexit here but a soft Brexit staying part of the European Union. But Europe itself is becoming a lot more innovative. If you look at the startup scene in Berlin and Munich and Cambridge and London, they are clearly not as good as Silicon Valley yet but the distance between Silicon Valley and these European clusters is shrinking all the time, especially as the change is to more software related products like FinTech and also big shift into life sciences where Europe has some great assets. Because these European startups could have a chance if they are able to find a trick and make money. It's important to not just have awesome technology, I guess in your career you have experience in trying to push the entrepreneurs to think about how to make money. Yes, and one of the biggest opportunities for Europe is actually in FinTech, in financial technology where we do have a very sophisticated financial system in the UK and a lot of that can be automated with machine learning, with very sophisticated data analytics. And I expect many breakthroughs and many interesting, we already have many interesting FinTech companies and indeed at Amadeus Capital Partners, we've invested in a few of them. So in the last 30 plus years, you've been entrepreneur, like a serial entrepreneur, right? And investor, and this is what you do now? Yes, I founded Amadeus Capital Partners in 97 with Anne Glover and we will have our 20th anniversary next year. And right now I'm seeing more exciting deep technology deals than I've ever seen in my life. So this is a very happy time for us. So it's gonna be exciting. You're sitting down with people that have ideas and you're thinking for each one how to customize a package for them kind of, like what they need? Yes, one of the things that we need to do as venture capitalists, I always say, we provide two things in addition to money which should be helpful to small companies. One is we make our network of contacts work for the companies. And the second is we help them think through the business model. We've got to help with business models every time we make an investment. The company only has to get it right once. So we're not any smarter than other people which have a lot more experience in thinking through business models and they turn out to be very important for the success of the company as indeed Arm has shown. Because you have experience in many companies, some few succeed and some didn't really work out, right? Yeah, indeed though, there have been lots of failures and there's an old saying that you learn more from your failures than from your successes because it really hurts if something goes wrong and you remember that. All right, so looking forward to a future success here in UK. So Amai, thank you very much.