Interview with Tom Ilube CBE

Tom Ilube, CBE was born near Richmond, Surrey, in July 1963. Tom says: “My mother is English, she was born and brought up in Richmond, as were her parents and her grandparents. We’ve been in Richmond for about five generations now, if you include my children.  My father was Nigerian. He joined the then West African part of the British army and came to the UK in 1956/7 to be trained in Harrogate in north Yorkshire, then trained as an electrical engineer in the army and then subsequently ended up in London where he met my mum and I was born.”

Until the age of seven Tom went to school in Sunbury where the family lived while his father worked for the BBC. Tom says: “My dad had been working for the BBC, he was one of the first black engineers at the BBC, a fascinating time in the sixties, as you can imagine, and also for a white woman and a black man with a mixed race child and so forth, it was just a fascinating time.”

The family relocated to Uganda in 1969 when his father was asked to help establish Ugandan Television. They spent three years in Uganda which was under Idi Amin’s rule before escaping back to the UK via Kenya in the early seventies. Tom then attended Teddington Boys School. He says of his experience of moving schools: “I was constantly coming to a new school or leaving a school halfway through and being the new boy all over again.  What it gave me was the ability to go into new environments, figure them out, establish myself, get on with people and I think that’s been quite useful to me over the years. It gave me adaptability; adaptability across different groups of people, different cultures, from Richmond to Uganda in East Africa, back to Richmond again, then off to Nigeria and then back to the UK, you just get used to moving in and out of different cultures.”

 Tom enjoyed school. He loved science and rugby which he played both in school and for his local club, the London Welsh in Richmond.

At the age of 14, Tom and his family moved to Nigeria where his father had been born. Tom says: “I was 14 at the time and it was a difficult move for me because I was a typical London teenager in the mid-seventies, playing rugby and ice skating and then there I was going off to Nigeria, so that was pretty hard for me. I didn’t like it at all to start off with, in fact at one point I tried to escape and get back to England, but that didn’t work.  Then I settled down and said, okay, I’m here now, let’s make the best of it and when I shifted my mindset and said okay, this is where I am, let’s get into it, I made lots of friends, I had a tremendous time, learnt a lot.”
Tom went to Edo College in Benin City, in the south-west of Nigeria. The school was the premier school in the region and was modelled on British schools. Tom says of the experience: “My father was very proud that I was there.  I didn’t really appreciate how important it was to him, because he grew up very poor background in the village. Edo College and some of the other colleges were modelled on the great British schools and it was really special for people to get into them.  So the fact that his son had got into this school with a great reputation was really important.  Sadly, at the time, I didn’t really appreciate that, I was annoyed about being there, I didn’t want to be there, so it made no difference to me.  But actually, over the years some of my closest friends over many years come from my Edo College days.”

 In 1980, Tom went to University of Benin in Nigeria to study physics. It was here that Tom was introduced to the idea of a computer as he explains: “We were told in that building is a computer. We would write our programs and give them to the computer man who would take them away and then he’d come back the next day and say, your program didn’t work.  That’s as close as we got. … So I never actually saw a computer in Nigeria, it wasn’t until I came back to England and bought myself a ZX Spectrum that I actually laid hands on a real computer.”

After graduating in 1984, Tom returned to the UK where he decided he wanted a career in computing and IT. After doing a few odd jobs, he started on his plan to get a job with the help of The Computer User’s Yearbook which featured all the main companies that had computer departments in the country. Tom says: “I thought this is easy, I will simply just apply to all of them.  So I started at the letter ‘A’ and I applied to every company in the UK in The Computer User’s Yearbook that began with the letter ‘A’, and they all said no.  Then I started on the ‘Bs’ and got to British Airways and they gave me a job. I was ready to go all the way to Z and back again.”

Tom started his career as a trainee assembler programmer at British Airways based at Hatton Cross near Heathrow. He worked on airline reservation systems. Tom says: “We were writing them on IBM 370 mainframes, so 370 assembler and it was its own operating system as well, so not exactly transferrable skills.  You could basically transfer from one bit of British Airways to another bit of British Airways.  It’s astonishing to think that an airline would basically have its own operating system, but it had to operate extremely quickly and sometimes we would write direct in machine code instead of assembler, because we wanted to make the programs go a bit faster. They were completely unmaintainable.  You would look at someone’s code who’d been there before you and it was just a mix of uncommented assembler with bits of machine code and you were supposed to figure out what on earth it was doing.  It was astonishing.”

 Tom enjoyed the intellectual challenge of working at British Airways. He explains: “I enjoyed the intellectual challenge, programming in assembler on mainframes, trying to make sure your programs fitted in 1k of memory otherwise they’d get kicked out, and they had to be fast, etc, it was extremely intellectual stuff and you were right down at the operating system in the machine code and so forth.”  However, the pull of the City of London and the big bang of the mid-eighties proved too strong an attraction, as he explains: “Even though I enjoyed and really liked British Airways, there was the lure of the City. I wanted to get into the City and I ended up moving to the London Stock Exchange.

Tom made the move to the London Stock Exchange as a system designer. He says: “That was a fascinating time, it was a real period of change in the City, pinstripe suits, but the Americans and the other international companies coming in because the City was changing, a lot of excitement, a lot of energy in that kind of late eighties period.”

Tom worked on settlement systems.  He explains: “The systems dealt with post trade, how do you settle the transaction to make sure that the shares go in one direction and the money goes in the other direction.  We were working on a system called Talisman, which was the Stock Exchange system at the time, and there was a huge project called TAURUS that ended badly, that was all about moving to a different type of settlement system.  There had been a sort of two-week settlement period and the whole world was moving towards rolling settlement and there was this big change going on.  It was a massive project, there were so many stakeholders in the City with so many different views.  The whole programme eventually got closed down and the Bank of England stepped in and took things over and created a new platform called CREST.”

Tom believes that TAURUS failed because of continuous scope creep, he adds: “the Stock Exchange didn’t have the authority and the power to tell its member firms what was going to be in and what wasn’t going to be in, it was getting pulled this way and that with new requirements and changes coming in.  The Bank of England, when it stepped in, just had a whole different level of power and authority at the time.  It simply just said, right, we’re going to do these three things and that’s what we’re going to do, and then everyone sat down and kept quiet and then they did them and it worked.”

Tom stayed at the London Stock Exchange for a couple of years before leaving to do a Masters in Business Administration (MBA), at City University Business School in 1987/88. He says: “I felt that I didn’t have a British academic qualification.  I had my Nigerian science degree and that wasn’t getting me into conversations that I wanted to get into and also I wanted to broaden out my business knowledge as I’d determined that I wasn’t going to be a hands-on technical person, I was going to be a broader business person with technical skills.”

After completing his MBA, Tom moved into the consulting world with Hoskins that became Capgemini, and then on to PricewaterhouseCoopers (Coopers & Lybrand, or Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte).  While at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Tom was sent on a project to the London Stock Exchange.

 Tom spent seven years as a consultant working on different projects which took him across the globe from the Middle East, the US to Europe. He says: “I really learned a lot, I learnt how to get up to speed really quickly on a new project, become part of a new team, how to present, how to facilitate, manage projects, grow confidence.  I’ve always been quite confident as an individual and so it was honing that and knowing that you could throw me into any situation …  and that became incredibly useful to me further down the track when I started my entrepreneurial career.”

After seven years as a consultant, Tom left Coopers & Lybrand to join Goldman Sachs as part of its internal consulting department, a move the company made to reduce the amount of spend on external consultants. He says: “I felt like I knew a lot about how to get things done, but I didn’t have a lot of content.  I felt I was too much process and not enough content and I wanted to go back to working on the end user side of things to get a bit deeper into an industry area and become a bit more expert in that area.”

 Tom led projects in the fixed income trading area which was going through a transition of the way it used data.

In 1996, at the age of 33, Tom felt ready to move into entrepreneurship and founded Lost Wax. He set up in a converted church hall in Richmond. He says: “I went from commuting up to the City in my suit and tie to wearing my woolly jumper and sitting in a converted church hall and programming. It was an exciting time and that was quite a change for me.”

The company started off creating websites for clients, Tom says: “Then we became really interested in this emerging area of agent technology and multi-agent systems.  There was a professor down at Southampton called Nick Jennings who was doing some really fascinating stuff in that area.  So we started to develop multi-agent systems and eventually ended up developing a multi-agent platform that is still being used today actually.”

After running Lost Wax for a number of years, Tom was invited by his friend Richard Duval to become part of the founding team of  Egg, an internet bank which was part of the Prudential, where Tom was subsequently appointed as CIO.

The Derby based company was an instant success and met its five year targets for deposits and users in a matter of months. Tom headed up the team who designed and assembled the IT system for the business ensuring that it could be scaled up as the company grew.

Tom says: “You couldn’t really say that we sat down and managed to design a system from the start that scaled and scaled in order to support what ended up being something like four million users and grew at an incredible pace with a whole range of products.  I think it was more that we had a team and a culture that was all about speed, flexibility, taking on big breakthrough problems and solving them, and that is what enabled us to cope with the level of change and speed.  … Every month, every week, there was a new problem caused by that rapid success that everyone had to pile in and solve.  So in a sense the architecture that we devised in order to cope with that wasn’t a technical architecture, it was a cultural architecture, it was a way of being and a way of wanting to solve those problems that allowed us to tackle them, rather than the beautiful technical architecture that solved them for us.”

In 2005 Tom co-founded Garlik, an identity protection company. He says: “I had a great time at Egg, and then eventually left to go back to my core entrepreneurial journey, set up the next company, which was called Garlik, and then off we went from there. We wanted to help consumers look after their identity in the digital world.”

Having raised venture money to set it up and obtained backing from 3i and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, they worked with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Wendy Hall, who were working at the University of Southampton on a very large research project looking at the semantic web, which Berners-Lee envisaged as the next generation of the web.  Tom says: “We took those ideas and that technology platform approach and some of the team and built Garlik’s technology platform based on the semantic web model and the semantic web ideas. Tim Berners-Lee was a senior adviser to the company for a number of years, which was really great fun and fascinating.”

Garlik was sold to Experian, the credit reference agency in 2011.

In 2010, Tom became Managing Director of the consumer division of credit reference agency CallCredit Information Group, which had just been through a management buyout. He explains; “They wanted to build up something interesting on the consumer side and I came up with an idea which we called Noddle. It was about giving people access to their credit reports for free and enabling them to use that information to find the right commercial deals, the right credit card deals, the right loans that suited their credit reference agency.  That was a real breakthrough moment in the credit reporting industry because until then amongst credit reference agencies, the whole approach had been if you want a credit report you have to pay us for it. I said I’m going to turn that on its head, I’m going to give consumers their credit reports and we’ll generate money if they decide to use those credit reports in order to access products and services.”

Noddle was successful and grew very quickly. Other credit reference agencies were at first puzzled how to respond to it but eventually adopted a similar approach. Noddle grew to several million users  before the whole of CallCredit was eventually sold to another private equity firm and Tom moved on from the business.

Noddle was sold to a US company called Credit Karma and is now known as Credit Karma in the UK. Tom adds: “It was a fascinating business and it really did change that bit of the industry, the idea that consumers should be able to get their credit reports for free rather than paying for them, I can definitely claim credit for coming up with that idea and launching it in the UK.”

In 2014, Tom co-founds Crossword Cybersecurity, a research driven cyber-security company in partnership with leading universities. Tom, who is Crossword’s CEO,  explains: “We were looking for interesting intellectual cybersecurity research in universities and thinking about how we could commercialise that research and bring it out of universities and into the commercial world and turn it into products and services. To some extent it was building off the back of what I did for Garlik, because at Garlik we had taken some intellectual property, ideas and teams from Southampton University which had worked really well.”

Sir Richard Dearlove is the chairman and the company is listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange.

Tom explains how his management style has evolved thanks to some interesting input during an appraisal session: “My management style has evolved a lot over the years.  I used to be a very content-oriented manager, I would manage because I knew a lot about what we were trying to do and therefore I was the expert that my team or my project team or the client would have to come to ask how do we do this or that.  I was given a bit of feedback by one of my consulting partners who told me that one of my problems is that I listen too aggressively. I’d never heard that before, I didn’t realise you could listen aggressively. But he said, ‘because you know so much content, the person talking to you feels almost like they’re being judged and you’re going to jump on them at any moment and everyone’s slightly on edge because you know too much’.  I thought, that’s fascinating and so I changed my style as a result of that and I thought a lot more about process and about listening skills and the softer skills and I think I came out of that a much better manager and less reliant on knowing all the detail and more on having the personal skills and the inter-personal skills to be able to manage large and complex teams.”

 The change was a “light-bulb moment” for Tom. He adds: “It wasn’t easy, but it was interesting and it was effective.  I think that was the thing.  I think that as I started to change my management style and I became more effective, it was a light bulb moment; this really works.  If I listen differently and ask questions in a different way and am genuinely open to whatever answers come at me, then I learn more.  Who knew! I embraced some of those management techniques because they were really effective, so it wasn’t too hard to make that transition.”

Tom says of Y2K: “What a project across the industry, it was astonishing.  I pretty much know that code that we wrote in the eighties at British Airways would have fallen over.  I know that because I wrote some of that code and we had to fit everything in 1k blocks and therefore bytes mattered, and therefore if you were doing some date processing and you had the choice of putting it as ‘1988’ or just ‘88’, you could save yourself some memory by just using ‘88’ instead of ‘1988’.  … There was no doubt in my mind that the industry had to work through it and sort it out.  I don’t know whether the industry as a whole has really got better at looking ahead at problems that will come down the track. I think we’re an industry that has a strong tendency to look at the here and now and believe that we’re really clever and have got all those problems sorted and then we’ll be taken by surprise again when it turns out that we haven’t. I think that’s what happened there. We as programmers in the eighties and nineties thought we were phenomenally clever and that whole Y2K thing was just such a schoolboy error on an industry scale, as it were.  I think as an industry, we have the capacity to do that again, because here we are again with AI and all the rest of it and again, we think we’re phenomenally clever. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point down the track there was something – I don’t know what shape it would take – but there was something where we all looked at ourselves in embarrassment and thought, whoops, we’ve done it again.”

Tom believes there are a number of reasons why the UK has limited success at creating large tech companies such as Microsoft or Google, he says: “One reason is our relationship with failure.  We don’t really like and embrace failure in the way that the folk in the States do.  When you talk to an entrepreneur in the States about their businesses, and they’ll say, ‘I launched one and then it crashed and burnt, and then I launched another and then it crashed and burnt, but this third one is going really well.’  You talk to an entrepreneur in the UK, we just don’t like to talk about failure.  But, as entrepreneurs, we know that the route to success is through a series of failures.  The reason why I got my first job at British Airways was because I applied to 500 other companies and they all said get lost, we don’t want you.”

In 2005, Tom was among a group who started a project to set up the Hammersmith Academy; an idea inspired by an Apple store where people were allowed to play with the computers on display. Tom says: “I thought wow, that’s fascinating, I wonder if you could build a school that had that same sort of feel, that was just open, that was accessible from a technology point of view, that had such good equipment that the students wouldn’t go home.” The Academy opened its doors in 2011.

Tom worked with various livery companies, including the WCIT, to set up the project; a conscious decision in his mission to give back to society. He explains: “I had decided two things, when I decided I was going to start to give back and adopt more of a charity side alongside my commercial activity. One, that I was going to be very focussed about how I did it, and two, that I was going to work with other people.  I wasn’t going to be a lone philanthropist trying to do everything on my own. Therefore being part of the livery company and essentially leveraging the power, experience and influence of being part of a livery company and the broader livery movement, that’s what enabled Hammersmith Academy to come to life.   It just wouldn’t have happened by me as an individual on my own, never, never in a thousand years would it have happened.”

Tom says: “I’ve failed constantly.  I’ve pitched for money from all sorts of people and been turned down over and over again.  Whenever I pitch for money I assume that I need to pitch to 50 people in order for one to say yes, so 49 are going to say no, get lost.  I’ve applied for jobs, I applied for the same company five times in a row and sometimes when you tell that sort of story to people, they assume that the story is going to end with, and on the fifth time they gave me the job.  No they didn’t, they just said stop applying to us, we will never give you a job, go away, and that was the end of it.  I had 16 interviews to get the job at Goldman Sachs.  It was the job I always thought I wanted, with a company I always thought I wanted.  A year later I was pretty much close to emotional breakdown and stepped away from it and said I can’t work for this sort of company in corporate life any more. What I’ve learnt over the years is that almost every time you fail, if you do keep going, something else comes up.  So many times you look back and think, thank goodness I didn’t get that thing because otherwise I’d have never have got this.  Thank goodness things didn’t work out for me in the way that I wanted at Goldman’s because I may never have become an entrepreneur and had the success that I’ve had as an entrepreneur.  I just see that over and over again, I can take the long view now that allows me to see that, but boy, have I had a lot of failures.  Even when I asked my wife to marry me the first time she said no.  I was astonished! It took another year before I could build up the courage to tentatively ask her again.  Fortunately she said yes the second time.”

Tom does not own any Bitcoin, preferring instead to only invest in projects that he has direct control over and is involved with. He says: “I think bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it’s a whole fascinating area, it’s not going anywhere, it’s not going to suddenly disappear, but it’s not something that I personally invest my money into.”

 Crossword has been working on a blockchain project. Tom explains: “It came out of some ideas that we developed with University of Warwick and a university in Switzerland, EPFL, who are doing some really fascinating blockchain related stuff.  So we are really interested in and quite expert in blockchain technology. I think that’s another fascinating area.”

Tom addresses the importance of inclusion, looking at how much progress has been made. He says: “The climate has changed over the years.  Sometimes you have to take the long view, if I think about the abuse and the problems that my father suffered in London in the fifties and sixties, then the abuse and the problems that I suffered in the seventies, eighties, nineties and 2000s pale into insignificance compared to what he suffered.  Whereas if I narrate the things that happened to me over the years to my children, they look in horror and say how on earth could you stand that stuff, because things have moved on again.  I relate to it a bit like a relay race, every generation is moving further and pushing things forward. From time to time you have setbacks and you have incidents and you have issues, but overall things are moving in the right direction.”

Tom cites his recent appointment to the next chair of the Rugby Football Union which he will take over in the RFU’s 150^th year, adding: “There I am as a black man being appointed chair of the Rugby Football Union in its 150^th year; it’s quite a big step forward. In fact, I will be the first and only black chair of any national sports governing body in the UK ever, which on the one hand is quite surprising and almost shocking, given the number of black people involved in sports, and on the other hand it’s another step forward, another barrier broken. The next person who’s appointed won’t be the first, they’ll be the second and the third and it’ll become more normalised.  So we keep moving forward, we keep moving forward, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t sharp setbacks or trips or incidents along the way, but when you take the long view, we’re moving forwards.”

Following on from the Black Lives Movement which has seen Britain re-examine its attitudes to its history, including the question of removing statues of slave traders, Tom says: “For me personally, I look for things where I can have an impact, and I think for me, where I can have an impact is by using my influence to try and move things forward, whether it’s on my role as on the board of the BBC or my new role at the RFU or my position as a businessman. I tend not to get distracted by things, I don’t go running off after arguments that have nothing to do with me.  I pick the things where I think I can have an impact and then I use my influence to try and make a difference, and that’s mostly in areas of education, in areas of entrepreneurship and mentoring, and that’s where I focus my attention.”

Interviewed By: Richard Sharpe by Zoom on the 2nd March 2021

Transcribed By: Susan Nicholls

Abstracted By: Lynda Feeley