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Brilliance: Mike Lynch had a keen eye for selecting talent
Much has been made of the late Mike Lynch’s brilliance as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates in creating a massive global technology company, as well as being one of the world’s leading authorities on probability theory.
Less talked about is how the tech mogul had a keen eye for talent and was a big advocate for the female sex.
The CEOs of the three most successful Deep Tech companies he invested in are all led by women, despite the fact that only a fifth of all those working in the tech industry are women.
What’s interesting is that none of them had what one would consider specialized or academic knowledge of complex industries like machine learning or cybersecurity when they started working for Lynch, which they now lead.
What they share is a connection to Lynch through their Cambridge network, whether through having worked for Autonomy or Darktrace or one of its other spin-offs like augmented reality startup Aurasma.
This shows how important experience and leadership skills (and the support of a great boss) are. Take Martina King, 60, CEO of Featurespace, the AI-powered fraud detection engine from Cambridge that helps businesses track everything from problem gambling to credit card fraud.
King leads a team of 420 people, including dozens of some of the smartest people on the planet — men and women with PhDs who write complex code — who are carefully educated because, as she says, they are some of the shyest people on Earth.
This fun-loving boss comes from a diverse range of backgrounds. After working in advertising for Guardian Media Group, she headed Capital Radio and then Yahoo!’s European division.
Lynch recruited her to run Aurasma and then Featurespace, where she has worked for 12 years and become a global leader in behavioral analytics (an IPO could be on the way).
Another is Poppy Gustafsson, co-founder and head of cybersecurity specialist Darktrace, a FTSE 250-listed company that was recently sold for £4bn to a US private equity fund.
Gustafsson, now 42, is a mathematics graduate from Sheffield University and a chartered accountant who worked for Autonomy until shortly after its ill-fated takeover by Hewlett Packard.
Gustafsson then co-founded Darktrade with a team of math and intelligence experts to introduce AI-powered solutions to find and contain cyberattacks.
Eight years later, Gustafsson led Darktrace’s IPO on the London Stock Exchange, declaring herself a “flagbearer” for British technology at a time when the UK was being criticised for its inability to create large-scale technology companies.
However, when Darktrace was sold this spring to Thomas Bravo, she lamented the low valuations given to UK tech companies by investors.
The sale still netted him £24m, with Lynch and his wife earning £300m.
The Darktrace network produced the third of its top lieutenants, Eleanor Lightbody, who runs another of Lynch’s investments, Luminance, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence platforms for lawyers.
Lightbody, a graduate in business studies from the University of Cape Town, oversees 150 people who provide legal services to more than 700 companies around the world.
Is it then coincidence or design that all three tech companies are run by women?
Sounds like design.
As Martina King says, Lynch was a champion of results, of promoting the people who achieved them.
“I had no prejudices… I believed that deep technology could be handled equally well by men and women.” Hooray for that!
Another magnificent legacy from Lynch.
Interest rates in the US are falling
The mighty Jerome Powell has spoken. The head of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, has finally given the strongest hint yet that interest rates will be lowered next month.
It is rare for Powell to be so direct in his traditional Jackson Hole speech.
But even the Federal Reserve knows it’s time to give financial markets a little more food for thought after recent jitters about the prospect of the U.S. heading into recession.
And given the reaction (the S&P rose to near an all-time high), there could be a big cut, possibly half a percentage point.
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