Sir Robin Saxby is one of very few knights in the IT sector, and is recognised as one of the pioneers of the microprocessor industry.

The company he founded and led for 16 years, Arm, is a global leader but has never manufactured a thing. Arm is an intellectual property (IP) firm, and its designs are used in chips that power much of today’s corporate and consumer technology – such as mobile phones, MP3 players, gaming devices and Intel processors.

Saxby stepped down from day-to-day involvement with Arm in October, taking up the post of chairman emeritus. Computing recently interviewed him for a seminar organised by Icon Corporate Finance, and we discussed the future for UK IT.

Q: If you were advising a startup technology company today, what lessons would you pass on from Arm’s journey from startup to global brand?

A: I had success with Arm but I had some failures before that. One of the things about technology is you do not get success overnight. Engineering and science take a long time.

The team needs to have some experience. You have to have passion and energy and hard work, and you have to have a global vision. When we started Arm at the end of 1990, we had 12 engineers, myself, a prototype and £1.75m. I said we were going to be the global standard, and that was pretty ambitious. But to put it into context, our partners will ship more than two billion Arm chips this year, so my number one tip is to watch your vision.

I would encourage people to think beyond the possible but then back off to reality.

We did not have the money to build a factory to make chips, so the backing-off was to think about how we could become the global standard with so little money and so little resources. So we had to talk about licensing and partnerships.

Also, be realistic. Most startups will tell you they are the world’s best; most technologists will tell you their technology is the world’s best; so have some serious honesty about what is real and what is not real. And the other thing is that you have to have the best people.

Q: The government talks about making the UK a successful knowledge economy, and Arm is often held up as an example of that because of its IP-based business model. What are the challenges of achieving this goal?

A: I have sat on all these committees with Gordon Brown and (former science minister) David Sainsbury. Where they are coming from is very logical – that we are an expensive economy, but we do not have a large population such as China or India, so who is going to buy all this stuff?

Gordon Brown is saying that unless we use our brains we do not have a future and I think that is totally right. We have to use our brains, and our brains might be in creative stuff as well as in technology.

Technology is only one piece, the value is also in the content. We are good at music and games, so creativity can come from putting the content with the technology. Software is another piece of the jigsaw.

But remember that the Chinese want this as well. Do not pretend we are any smarter than the Chinese or the Indians. We are not in an exclusive position to use our brains.

If you are on the way up and you have been poor and see technology and wealth creation as your way to a better life, you will work harder, that is human nature.

But I do feel that in the West we have more experience. We have some historical knowledge, whereas when you are at the startup phase you are not in such a good position to make the right decisions, so that is a competitive advantage.

Q: You have talked in the past about the challenge of enthusing schoolchildren to study science and technology. What can be done to improve this?

A: The problem is the teachers. If you want to inspire kids you better be good at your subject, and that is the biggest gap we have.

Until the government fixes that, we have a problem. The quality of maths and science learning is lousy at A-level. A friend of mine is at York University, they have been doing an exam for the past 30 years for a particular course – they only take the top students who get the best A-levels, and when they arrive they set a maths test.

Today every single student fails it – and these are all kids with A* grades – and 20 years ago everyone passed it.

All the statistics about the quality of our education is rubbish and frankly the only way to fix that is through the teachers. That is the truth now – will the government admit that? What I try to do is tell the kids about careers, how they can make money and what they can do.

Q: Does technology still have an image problem with children in the UK?

A: I will tell you a bit about Hong Kong. I have just been there and in the Arm team we have a fantastic young-members section and they are really trendy kids. One guy is an engineer, he has the trendiest glasses you have ever seen.

When I go to China we have thousands of people queuing up because they are interested. We tell the kids to look at the problems of the planet, look at energy, look at resources – the opportunity to have a fantastic career in engineering and science has never been better because these guys are the people who are going to save us.

Further reading:

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