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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci · The Rise and Fall of a Tech Titan - Katie Prescott · 11 Jun 2026
podcast
Um, and I couldn't find anything.
And so I became really intrigued by, by this story.
Um, and, and that was the genesis of the book.
Mike Lynch came from not
very wealthy family at all in the east of London born to Irish immigrant parents and one of the most astonishing things about his story is actually in Britain we still have a very divided class society as you know and he did not come from the establishment at all but he was extremely bright and that was spotted very early on and he went to a private school on a scholarship so he would have been there surrounded by middle class kids whose parents could afford to pay for them to go to
to private school.
He really excelled there.
He went through Cambridge, where he studied science in the sort of dawn of the computing era and rode that exciting period of computing back in the days where you could sort of take tech apart and put it together again and really mess around with computers, perhaps a little bit like people are doing with AI today.
And at a time when I think a lot of people were going into the city of London, it was
the big boom that had happened in the late 80s, he decided to stay in Cambridge and started a company called Autonomy, which was a search business at a time when digital information was booming and people were trying to work out how to sift through all of that information.
and he I said he rode the wave of the computing era he rode the wave of the dot-com boom he floated the company three times in Europe out on the Nasdaq and then in London and
because it was that time, even though it wasn't making huge amounts of revenue at the time, about £44 million a year, it was valued at £4 billion, another parallel perhaps with the AI era today, and jumped straight into the FTSE 100, so the top stocks listed here in London.
Um, so, you know, he had this kind of astonishing rise and at the age of 30, he was running a FTSE 100 company, um, of an incredibly bright guy, as I said, but also a really cruel man.
And that was one of the things that came through in my research quite early on that really surprised me was how ruthless he was and how difficult to deal with and how he just burned through relationships.
How about saying it that way?
unable to build relationships with people quite the opposite you know he wasn't a typical tech geek he had a couple of bands while he was at school and at university he had lots of girlfriends which people at Cambridge said to me you know it was not quite not not a sort of stereotypical Cambridge science geek so um I think he had EQ when he needed it but he had an ability to be extremely cruel and
And I think he thought that that sort of fear in business and within his teams got results.
And I think it did actually for him, but it certainly didn't.
It made him a lot of enemies along the way.
Yeah.
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