Latest - Area of Interest: Entrepreneurs and investment

Sir Peter Rigby

Sir Peter Rigby left school and joined the computer industry working for NCR, Honeywell and the Diebold consultancy. In 1975 with £2,000 of his own money he launched SCR, a recruitment agency for IT staff. Seven years later he sold the company for £1 million. He ploughed the cash back into growing IT enterprises with his eye always on developing a large organisation. He has kept the company privately owned by his family in order to preserve the values he sees as vital in business.

Andy Ayim

Andy Ayim moves in the world of venture capital, tech start-ups, and product development. In 2010 Andy, along with his brother, Kwabz and a few friends set up Mixtape Madness, a passion project to create a central location online for people to listen to UK hip-hop and grime music.

He is currently Managing Director of the London Accelerator at Backstage Capital, that looks for investment opportunities with companies founded by those from under-represented groups, including women, people of colour, and the LGBT community.

In 2018 Andy was named in the Financial Times as one of the top ten most influential black and minority ethnic tech leaders in the UK.

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Hayley Sudbury

Hayley Sudbury is founder and CEO of WERKIN, a company which helps to create, track and activate mentoring and career development programmes, supporting workplace inclusion like professional LGBT+ communities, and BAME talents. She is an active mentor of Stemettes speaker for Founders for Schools. She is an ambassador of LB Women, a network created to inspire, inform and celebrate success of professional lesbian and bisexual women. She is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and in 2017 and ’18 Hayley was on the OUTstanding Financial Times Leading 100 LGBT+ Executives list.

Interview with Sir Andrew Hopper

Andy Hopper studied computer science at Swansea under Professor David Aspinall then did his PhD in Cambridge where he worked on the Cambridge Ring.  His LAN company came to the attention of Acorn Computers and was taken into Acorn in 1979.   Hopper was appointed managing director of the Olivetti Cambridge Research lab in 1986.  As MD he helped more than 10 venture operations become independent companies under the benign eye of Olivetti.  On the closure of the lab Hopper focused on his professorship at Cambridge where he developed a strategy to get over 200 ventures from Cambridge University into the market.

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Iann Barron

Iann Barron nurtured three generations of computer designers in the UK at Elliott Brothers, Computer Technology (CT) and InMos.

He designed a computer at Elliott’s for the RAF and left to form his own company, CT, in 1965, raising private capital to fund it, one of the first to do so in the world.

He was forced out of CT in 1975 and after a spell as a consultant joined the InMos venture of the National Enterprise Board designing the transputer microprocessor and advising Motorola, Texas Instruments and Fairchild and also telling Intel what was wrong with their microprocessors.