There are few Brits better positioned to give advice to startups than Robin Saxby. As the founding CEO of Arm, he led the firm from humble beginnings as a startup based out of a barn in Cambridge to be worth over $10bn.
Though he left the company to retire in 2006, the foundations he laid have allowed the chip designer to keep growing, reaching a valuation of around $170bn today.
Since retiring, he has had a keen interest in mentoring young entrepreneurs and is involved in several startups as an advisor and angel investor.
He spoke to UKTN about the lessons he’s learned about running a successful business over his almost 40 years in the tech industry.
The core principles of his approach lie in founders getting their priorities straight.
“Really do a proper analysis of the world market. Work out the areas where you’re the best—and I really do mean the best—and then also think, what does the market need? How is the market changing? And how can we fit our technology to meet that need?”
He says that this was one of the reasons that Arm was able to grow at the beginning. The firm was producing chips that were more power efficient and cheaper than others on the market.
But just doing more for less is not enough for a product to be a success according to Saxby: the technology must have a real-world application.
“Customer pull is 1000 times more important than technology push.”
“If you solve a real problem for real customers, you’ll get a purchase order. But if you’re trying to push some technology which might be great in a university that nobody really wants, you are not going to get a business.”
While he sees the technology being sold as fundamental to the firm, he also asserts that the staff hired are of huge importance too. “It’s not about just the leader. You need the best person in every position”, he says.
“You’re as weak as your weakest link. What lots of startups say is ‘well, we know they’re not quite good enough, but we’ll change them later’. I mean, honestly, that’s a problem. So often businesses are slow to react to fit the weaknesses.”
But even with the best technology and people it can be difficult for startups to convince larger firms to trust a new, small firm.
When Saxby became CEO of Arm, the chip designer found themselves in a similar position – their entire team consisted of only a few dozen people. But he overcame the challenges by analysing the market and manoeuvring strategically.
“You’ve got all the big semiconductor companies that have their own microprocessor chips. They’re not going to buy from you. So what you do is you find the customer who has the explicit need that you can help fix.”
Arm did this by breaking into the mobile phone semiconductor market, licencing out the firm’s architecture.
“At the start nobody really wanted to license [Arm’s] technology, because why should we deal with this little company? So, you solve a real big problem for some really big guys, and then eventually the rest follow.”
But being a small company is not all doom and gloom. In fact, Saxby says it can have some benefits: “Smaller companies can move faster than larger companies. They can move at pace. You have to look at how you compare to their advantages, and then eventually the momentum builds.”
But Saxby insists that one of the most important things to remember is also the simplest: “You have to pick yourself up and fix the problems.”
Robin Saxby attended the University of Liverpool and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1968. He then worked for several semiconductor companies including Motorola, where he stayed for 13 years.
Saxby was the first CEO of Arm when the firm formed in 1990. Under his tenure, the company was built up from being headquartered in a Cambridge barn to having a global presence. He played a part in forming a close relationship with Acorn and Apple and gaining a share in the mobile phone semiconductor market.
Read more: How Arm became Britain’s most successful tech company
He left the role of CEO in 2001 and was made chairman of the Arm until 2006, when he retired.
In 2002, he was knighted for his services to the IT industry and was subsequently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineering in the same year. In 2015 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
In his retirement, Saxby is a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool and regularly mentors new entrepreneurs.
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