Interview with Simon Gibson CBE & Mike Doyle

Simon Gibson was born in 1958. He is one of four brothers. At the time of his birth, his father ran a factory that was part of Thorn EMI’s empire. He says: “In those days, televisions and radiograms were all housed in wooden cabinets with fine marquetry, my father ran the factory that built those wooden cabinets in Rayleigh, Essex.”

Simon’s mother stayed home to look after the children and then worked as a legal secretary and in an estate agency in the later part of her career.

From his school experience he explains: “It’s always about the person who inspires, it’s about leadership. I had one such physics teacher, Mr Neil, who was devoted to not only sailing which I loved, but he taught us mechanics and physics in a very applied manner. He had an ability to bring the subject to life. I remember him using a Ford Popular car to demonstrate principles of physics and then used the vehicle to teach us to drive on the school playing fields. What a teacher, he was a great coach, not only in physics, but other passions such as sailing, a sport in which our school excelled.”

After leaving school, he joined an apprenticeship programme with Post Office Telephones, now British Telecom, BT.  He says of the experience: “It was a fabulous programme.  We spent about twenty-eight weeks in fulltime education and the rest of the time we were rotated through every department of the business.  We were exposed to everything from being up a pole, to down a hole, building and maintaining telephone exchanges, installing fibreoptics networks, and planning network rollouts, it was a superb programme. My business partner, Sir Terry Matthews, was also apprenticed through that programme.”

Asked what the culture at the GPO was like, Simon says: “You were a government employee and the culture was heavily unionised.”

In 1981 Simon joined Ericsson based in the City of London. His decision was made based on a chat with Michael Heseltine whom he sat next to at a lunch one day. He says: “Michael Heseltine asked me what I did for a living, and I said I was focussed on computing but I had a deep interest in telecoms as well.  He told me to get back into telecoms because the government was going to deregulate it. I took his advice and I switched from an engineering role to a sales and marketing one; I got a job in Ericsson as a systems consultant and sold systems in and around the City of London.”

His clients included Utilities, Banks, and the Stock Exchange. Simon was selling Ericsson’s MD110, the only digital distributed switch architecture available at the time. He adds: “I believe, at the smaller end of the market, I was the first person in the UK to sell a deregulated switch which happened at about ten-past nine in the morning the day the government lifted market access restrictions.”

 Simon says of Ericsson’s culture: “It was a joint venture, a combination of Thorn EMI and LM Ericsson of Stockholm, so culturally it was very Scandinavian in terms of the technology, but it was run as part of the Thorn empire. Eventually, Ericsson went solo with the business.”

On the UK’s lack of a telecommunication network equipment, Simon says: “I think each of them has their own story, but I think Marconi was absolutely the case study.  I remember driving up the M4 with Sir Terry Matthews and we took a call from Mike Parton. He told us that they had just lost the BT supply contract. For years GEC and Marconi had been the predominant supplier, they provided System X. When the 21CN tender was announced, it was awarded to Huawei in China, despite all the concerns that there were around security, and the government didn’t bat an eyelid. They were more than happy for that to go ahead. That finished Marconi despite the fact at the time they were the only supplier to have a Soft Switch operational in a carrier network.”

Simon goes on to add: “I think questions should have been asked regarding that demise, but nothing was said because historically I don’t think the government with its free market dogma, had any interest in defending British companies.  It would never have happened in Germany, France, or in most countries, including the USA.  But in this country, it was a case that anything’s for sale to the highest bidder regardless of where they’re from.  I am very, very encouraged by the new National Security and Investment Act of 2022, which now requires anyone who’s acquiring more than 25% of a company in a category of nationally significant technologies is required to register that intent, which gives the government thirty days to call it in to look at it.  A lot of British tech companies have just disappeared off the map, the latest is Newport Wafer Fab, the only independent wafer fab left in the UK. I genuinely believe the first thing the government knew about it was when they read of the threat to the supply chain on the front page of a newspaper. That complete obsession with an open market works in some ways and is highly destructive in terms of national ownership on the other.”

After leaving Ericsson, Simon moved to Mitel which were renowned for their enterprise switches (PBXs). Simon explains their history: “The first product Mitel made was a tone to pulse converter, a tenth of the size and cost of Western Electric’s product, and that funded the development of the world’s first software-controlled PBX, the SX200, which BT distributed as the Regent, and the SX20 was distributed by BT in this country as the Kinsman. Mitel had a 40% market share within just a few years, which led to a referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission; remarkable growth.”

After leaving Mitel and spending a year working for EFI, which focused on power conditioning in the telecoms business, in 1987 Simon joined Newbridge to run global marketing. The company became the dominant global data networking supplier of the 1990s. It was sold in 2000. The company had been started by Sir Terry Matthews, CEO of Mitel, who approached Simon to run the marketing.

Simon explains: “We started Newbridge over the top of a dry cleaners in Chepstow and over the top of a furniture store in Ottawa and ten years later it had achieved revenue of three billion and was the biggest provider of data networks to telephone companies. The company was sold for $7.1 Billion US dollars.”

 “Terry’s quite extraordinary. He asked me what I needed from a marketing perspective to get the company to be the number one supplier in the world. I gave him a number and he said, ‘Do it’.  Three years later we had become the leading data supplier in the world.”

The team created a standards-based product. Simon continues: “Our product sat in nineteen-inch racking.  Everything in a telephone exchange was in nineteen-inch racking.  It had dual redundancy in power, in its control planes and its CPU.  We also created a network managing system that allowed a carrier to take a network of our devices and slice them up into VPNs and sell their corporate customers a VPN which they controlled and managed, but the window that the customer saw was their own network. That was unique at that time and opened up a massive revenue opportunity for carriers. Newbridge ended up with pretty much every carrier in the world as a customer. It was really exciting, the first-year sales were seventeen million, second year sales sixty-seven million, then one hundred and twenty-one million, it was extraordinary growth to be involved in.”

Newbridge undertook a joint venture with Radio and Telecommunication Ministry of the Soviet Union at the time of Perestroika and Glasnost. Simon says: “We did an exchange; we were able to access Russian mathematicians who were particularly talented in creating voice compression algorithms and in return for that we gave manufacturing of a lot of the metalwork and technologies that we were allowed to share with the Soviet Union then. … We were one of the first Western technology companies to ever set up a telecom joint venture there.  Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and things were fine for a while, but then corruption set in and we eventually decided to withdraw.”

Michael Doyle (Mike), was born in 1965, in Bedfordshire. His father was an electronic engineer, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, and his mother was a language teacher originally, who took time out to raise the family before returning to work in office administration.

Mike says: “For a long time my father worked on the island of Malta, that’s where my mother originated and he moved to after the war.  He worked in electronics and civil engineering. The dockyards there used to have an electronics and draughting department that would work on the ships and so forth. When he returned to the UK, he joined the civil service and moved into the Ministry of Defence and stayed there until he retired.”

Mike attended Bedford Modern School (BMS) where he obtained ten O levels and four A levels, he says: “They were the usual mixture of subjects, English, maths, physics, chemistry, biology, I also studied German and French.   I originally went to a comprehensive school just round the corner from where I lived, and at the time there was an entrance exam with the opportunity to join BMS with a bursary.  We couldn’t have afforded to go there without the bursary. I managed to pass the entrance exam and interview and they offered me a place. I stayed at the school until I went to University College, London.”

Mike attributes his intellect and curiosity to his parents. He adds: “My mother was very good at languages; she spoke four languages, and my father’s technical background and willingness to engage with us on homework and projects.  He’s very mechanically minded as well; he can fix anything.  I haven’t inherited that gene, unfortunately, but I’ve inherited his electronics and technical side, and a willingness to query things and be enquiring.”

After school Mike won a place on a thick sandwich sponsorship course with GEC Telecoms. The course saw him work one year at GEC and study Computer Science for three at UCL, before returning to work at GEC for a further year after completing his formal study. Mike’s sponsorship meant that he left university without any debt and without the need for his family to fund him.

Having completed his sponsored degree in computer science, Mike took up a role as System X developer with GEC Telecoms based in Coventry. He says: “I went straight into the software division, analysing existing code that was written in Fortran or C and then making it better or making it faster, and modifying things for the telecoms side of the System X modules. I was part of a large team, there was probably twenty or thirty of us when I first started and it went up from there. It was all based around a team dynamic of being allocated small tasks to do and then you received more responsibility as you were able to show you could write decent code.”

GEC Telecoms became part of GPT and then merged with Plessey.  Mike says of the experience: “It was chaotic, because you’ve got two companies, they’re doing similar sort of things, so there was quite a lot of infighting as to which bits would be kept and which would be thrown away.”

After a year with GEC and feeling that he had little opportunity to progress, Mike decided to leave and start contracting. He says of the experience: “As a contractor, I worked for STC for some time and a whole range of financial, video and telecoms companies all over the UK.  I travelled up and down the UK extensively over three or four years.”

It was while he was contracting that Mike met Simon ; they formed a relationship which would see them found Ubiquity Software Corporation and work together at the Alacrity Foundation.

In the early 1990’s Simon and Mike realised that the traditional telecoms approach was going to transition into the technology of the internet and decided to set up Ubiquity Software Corporation in Newport, South Wales.

They chose South Wales for the base of their business because there were few technology employers but seven universities. Simon explains: “Because we didn’t have to worry about competing new companies stealing our employees, we got the lion’s share of anyone who was talented in Wales who wanted to stay in Wales. They could get an exciting and challenging job with Ubiquity. Ubiquity undertook the largest venture capital round in software ever to be done in the UK in its time and was subsequently listed on the UK stock market.  It became Wales’s first technology publicly listed company.  In our ten years’ history, out of the 200-odd people that worked in the facility in Wales, I can only recall a handful of people ever leaving.”

Mike adds: “We noticed there was a huge drain of people, … but that graduates out of Bristol, and certainly out of the Welsh universities, liked to stay in that area, they didn’t necessarily all gravitate to London. If you’re developing software products, what really hurts a company is technical staff turnover.  When you spend six, nine, twelve, eighteen months immersed in a technical product and then you leave, the gap that you create is very hard to fill quickly.  So, we recruited people who wanted to stay in the area. We looked at Bristol, Cardiff and the surrounding areas, but we firmly rejected the advice to head towards London, because we felt that the staff turnover would be crippling, and the cost of actually locating any from in that area was two times what was available to us in the Newport and the Cardiff area.”

Mike and Simon distributed 20% of the company shares to all the employees. A benefit that has helped them create what Simon calls ‘stickiness’, he explains: “Every employee was a shareholder and there were times when things got tough, and it’s that employee ownership that kept everybody in the game.  Newbridge created more than 500 millionaires on the payroll.  We were a much smaller operation, but we said what would be a virtuous outcome for most of the people who are in their twenties was to be able to buy a house at the end of this experience clear of a mortgage.  We delivered that in Ubiquity.  Some employees did walk away with seven-figure sums. For a young twenty-something, that’s a really good start in life.”

As CTO and co-founder, Mike played a key role in the developing and commercialising the Session Initiation Protocol which had been proposed by Professor Henning Schulzrinne at Columbia University, and who was a Board member of Ubiquity.  He explains: “Before Session Initiation Protocol, people used phones which were circuit switched. Basically, that means, if we forget mobiles for a moment, when you speak into a phone, the microphone translates what you’re saying into electrical impulses on a wire and it’s picked up at the other end. Using the Session Initiation Protocol means sending your multimedia over the internet in packets, in little blocks. The reason that was so important was that laying new wire in the ground that is capable of richer services is very, very expensive. Also you can’t easily put more than one type of conversation on the same wire; it’s hard to do that. Using the internet protocol, we were reusing the capabilities of the internet and you could put information in chunks down that ‘wire or fibre’ far more efficiently than you could with circuit switched.

In addition to voice, you could put video, messaging, screen sharing and a whole host of other things that were, from the business perspective, very attractive.  It was the way of combining or coalescing those capabilities. None of that existed at the time, so we worked together with a number of people, in particular Professor Henning Schulzrinne, was also the inventor of the Real Time Protocol that allows voice and video packets to transfer across the internet together with the session initiation.  There’s a difference between the session, which is the setting up of the call itself when you pick up the phone and start dialling, and the information that occurs once you’ve got a connection.  So those two together allowed us to create a whole range of capabilities, products and services that were just not possible before.”

Simon adds: “What the protocol would do in setting up the call, is establish the capabilities of the device with which it was communicating. The protocol meant that you’d have one signalling session that was agnostic, it didn’t really care what the device or media type was, it could mediate between them all.  Now SIP is used for call set-up on mobile phones, Zoom, Teams, most trunk calls on the network are now traversing the internet and controlled by this protocol.”

When we started the project, you could count on one hand the people involved in this idea of a session protocol for the internet. We had to work together, and that community slowly grew as we got more and more people to understand the benefits of this stuff.  You have do that through a process of proselytising and promoting, under the support of the internet engineering taskforce.  So, you start out with a very small group and it continues to grow.  You must establish right up front that so long as there’s a common objective, there’s no competition in building community. What was fascinating at the outset of that whole process was that the large incumbents didn’t understand what that meant.” He goes on to say that many companies rejected the idea of progress the internet provided before Sun Microsystems decided to get on board and offered them early access to a new project, they were working on; the launch of Java.

Mike adds: “The telecoms companies wanted to stick with H.323, binary protocols and other protocols that were awkward to use and extend, but they had a bit of a monopoly on the whole process, and it was breaking away from that monopoly and providing the capabilities, services and opportunities that led in a non-competitive environment.”

Simon concludes: “When you consider what might have happened if some of those larger incumbents had got this vision quicker, how things might have been different.  Where’s Nortel today?  They were the world’s largest supplier.  Where’s Alcatel, Siemens, Fujitsu?  Every one of them slipped off the map because they could never make a timely transition between the old switched world and the new internet world of TCP-IP.”

In 2001, having taken the company public and with constant commuting between the US and the UK, Simon stepped down as CEO but stayed on the Board. His decision to leave was based on need for a North American based chief executive. In the year prior to his departure, he made 28 return trips to the USA and it was proving taxing on his health. After a ten-month search, Ian McLaren was appointed.

Simon then became the CEO of Wesley Clover Corporation, the family office of Sir Terry Matthews, with interests in technology, commercial real-estate and hospitality. Assets include a wide technology portfolio, the Celtic Collection of Hotels, including the Celtic Manor Resort and Kanata Research Park, North America’s largest cluster of Telecom and Networking companies.

 Mike remained and ended up travelling back and forth to the US to the point at which he also decided it was not a healthy option. The company was sold to Avaya Corporation for 144 million dollars. Mike remained for a further two years after the sale.

In 2011, Simon Gibson and Owen Matthews founded the Alacrity Foundation; an organisation that aims to help student entrepreneurs create the next generation of technology companies. Mike Doyle was asked to supervise the programme in the UK. The first centres were established in Victoria – British Columbia and Newport – South Wales. Later centres were added in Lille – France, Istanbul – Turkey, Pune – India; Santiago – Chile, Mexico City and Ottawa – Ontario.

Simon explains the motivation behind the company: “Alacrity’s background wasn’t driven by venture capital, it was driven by a goal to create a new generation of entrepreneurs amongst our graduate population.  It had its birth around the time of the post-banking collapse, when prospects for young people were particularly poor. We looked at a lot of incubators and they just seemed incomplete. We thought what young people need is a formal curriculum of education, not a quick crash course undertaken over three or six weeks, but one equivalent to an applied MBA. On our fifteen-month programme the graduates don’t learn by other people’s experience or case studies; their own business becomes the case study.

There are two things which are fairly unique about Alacrity.  Firstly, it’s a charity, and an educational foundation, and the second thing is, no one’s expected to come to the foundation with an idea. We tend to work with the private and public sector and ask them ‘what’s killing you, what do you need?’  That’s really quite an insightful exercise because many respond with an observation that they are never asked for such insights, as everyone is always trying to sell them something. I learnt a long time ago, and it’s very much a lesson that has come from my association with Sir Terry Matthews, that it’s essential to build what the customer needs.  Always focus on the customer.  You’re much better off with a demand driven business than a supply one.  You’re much better off starting a company where you know someone wants to buy the product, versus starting a venture where you hope someone wants to buy the product you assumed they needed.  There are graveyards full of companies where people were beguiled by their idea, they never listened to the customer and then when they launched the product or service, (and sometimes have raised quite large amounts of money around that misplaced idea), suddenly discovered nobody wants this thing.”

Mike joined Simon in Alacrity to run the UK element. He says: “I started with a colleague in the UK and interviewed the first sets of graduates to come on board, and then ran it out of the office space that we’re still located in Newport.”

Upon graduation, the programme provides graduates access to a designated venture capital fund, which is separate from the foundation, to fund their graduating companies.  Simon explains: “the founders don’t have to take the money, obviously, but if they choose to take it, they get £250,000 cash and for that they get 40% of the company with a 20% stock option scheme on top of that. The foundation receives 10%, for the IP that’s been created in the fifteen months of the programme. The expectation is that the charity itself might evergreen in the future as companies exit. The investors, which comprises a combination of private and public money, get the remaining equity in the company.  So, when they graduate they’ve got a post-round company valuation of half a million pounds.”

Alacrity also provides a mentoring programme with more than a hundred mentors in it.  Simon says that when he visits organisations and mentions that Alacrity is a foundation, inevitably, they think he is looking for donations or funding. He explains: “Instead, I usually ask for them to donate a day a year to helping these young people, just a day a year. In reality it’s not a whole day, it’s typically a couple of hours, a morning, or an afternoon.” He says that it’s often a new experience for many of the very senior people and they can often be nervous, adding: “After they’ve spent the time with these young people, they come running out and, in most cases, say ‘when can I do it again?  That’s fantastic’. It’s such a virtuous experience, you’re helping young people, you’re sharing your wisdom and skills with them and it’s a good feeling.”

Mike adds: “We do ask some of the previous cohort members that start their own companies to come back and give their experiences to the new interns coming through the door.  It’s all well and good the older brigade telling the new graduates how wonderful it is and what they’re going to experience, but nothing beats someone who says, well I was here exactly one year ago and this is what it’s going to be like, and these are the highs, these are the lows, this is what you can expect.  There’s a lot more expectation and trust brought out from that interaction than there is from when we stand up and say it, because we clearly want to promote the programme hard to them, but there’s nothing better than having someone who’s actually just been through it one year ago.”

Simon and Mike are flexible about who they hire and experience an attrition rate of around 30%. Mike explains: “In the early stages it is because it’s pretty hard going. We try to make sure they understand it’s not a nine to five, this is a be-all, end-all.  This is your company and you’ve got to understand, if you want a nine to five type job, then you need to find something else.” Each student who joins is given a stipend to join the programme and support them. Mike adds: “But we expect them to really give everything to it, because in the end, if they’re going to receive funding, they’re responsible to shareholders and that’s a significant commitment by a shareholder to give them £250,000 when they haven’t got a consistent revenue stream and they’ve got a product still in its infancy.”

The programme attracts around a 60-40% male to female gender split and is very diverse and is open to international students as well as UK students. Mike adds: “We don’t make any specific selections based on gender.  We try to encourage women to apply, and we have a Women in STEM programme to do that. We select on meritocracy.  If you can pass the process and impress people, that’s all that matters.  You’ve got to work as a team.”

Asked about the success of companies set up within Alacrity, Simon says: “We’ve had some exits already.  The company with the highest valuation is about $400 million. In the UK we’ve got companies now who we could sell if we wanted to, but the idea of what we’re trying to achieve is to create British companies that stay British. We’ve fast growing companies in contact centre, cybersecurity, energy, corporate solutions, hospitality, datascience and education markets doing rather well.”

Asked about Sir Terry Matthews management style, Simon describes him as ‘having the senses of a bloodhound in his ability to identify talent’, a man who is ‘never happier than when he’s in with customers, finding out what they need, what their current trends are’. Someone who is ‘very good at understanding client demand and the potential of emerging technology, he is a consummate engineer with a sixth sense to see what’s coming down the line’.

On the subject of his own management style, Simon says: “I would hope that I took many of the lessons I learnt from watching one of the world’s most successful telecom entrepreneurs and putting a slightly different spin on it. My translational skills are very good.  I can take really complex scenarios and distil them down into concepts that mere mortals can understand.” He then asks Mike Doyle to add his thoughts.

Mike says: “Simon operates very differently to Terry, which is a testament to that learning phase and trying to implement the elements that he found that would work differently for his capabilities.  Simon surrounds himself with people who are better than him at things that he needs to get done. He doesn’t pretend to be a technical expert, and I don’t pretend to be a marketing expert.  He employs the best people to get the job done around him, and collectively that has borne fruit in what we did. It’s that understanding that you don’t have all the eggs in your own basket, making sure that other people have those capabilities around you.  For some people that can be a threat, for Simon it’s not, it’s definitely one plus one is greater than two.  That’s been noticeable all the way through his career at Newbridge, and then when we got together at Ubiquity and at Alacrity, it was making sure that we’ve got the best people around us to make the situation much more fruitful and productive.”

Simon says: “The biggest mistake I’ve learnt in business is do not under-capitalise an opportunity.  Bootstrapping everything with minimal funding can be done, but it’s extremely painful. I’m more convinced that if you’re going to succeed you need to capitalise your company with sufficient funding, so that you don’t have to take your foot off the gas.  Somewhere in the world there’s someone with the same idea as you, pursuing the same market. You might have a lead to begin with, but particularly in the UK context, if you’ve got to take your foot off the gas to raise money, and you’ve got someone who’s better financed somewhere else who’s got their foot full down on the accelerator, they’re likely to beat you up.

“We started with very meagre resources at Ubiquity, but we learnt our lesson, because we went from very small funding rounds to the biggest venture capital round that had ever been done in a software company in the UK.  It was a £25.8 million venture round, which back then was huge.”

Mike adds: “It was a fairly hard grind, the organic growth was difficult, because it was almost month to month, and that’s not possible to achieve some of the increases in productivity and software advances if you’re forced to do it over twelve months when you could actually do it over three.”

Mike says of his mistakes: “The biggest mistake I made earlier on, was not leveraging the capacity of other companies to do the selling for you.”

Simon adds: “We did have a slightly unusual business, because for the first two years we were promoting a product and a technology that we were having to give away.  This is before the trend of freeware.  If you’re going to establish a protocol that’s open and available to all, you can’t sell it.  It was the same dilemma faced by Tim Berners-Lee with HTML and the browser. You’ve just got to give it away.  But we did have a longer-term strategy which the investors bought into, which was once the protocol’s established the world would need service platforms that operated with that protocol to deliver new services to the various customers. We first approached the big incumbents.  We spoke to the carriers, but it was the guys who developed the over-the-top services who took the most advantage of SIP, the social media companies such as Facebook and WhatsApp. They came in and just blew the world away with new thinking.  When you consider the funding, the manpower, the market penetration that the carriers had, it’s almost unforgiveable that they let those over-the-top newcos demote them to just being plumbers and suppliers of bits on a network.”

Asked why the UK produces mostly small IT businesses, Simon say: “There are two principal reasons, one’s private, one’s public.  In the private space there’s still difficulty in venture capital access.  It’s improving no end, but historically it’s been very, very difficult.  In the case of Ubiquity, we had to find our money in North America.  We couldn’t find a single UK venture capitalist or finance house that could even understand what we were talking about.”

Simon goes on to highlight the difference in the analysts in the different public stock markets around the world, highlighting that those in the US, have a single focus which might be quantum, 5G, internet of things etc, which means that they can provide in-depth insight into the potential market and this provides a greater level of confidence among investors. He says: “In London, the poor old analyst is expected to do everything from quantum to 5G, and the task is to just too broad As a result they struggle to instil that same confidence, they don’t have the specific expertise to educate the market and accordingly, everyone says if you really want your company to succeed you need to list it on a North American stock market.  There is a direct association between that analytical amplification and advocacy that they create and the success of a company.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley