Championing
Cambridge
innovation

What's your connection to the University? I did a maths degree at Cambridge, then started Part III Maths which I left halfway through for a PhD in fluid mechanics at Imperial - which I left halfway through to found a start-up. You can see a pattern emerging!

What was the start-up? STNC, which ended up being the first company in the world to put web browsers onto mobile phones.

When we started in the early 1990s, mobile phones were becoming a thing but only for voice calls and text messages. They certainly didn't have colour displays, cameras or email.

My co-founder was one of the very few experts in computer networking at the time and we started offering a solution for email for low-cost, low-power hand-held devices.

We would go to meetings and people would say things like: "Why on earth do we need email when we've got a perfectly good fax machine? Who wants to send an email from their phone?"

We grew very slowly to start with and then the internet happened, almost overnight.

We were one of the few companies in the world that understood its possibilities. By that stage, there were 10 of us and we had some of the world's largest tech companies queuing at our door.

Two things happened in parallel. Everyone wanted to get on the internet and mobile phones started to carry small amounts of data.

We were able to create a web browser that used less than 200 kilobytes and found ourselves in a unique space, doing something that no-one else could just as the internet was bursting into everyone's lives.

You must have been growing very quickly at this point? We were. We decided to take external investment to ride the opportunity. From then on, we were doubling in size every year.

We started to work with Microsoft which eventually led to them acquiring us and our software becoming Microsoft Mobile Explorer.

Was it always your ambition to start your own company or was it more accidental than that? For me, it was accidental. For my co-founder, it was always the goal. Although I liked the idea of working for myself, I hadn't been exposed to technology start-ups when I was growing up.

In my world, running your own business meant having a shop or running a care home. But when I came to the University, the Cambridge-designed Acorn Archimedes was just coming out and I began to understand the potential of the tech sector for someone like me.

When Microsoft acquired the company, you went to work for them. What was that like? I went in with absolutely no idea of what big company rules and processes looked like. I proceeded to trample all over them until I discovered what I was and wasn't allowed to do.

What was your role in Microsoft? Initially, I was part of the group adding mobile features to Microsoft Exchange but I then moved into the Windows Media Group, which was the precursor to MP3 players.

That was really interesting but, honestly, I don't do well in big companies. I tried at Microsoft and I tried at Hutchison 3G which was a start-up when I joined and employed 2,000 people by the time I left two years later.

By 2005 - which was only six years after we sold the company - I had realised that big companies don't suit me. I figured out that the bit I really like is the early stage where you've got something interesting, but you don't quite yet know what the product is or who your customers are.

I found myself a role in the University, as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Cambridge-MIT Institute, a partnership between the two universities that ran from 2000 to 2006. It was then that I came across MIT's i-Teams programme and started to think about how it could work for Cambridge.

At the time, there was quite a lot of support available for students who already had an idea for a business and there were a couple of undergraduate courses and some masters' programmes which included modules on entrepreneurship. But there was very little for the majority of students who were broadly interested in entrepreneurship but didn't have their own idea for a company.

Cambridge i-Teams was designed to fill that gap by giving entrepreneurial students the opportunity to work on real technologies coming out of the University that were underpinned by great science.

How does it work in practice? Teams of up to seven participants, from across all university disciplines, work with the support of their team mentor, the researchers who developed the technology, and me.

The teams investigate market opportunities and give researchers early feedback from potential partners and customers.

After a successful pilot, we ran two courses in the first year, gradually building up to where we are now: six courses a year in a variety of 'flavours'. There's Innovation i-Teams where the students can work on any kind of technology, Medical i-Teams focused on healthcare and Development i-Teams which concentrates on international development and supporting UN Sustainable Development Goals. We've just added Social i-Teams to the portfolio for students interested in social enterprises.

Have you got a favourite project? It's so hard to pick but Xampla is a good one. Professor Tuomas Knowles had been looking at using spider silk as a substitute for plastic in biodegradable microcapsules.

Our students researched the market and discovered a real opportunity in the food industry for biodegradable, non-plastic materials.

Knowles's silk, however, although a natural protein, didn't comply with EU food regulations but pea protein did. As a result of the i-Teams project, the researchers went back to the lab and came up with product that Xampla is now successfully commercialising.

As well as founding and directing i-Teams you have also been supporting entrepreneurs as an angel investor for the last 20 years. When I decided I liked early-stage things, I did a bit of angel investing on my own before I formally joined Cambridge Angels in 2005. I was running the deal flow in those days which I could fit around family life when my kids were small.

What makes Cambridge Angels different from other angel investor groups? It was formed by a group of exited entrepreneurs, almost all of us have been there and done it ourselves. We understand the ups and downs of founding a company. As a group of investors, we are also very interested in and knowledgeable about new technologies.

There are plenty of other angels out there but we have a huge breadth and depth of expertise in technology-based businesses: and that comes from being in Cambridge.

How would you say the Cambridge ecosystem has changed over the past, say, 20 years? In those days, there was still quite a lot of resistance to commercialising research whereas now it's almost commercialisation first.

20 years ago you didn't meet people who said, 'I want to be an entrepreneur when I grow up'. You do now.

The other thing that's happened over that time is the enormous growth in life sciences which has had a huge impact on the ecosystem more widely.

You have done an enormous amount to support entrepreneurship in and around Cambridge. If you had to pick one thing that you've most enjoyed...? It’s got to be Audio Analytic which developed AI techniques to recognise sounds, aiming to give machines a sense of hearing. In 2010, Cambridge Angels invested in Audio Analytic and I joined the board with Robert Swann who is now my co-chair at Cambridge Angels. 12 years later they were employing around 60 people and were acquired by one of the world's largest companies.

Why is it so dear to your heart? I think because it's where both my experience and expertise collide. It was in many ways very akin to the company I co-founded, in that it was embedding software into consumer devices and selling to large American companies. It was something I knew about and was at the stage of growth I most enjoyed.

Is there anything the Cambridge ecosystem could be doing better today? There's still a big gap in support for people who are not connected to the University. Within the University there is now a lot of help for people who want to found a company and that's a good thing. But if you are a start-up with no connection to the University, it's not always easy to find and access support.

What about setbacks? How have you dealt with them? I had cancer: that was quite a big setback. My kids were quite young at the time. One of them wrote in a piece of school work: "My mum's got cancer but she keeps on smiling."

How did I cope? I dropped everything except i-Teams and being chair of the governors at my children's school. But keeping on doing those two things in the background helped.

While you can't control the medical outcomes you can manage your mindset. Resilience is about flexibility: you go forward with an idea of what tomorrow looks like but when it doesn't turn out how you expect, you adapt to the new reality.

And that's what it's like to start a company. You have a vision, but you have to keep on checking it and changing when necessary.

The other thing about cancer is that it focuses the mind. You are more willing to say no to things that don't work for you - another useful attribute for a company founder.

What's the most challenging aspect of starting a new venture? The people. It's always the people and getting the team to work. Which is not to say that they aren't good at what they do but there are always unexpected things to sort out.

If you're a first-time founder, you have no experience of dealing with any of this.

The other major challenge is uncertainty. You have to be able to cope with it if you are an entrepreneur. It is the nature of the beast that you can do everything right and still fail. If you are going to struggle with that uncertainty, it may not be the right path for you.

What makes a good leader? It's very easy to say, I'm the leader and I'm going to tell you all what to do. And that's what I would have done at the beginning of my career.

You don't know any different when you are 25, unless you're very emotionally intelligent.

But these days, everything I do is about creating the space for people to bring their own ideas and fulfil their potential.

The midwife community talks about holding the space for the woman who's having a baby. What I try to do is hold the space for whoever I'm working with, whether that's in a boardroom or running i-Teams.

i-Teams is very much holding the space to give the students the appropriate support while encouraging them to work with their own skills and expertise.

You are a very busy person. Do you have any spare time, and if so, what do you like to do in it? I play the viola and I crochet small things very slowly. I also read as many books as I can get my hands on.