Dr Mike Lynch: ‘Get more girls to study physics’!

“To encourage more female entrepreneurship in the tech sector, it starts at school. The UK needs to get more girls to study physics degrees so that they can go on to develop technological solutions to the challenges of the modern world” said Dr Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, arguably Britain’s biggest tech success story. A physicist, Dr Lynch is known for his work applying techniques from signal processing and pattern recognition to unstructured information, and the company he founded continues to be a leader in this area.

Dr Lynch was speaking at an entrepreneurial event hosted by Restoration Partners, a merchant bank established by Chairman Ken Olisa OBE in March 2006. Restoration Partners works alongside visionary entrepreneurs in the dynamic, high-value, technology sector. With a strong mix of entrepreneurs, channel partners and investors, the purpose of the event was to bring together the vibrant UK tech ecosystem to share experiences, opportunities and challenges on their personal journeys.

Ken Olisa OBE, Chairman of Restoration Partners introduced the event with some of the insights that he and Restoration Partners have acquired about the Entrepreneurs' journey and how those insights can be applied to help them meet their goals.

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Guest speaker Dr. Mike Lynch OBE, the founder of Autonomy, one of the most successful UK technology companies of all time, and now the founder and CEO of Invoke Capital, a technology investment and advisory company, followed on from Ken talking about his earliest days when he designed a music synthesiser which gave him his first financial success. In 1991 he went on to set up Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialized in computer-based fingerprint recognition which revolutionised criminal investigations. Mike advised gathered entrepreneurs to start with an “unfair advantage” as he had done with this business.

He shared some of the lessons he has learnt the "hard way" and how some of those lessons now inform his team at Invoke Capital in their decision making. In 1996 Dr Lynch co-founded Autonomy Corporation and he served as its CEO until it was sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11bn in October 2011. The sale proved to be acrimonious and saw Mike exit the company he founded in 2012. In February 2013, he raised $1 billion through his Invoke Capital fund to invest in up and coming British technology companies, announcing later that year that Invoke’s first investment was a $20m stake in Darktrace, "the world's first behavioural cyber defence platform”. He drew an analogy between the biology of the human immune system being able to differentiate between self and nonself as a possible route to future solutions in cyber security.

The evening concluded with Mike answering a number of insightful questions from the audience and then chatting individually to some members of the audience.

Mike is regarded as Britain’s most successful technology entrepreneur and has won numerous awards, including Computer Weekly’s ‘Most Influential Person of the Year’ and the Chartered Institute for IT’s award for Outstanding Contribution to IT in 2011. He was awarded an OBE for Services to Enterprise in 2006. Mike is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, an honorary fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge and a non-executive director of the British Library. He is also a scientific advisor to the UK Prime Minister. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in April 2014. He is married with two daughters.