Michael Richard Lynch

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Michael Richard Lynch was born in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Republic of Ireland in 1965.

Dubbed by the Financial times "the doyen of European software" , he is the co-founder and CEO of Autonomy Systems and his entrepreneurship is associated with Silicon Fen. He has recently spearheaded the meaning-based computing movement and is considered a rare example of a European academic turned technology entrepreneur who has taken a start up through to being a global leader.

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[edit] Early life

He was born in Ireland but his family moved to England, where he grew up outside Chelmsford in Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father a fireman.

By the age of eleven in 1976 he as able to win a scholarship to Bancroft's School, Woodford, Essex . From there he was accepted to Christ's College to study Natural Sciences. Unlike most students he combined mathematics , biological and physical sciences taking the rare combination of Advanced physics, mathematics and biochemistry in the IB Tripos. For his part II he chose Electrical Sciences where he first met Dr. Peter Rayner his mentor in the signal processing laboratory of the engineering department. After graduating he went on to do a PhD in Signal Processing and Communications Research from Cambridge University, and then under took a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition.

[edit] Entrepreneurial career

Although whilst a student he had set up a business writing the software for musical synthesizers in then 1991, based on his research, he set up his first real company, Neurodynamics, which specialized in neural network computing , as well as automatic number-plate, fingerprint and face recognition software.

In 1996, Dr. Lynch co-founded the company he is most associated with, Autonomy, with Richard Gaunt , which specializes in providing knowledge management and enterprise search solutions, again based on his Bayesian research.

The main venture investor in autonomy was APAX the UK European Venture capital titan and its founder Sir Ronald Cohen called Lynch his favourite entrepreneur in an interview in 2007 Buyout king Cohen. This may not be surprising as APAX is claimed to have made a $5M investment into $1Bn giving one of the best returns for a European Venture investment of all time.

Autonomy went public in 1998 on EASDAQ and Lynch has grown it to a $4Bn market cap global business. According to the Sunday Times he is now worth around $500M but for a brief time during the dot com boom he earned the title as Britain’s first dot com billionaire.

Shortly after the dot com crash he upset some in the city and won praise from others in an infamous incident. An investment bank had sent an email to Autonomy’s shareholders claiming Autonomy’ scientists had left the company. The story was untrue but the stock fell 14% in one hour. Lynch was sent the email by a newspaper and went into print calling the email untrue. This was considered bad form by those involved as in those days it was unusual for such practices to be called out by a CEO. In later interviews Lynch claimed he had no choice as customers would have left if they believed the story. In the subsequent week he received a rough ride in the papers as the bank’s PR people tried to deflect the issue. Eventually the bank apologized for the false story. Lynch was for a while considered difficult by some, but praised by many others including the shareholders and analysts for standing up for the company.

Over the years his relationship with the city has become good, and on two occasions, the acquisition of Verity and of Zantaz he was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from city fund managers in a morning. He has also twice been a finalist for Investor Relations award of the year.

He uses the example of the false story in his invited lectures to MBA students calling it a no win for anyone scenario and requests the students to suggest how to handle the issue.

He has also founded four other companies, of which two have been bought by trade players, and two also went public.

[edit] Awards

He was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 1999 by the Confederation of British Industry and was awarded the Institution of Electrical Engineers medal for outstanding achievement. [1]

Time magazine named Lynch in their 25 most influential technology people in Europe in 2000[2]

The World Economic Forum presented Lynch with an award for Autonomy as a technology pioneer in 2000 [3]

Dr. Lynch was awarded an honorary OBE in the 2006 New Years Honours and is an honorary fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.

Recently he was awarded Technology Entrepreneur of the year by the European Technology Forum at their 2007 conference in London for the $500M Autonomy acquisition of Verity.

In March 2008 he beat finalists CEOs Henning Kagermann of SAP and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo of Nokia to be chosen Innovator of the year at the European Business Leader of the year awards 'EBLA' and CNBC made a half hour documentary on his work.[4]

[edit] Other interests

In December 2006 he was appointed as a non executive director serving on the executive board of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

He has been involved in children’s medical charities and Social venturing initiatives for deprived areas and was one of the founding investors in the Bridges fund.

He has been an adviser to the government on encouraging entrepreneurship in the UK.

[edit] Quotes

He is the son of a fireman and nurse and is quoted as saying, "My father advised me to get a job that didn't involve running into burning buildings".

[edit] External links