Katie Prescott

speaker

250 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 11 Jun

Katie Prescott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Breakfast Business with Joe Lynam · The Curious Case of Mike Lynch: The Improbable Life & Death of a Tech Billionaire’ · 17 Dec 2025 podcast

And I'd say he was a tech entrepreneur, Joe, before it was a thing, before it was cool.

Yeah, one of the hardest things about writing this book was trying to make software accounting exciting.

Good luck with that.

I think I've managed to vaguely achieve through telling it like a story.

But essentially, autonomy was a search engine for corporates.

So Lynch used to say that he could have been the next Google.

But he decided rather than selling his search engine to consumers, to all of us, that he'd sell it to businesses.

And Hewlett-Packard came after Autonomy in 2011 because they were selling printers and ink, and they were one of Silicon Valley's oldest companies, and I guess quite an old-fashioned tech business, and they were looking for the next big thing.

And they thought if they bought this really cool software company –

and integrated it into their hardware and their massive customer base, that would allow them to grow for the future.

So that's how the two businesses came together.

Lynch started his business in the dot-com boom where the share price soared.

I mean, the comparisons with AI today are really, really interesting.

So his business, when it listed in London, was worth £4 billion.

It was making revenues at the time of £40 billion.

Billions were rare, but if you look at the actual revenue, the turnover was 40 million.

So yes, fast forward to 2011, Hewlett-Packard came knocking and paid 11 billion for the business.

Well, sorry, that was the next part of the question.

So there had been questions around autonomy's numbers and how they were registering revenue in their accounts for several years in the city before HP decided to buy the business.

And very quickly after it did buy autonomy, Lynch was fired by the new chief executive, a lady called Meg Whitman.

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