WE meet in the Landmark Hotel on London’s Marylebone Road, but Sir Robin Saxby, smartly suited and booted, has already got a better plan.
“I know a really nice place to eat round the corner,” he says, “Come on, I’ll look it up on my phone while we walk.”
And he’s off like a wrinkly whippet, bounding along the pavement, head down, briefcase in hand, eyes glued to his I-mate. Apparently, he’s got more than 5,000 names and numbers on his phone — contacts, companies, restaurants.
“Never waste time somewhere good when there’s somewhere great nearby,” he mutters, then adds: “This is it; oh no, that’s in Tokyo.”
In Baker Street, we walk right past it. “Galvin’s. Well spotted, that’s definitely it,” he says, turning back. Has he booked? No, but he gets a table.
Life with Saxby, you swiftly gather, is always full-pace. He’s never happy unless he’s on the move. Short, dynamic, volatile, still with a sweep of schoolboy hair across his 59-year-old forehead, he’s also the least nerdy technology titan you could meet.
Fifteen years ago he founded Cambridge-based ARM — the microchip-design firm whose brainwork goes into Ipods, mobile phones, cameras, laptops and, increasingly, white goods. Now it’s a global giant with a market capitalisation of £1.6 billion and offices round the world.
But Derbyshire-born Saxby, electrical engineer by training, salesman by nature, always retains the element of surprise. The last time we met he’d finished our interview by singing me an old blues song about syphilis (Goin’ Down Slow, by St Louis Jimmy Oden). Why? Neither of us can remember, but Saxby loves the blues, and is as happy talking about Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf as he is about microprocessors.
Last week he pulled another surprise, announcing his retirement as chairman of ARM from October, ending a relationship that has been one of the great British technology stories of the last decade.
Gone to spend more time with his collection of ancient radios? Don’t you believe it. Being Saxby, he isn’t really severing the link with ARM — he remains as emeritus chairman — but melding it into a new challenge, taking on the presidency of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and promising a determined push to increase the public’s understanding of technology.
“I’ve been very fortunate,” he says, tucking into his halibut. “I started ARM with 12 engineers 15 years ago. I’ve taken it public, I’ve survived the crash, I appointed a great chief executive five years ago, and I’ve seen how the ARM team has been rejuvenated with fresh blood.”
Now, he says, is the right time for him to step back, not least because the demands of the IET presidency make it difficult for him to stay. “I want to give it more time than I could if I remained chairman of ARM,” he explains.
The move will also give more space to ARM’s chief executive, Warren East, and allow the company to benefit from the experience of its new chairman, former Philips and ASML boss Doug Dunn. “With me out of the way, Warren can do some fresh things,” says Saxby. “I see that as very positive.”
For the IET, with its 150,000 members, Saxby promises a host of business connections around the world, and a gritty pushiness that will be a change in style from its current president, the boffinish Sir John Chisholm, boss of QinetiQ.
“I believe in the global economy,” says Saxby. “I want to get more globally connected and I want British engineering to benefit, but not myopic British engineering — it has to be connected engineering. And I want to inspire the young to recognise the opportunities in this area. I want to make keynote addresses all over the place …” And then he’s off again, rattling through China, India, Michael Faraday (inventor of the electric motor), the “flat world”. The flow of his conversation is so fast that sometimes you lose sight of the shore.
But Saxby’s zest for challenge and his global outlook were always the bedrocks of ARM’s success throughout the 1990s. He was the Liverpool University kid with sales experience who whipped a clutch of Cambridge techies into a world-beating firm.
Before that he had done stints at various electrical and technology firms, including Rank Bush Murphy, Pye, Motorola and Henderson Security. That’s how he picked up the business edge that made ARM’s know-how so marketable.
The firm lived and grew off the power of its brains — licensing its designs for others to manufacture. It now takes a cut of every product sold with “ARM-powered” bits inside. How smart is that? “We’re the global leader in what we do,” nods Saxby, “and in technology, unless you’re the global leader, life’s very hard.”
Saxby says there is no right way to build a business. “What you do is based on what you have experienced. The company I was in just before ARM was called European Silicon Structures. What it did was raise a lot of money and blow it away very quickly, so when we started ARM, I had the mean-and-lean philosophy.”
The most difficult thing he achieved was floating the company. “We had a variety of backers, including Apple and Acorn, and they all had different agendas. It was hard managing those conflicts.”
But going public was essential, he adds, because otherwise he would have lost his best engineers. “When it comes to the stock market, I’m not unhappy about it. I’ve gone through a personal learning curve. I’m a bit of a believer in progress through pain. I’ve had some pain and now I’m wiser.”
The downside was his sudden accumulation of wealth as tech stocks soared and the attention it brought. ARM shot into the FTSE 100 and by early 2000 Saxby was worth more than £150m — he still has more than 11m ARM shares, worth some £13m. But when I joked six years ago that he was probably Chesterfield’s richest son, he almost snapped my head off.
Now, having had much of his wealth wiped out in the tech-stock crash (although he has cashed in more than £10m of shares since 1998), he is more sanguine. In the past six years the value of the company has fallen from £9.3 billion to £1.6 billion. “What I’d have done differently is push the shareholders harder on going public, and I’d probably have sold more shares at a higher price.”
He grins lopsidedly and shrugs. Saxby is a hard man to pin down. East cites his stamina, enthusiasm and optimism: “Robin is always trying to square the circle between competing with businesses and partnering them. Turning our enemies into friends — that’s a Robin phrase.”
Saxby says he gets his drive from his background — his dad was a security guard, his mum helped him with his teenage hobby, fixing televisions. Like many entrepreneurs, he always wanted to do well because his parents didn’t have much.
He started in business designing chips for Rank Bush Murphy, but was turned into a salesman by Motorola.
His boss there described him as brilliant but tempestuous, resigning every three months, then rejoining.
Saxby calls it “Liverpool grit”, honed during his days putting on rock concerts at university to earn a bit extra. He took it into ARM, and developed his own globetrotting style, always on the move, seeking new customers.
Yet he never shifted his home to Cambridge, preferring the Thames Valley — closer to Heathrow, though some thought he was chippy about Oxbridge. He says he just hated Cambridge’s traffic and lousy restaurants. But don’t get him started.
“What I do hate is the misreporting. Oxbridge isn’t number one at everything. Southampton is rated the number one electronics department in Britain. Liverpool is top at veterinary science. Good students come out of all the universities.”
But, he adds, Cambridge does do fantastically good blues nights. Then he’s off again like a box of fireworks: last week’s Eric Clapton gigs, press distortions about technology, improving the teaching of science in our schools, accusations that he’s a change junkie. “It’s not about change, it’s about pace,” he says.
Later, paying the bill, he picks up the waiter’s handheld card-reader. “ARM-powered, eight cents royalty.”
Per transaction? He laughs. “I wish. Per unit.” But it’s a fact that the company he built up now has its designs everywhere, affecting just about everything we do.
That is quite some achievement, and with it, he has remained down to earth, likeable, and implausibly upbeat. That’s some achievement, too.
Three hours later he’s ringing me to explain how he organised the photo-shoot, dancing with the statue of Michael Faraday.
The next day he’s texting me, arguing the provenance of Goin’ Down Slow.
He never stops. Can he raise the profile of technology here? “I wouldn’t bet against it,” laughs East. Me neither.
Vital statistics
Born: February 4, 1947
Marital status: married, two children
School: Chesterfield Grammar
University: Liverpool
First job: design engineer, Rank Bush Murphy
Salary package: £181,000
Car: black Jaguar XK
Homes: High Wycombe and Anzère in Switzerland
Favourite book: The Northern Lights by Lucy Jago
Favourite musician: John Lee Hooker
Favourite film: Blues Brothers
Favourite gadget: AMI jukebox
Last holiday: Switzerland
Sir Robin Saxby's working day
“WHEN I’m travelling, I hardly go to sleep,” says ARM chairman Sir Robin Saxby. “So I’ll have gone to bed at midnight, then I’m up at 5am doing my e-mails. But if I’m at home I wake at 7am.”
Sometimes he drives himself into ARM’s office in Maidenhead. “My office is a virtual office – it’s where my assistant is, I only go there occasionally.”
Saxby prefers to be on the move, meeting customers, solving problems. “I don’t like to do anything five days a week. I like to be a catalyst for change, set an agenda, and stimulate other people to do their own thing.”
He loves travelling, and plans to take the IET’s message abroad. “I’m trying to get my head around next year’s travel arrangements — which countries I’m in when and where I’m speaking.”
Downtime
SIR ROBIN SAXBY loves technology and music, and has wired up every room in his home, and his swimming pool, for sound. “I managed to build myself a swimming pool at home. I’m proud of the fact it has underwater loudspeakers, a complete sound system, and I did it all myself.”
He also skis in Switzerland, where he has a chalet, and plays tennis every week at Cliveden, the Berkshire country house hotel. In the evenings he can often be found entertaining guests at blues or jazz concerts.
“I took family and friends to see Eric Clapton at the Albert Hall this week. It was fabulous, absolutely outstanding,” he says.
“I also like listening to my son’s band – I’m just trying to think what the band’s name is this week . . .” Saxby has been known to help set up the PA system for his son’s gigs.
