Academia to IPO - A Modern Odyssey

Abstract

I will relate the story of a disruptive technology in hardware compilation and reconfigurable computing. Conceived in academia, it led first to a ?spin-out? and then to a public company. After a career spanning computing and electronics in both industrial and academic environments I started a new research group at Oxford University in 1990. The ?big idea? was to develop a method of automatically implementing computer programs directly in parallel hardware - or ?hardware compilation?. I called the result ?Computing Without Computers? as once the compilation has been done, there is no sequential computer around to slow the computation down. However, there is a big disconnect between the worlds of academia and commerce. Despite welcome changes over the last ten years to make it easier for academics to create spinout companies, it is still a hard trick to pull off. Some of the things that can, and did, go wrong will be highlighted. I will try to abstract some of the hard lessons learned along the way. For example, I have come to believe that attempting to copy the entrepreneurial success of others is much less likely to be useful than avoiding their failures. The talk will cover the creation of the technology and the company, raising finance for it and the (unfinished) story of how to encourage the adoption of a disruptive product in the market-place. The spinout experience changed my life in completely unexpected ways.