This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with auto-quote explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it at Progressive.com Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, not available in all states or situations, price is very based on how you buy. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds.
Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those owners to your contracts, they said, what the f**k are you talking about? You insane Hollywood s**t. So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at MintMobile.com slash switch. $45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees
from ORIF and New Customers for Limited Time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month, so it's full turns at MintMobile.com. Welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. There's massive value in getting visibility into where assets, things, inventory, products are in an omniscient fashion
and Bluetooth Beacons have long promised that capability. When Apple announced iBeacon, the whole of the retail industry started thinking about how Bluetooth Beacons could be used to improve the shopping experience, make money and now it's spread to healthcare and so many other
industries. People tend to focus on the tags, but actually it's the readers, it's the infrastructure and it's the network of those readers that are some of the most complex things that need to be mastered and solution providers that are looking at providing a turnkey solution, a complete solution need to decide if they're going to make or buy the network and the firmware and the software
required to make this work. Solving that problem for solution providers is what Simon Fords Bleacon company has been focusing on and so I've recorded what turned out to be a fascinating conversation with him. Simon is one of the most experienced knowledgeable people in the Internet of Things industry. He's spent 17 years working at ARM which is the processor design house that is basically designing the CPUs in billions and billions of devices that we use every day
from the processor in your phone. Probably many of the processors in other things like cars and appliances. ARM is a fascinating multi-billion dollar business and it's really all centered around IP or intellectual property, the designs for these chips that are made by Apple and Qualcomm and williot, my employer. So I had really two fascinating conversations with Simon. The first one was about Bleacon and the second one was about his career and how he evolved his way to setting up
the company that he leads today. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. The Mr. Bleacon Ambient IoT podcast is sponsored by Williot bringing intelligence to every single thing. For Simon, welcome to the Mr. Bleacon podcast. Thanks, Steve, it's great to be here. I, we've talked on and off at a variety of events and I've always been fascinated by the work that you have done in the industry, your work at ARM and you look at things in a very
interesting way from lots of different perspectives. And so I'm fascinated by this, your move to start up your own company Bleacon and I'd love to hear a bit about what you're doing. What is Bleacon? If you can give us like the brief pitch and then we'll drill into it.
Oh, absolutely, yeah. So I guess Bleacon company is trying to unlock Bluetooth low energy, which is very established, well known technology, perhaps for an industry which is less well known, which is sort of the IoT connectivity sort of space rather than the sort of consumer technology space. And I think you're very familiar with this with Williot, you're using Bluetooth in your,
you know, Bluetooth sense tags, but you're not alone. There's lots of companies who are really trying to exploit Bluetooth in, I guess the arena way you'd more classically be thinking about like cellular connectivity, Laura connectivity, things like that. For many, many good reasons that I'm sure we can explore and that's just exploding. So yeah, the Bleacon as a company is building Bluetooth low energy infrastructure to allow IoT connectivity over that transport.
And our customers are using that technology in their products. So our customers look like technology companies building products to exploit that. Okay, so it's less selling to enterprises and more selling to other people that are building solutions? Absolutely, yeah. So, you know, much like, you know, you think of arm arm is selling to the guys that are actually going to manufacture the chips. You know, we're a company selling
technology that's going to be integrated into a final product. So in the classic SaaS world, you might think of companies like Astrite or Atulio, you know, you want to integrate payment, you turn to Stripe. Stripe doesn't sell to end customers, it sells to these, you know, service developers. You know, you want to interact with the telecom system, you know, that's Tulio,
that you're interfacing with those sorts of things. But if you're a cloud company, you know, data company, an AI company wanting to integrate, you know, with physical things and those physical things happen to have constraints that could be really interesting where Bluetooth could play.
Then yeah, that's what that's what we're doing. So, and that allowed these product companies that have cloud components to their product offering or their service offering to use Bluetooth to talk to the, you know, the devices or the products out in the field. And so what are the elements of what you're selling? The main thing that companies looking for is to exploit the Bluetooth technology, you know, in these use cases because, you know, well,
Bluetooth is an absolutely amazing, you know, technology. There's tens of chip manufacturers making Bluetooth-lonal chips already. It's very low power, it's very low cost, it works all over the world. You know, all of these reasons companies would like to use this technology, but just not in the consumer space, right? They want to use it for things like asset tracking and data within their products to, you know, communicate with them. So the technology we're building,
at one level is almost like a different version of the Bluetooth stack. It's a different profile for the Bluetooth stack that operates less like a consumer one-to-one paired model, but more like a, you know, cellular Wi-Fi, Laura type model. So we're providing that firmware to those companies so they can design it using standard off-the-shelf chips into their products. And then we're running
infrastructure that actually allows that to communicate back into the cloud. So we can, you know, luckily because Bluetooth is prevalent, we can enable, you know, mobile phones to act as the hot spots for those Bluetooth devices. We can enable laptops and things like that to act as the hot spots for those devices. And obviously have physical, you know, bridges like you would have a Wi-Fi
bridge or a Laura bridge that can bridge that into the cloud. And the combination of those sort of hot spots as we call them, whether they're apps on a phone or a physical box and the sort of cloud infrastructure that we're building and run, that gives a really practical way for someone who wants to embed a Bluetooth chip in their device. But, you know, the goal is to know where it is in the world or communicate it, you know, with their cloud service, their cloud backend. Yeah, so that's
how the technology fits together. And yeah, if you think of it as like a stripe or a Twilio, but for more like a physical device. And what sort of companies are looking for this kind of capability they're building out a solution and they don't have the in-depth firmware expertise, the networking software expertise. Can you kind of give us some profiles of the sorts of companies that you see adopting this? Of course, yeah, I mean, a good way to think about it is like where are these companies
coming from? You know, so these might be companies that perhaps historically, you know, perhaps they're already using Bluetooth for Beacons, right? You know, you're very familiar with. They've got a device, they want to know where it is, but actually knowing more about it is interesting. You know, so perhaps they've come from a more, you know, tracking backgrounds. They've been building solutions that are tracking devices, but they want to know what's happening to that device. Is it overheating
as it goes through a supply chain? Is it being dropped? So they're looking to go beyond just, I can see a device. I want to send data about this device. I want to understand about it. So there's that sort of world, which is very, very natural, you know, asset tracking, I suppose, asset becoming asset visibility, I suppose. And then over time, that will just become embedded into products rather than being discrete things you bolt on. So, you know, at the moment, you've really pushed this down to
stickers that you stick on something in the product world. Maybe that's embedded in the product itself. So, you know, pretty obvious what those look like. And then you've got more, I guess, you know, product, you think of as classic product companies that want to digitize. So I think medical devices, think, you know, products that perhaps weren't previously connected and putting a cellular device
in there just isn't possible. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't make sense. And that sort of one-to-one wire replacement model of Bluetooth means Bluetooth doesn't make sense. It's not about pairing your phone with your Fitbit because you didn't want to wire between your wrist and your phone, which is kind of the Bluetooth pairing model. You really do want to communicate back to base. So, yeah, that you can imagine all the sorts of industries that are looking at their products
and thinking, actually, I want data out of this. I want to be able to update my firm where I want to be able to understand if it's performing how it's meant to perform, you know, those sorts of things. So, yeah, it's a pretty amazing ecosystem to be starting to peel back on because there's a huge diversity of companies that if they could get connectivity into their product or onto their physical asset, you know, this really opens up like the data side, which SaaS companies have
taken for granted. Every product company in SaaS knows exactly what their product's doing, how it's being used, if it's breaking. And a lot of the, you know, people dealing with physical assets or physical products are kind of blind. So, yeah, initially, you can imagine it's the obvious things, a medical device that wants to actually report back to base. But over time, these things get more interesting. It's not just about the core data. It's about, well,
is it being used properly? Is it actually meeting my customers' requirements? How do I fix it if it's not? How do I patch the security bug, all these sorts of things? So, yeah, really interesting to see where it's getting picked up. Yeah, so let's just go through the verticals where this might, well, I'm sure there's almost an infinite number of verticals. But what are the main ones where you see this need for what you're providing? So, healthcare, medical devices, that's always a really
great market for IoT. It seems like one of the first places that you start. And you've talked a bit about that, but can you add a few more specifics of the kinds of devices that you might want to embed this into? Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you took something like the medical device, I guess, again, think of the two different types of companies. There's the one that this product they're trying to build. There's a bunch of startups or established companies trying to bring in new
product lines. The connectivity has kind of unlocked the product. So, monitoring this, monitoring someone's vitals or monitoring assets or things in a business opens up this business when it wasn't possible before. And then the other side, I guess, is almost like companies that have gone through a digitisation, but that digitisation is pretty manual. So, you have a sensing device or a monitoring device, but it's someone's job to go and read the thing, punch it into a
spreadsheet or punch it into your phone or something like that. And actually, if you could automate that, you've taken away the work, but also you've made it a lot more reliable, potentially have a lot more visibility. And you can start bringing in a lot more data from your environment that's, of course, people will start to see how AI's become very interesting, this is how you can look for patterns as well as just actually use the first order data.
And that applies to all sorts of things. I don't want to go through the standard IoT gamut of things because it's the obvious sorts of things. So, the way we think about it is less about the markets at the moment, especially as a technology company, but more about the type of journey that a lot of these companies are going on. And the use case, often, and the classical IoT use case, I guess we've had for the last 10 years, is it's unlocking something new. If you
have data, this product can now exist. If I could only sense that thing, I could do something. But I think Bluetooth is very interesting in that it can achieve a price point that actually starts you to do some of these higher order functions as well. So, you can actually manage a device, understand if it's working, update it at very low cost, or even just understand how your product is being used in the field, so you're getting to the product analytics data analytics,
the marketing team. So, you've gone through the fundamental product offering, through the engineering team, to the product and marketing team. And actually Bluetooth pulls that into the realm of possibility for a lot of things that just weren't viable before. So, it's actually really exciting to see the type of people that are knocking on the door, and the sort of ideas they're thinking about. But short term, actually a lot of the opportunities we're seeing look like,
I guess, quite classical IoT use cases. If I could sense this thing, if I could embed this technology and communicate this thing, I have a product. It's the first or the property of the product. And I think as we mature as a company and the market mature, I think some of that's going to move to the second order, almost like higher order philosophical questions. So, that's actually really exciting to see. Well, what are the industries where you see this kind of
IoT taking off? Because I think we all go through our professional lives with a mixture of optimism and euphoria and fear and panic about whether the market's taking off. What's your perspective on the state of the market and where there is an increasing need for this and where you've decided, probably not a great place to focus? Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that you're,
so there's sort of digitisation you want to digitise this data. I think getting it back to home base is the game changer at a cost point that actually makes it viable for someone to do it without having to send out, without being an expensive technology, but also without being
able to send out an installation team and things like that. So, if you look at the first, well, I would say the first year of IoT, the first 10 years, a lot of gadgets, a lot of remote control, but also a lot of projects that look good on paper, but actually when you think about the total economics of what it takes to deploy a product, so not just the cost of hardware, but well, you have to train people, you have to install it, you have to do these sorts of things.
Some of those projects, the ideas were formed and the insights were formed, but they couldn't really execute. Whereas the consumer space has always been about flushing out those sorts of costs, whether it's supply chain costs, installation costs, training costs, that returns all of these
sorts of things. So, I think a lot of that learning is coming back into the industrial world, and I mean, we think a lot of our customers look more less industrial actually, but more commercial in the sense that they're a commercial environment, and that could even be in a hospital
or something or a product. But the behaviors are and the way that they're adopted look much more like a consumer technology, because one of the joys of what we're with Bleak and and Blue Tooth is there's billions of phones and computers already out there that enable this technology. So we can just turn them on. That could be if someone wants coverage of their warehouse, turn your barcode scanners that happen to be based on Android into Bleak and Hot Sports and you have
coverage of warehouse. So if you want to cover an office, well all your laptops are already sat there, just enable them and they're done, and you're unlocking these incredibly low cost chips to talk to them. So I think that sort of ability to, that changes the equation in terms of how you think about deployment, because if you have to send the guy round to install it, well then that can
blow your model out the water. But if you can make it sort of a consumer onboarding experience for the end customer, that's the sort of thing that takes out those costs as well. So like crowdsourcing with people's phones rather than sending an electrician out to install
a bunch of Hot Sports? Yeah, I mean it's not so much the crowdsourcing aspect. It's just that if you can design your product to deploy, if you're Starbucks and you want to deploy sensing in your fridges because you want to keep within the health and safety constraints of et cetera, et cetera. If the staff just have, or someone relatively switched on can deploy that, that's a lot cheaper than having to send out a van and train and things like that.
And what you find with a lot of these data companies, they're OPEX driven, they're providing value to their customer, so it's an OPEX model, they're a subscription model, they're providing a service to their customer. And actually any upfront capital in cost of equipment, in cost of getting equipment out there and manufacturing and getting it online, that's all a barrier
to actually giving the customer value. So anything you can do to reduce those costs, really allows it to go straight through to the service, which is where the customer is getting the value. So a lot of the way we think about the bit, so Bleak and us, we've already got these incredibly low-cost chips that already made in billions,
so we're taking advantage of incredible economies of scale. It's already got a Bluetooth, there's already a trusted brand, it's already all over the world, there's billions of handsets out there already. So that aspect, like amazing opportunity, but in terms of actually building the business, we're also looking, well, where does cost turn up, where does capital cost turn up? Whether that's NRE, how a supply chain works, how you have to manufacture a device,
how do you deal with security and credit? All of these things add to effectively the upfront cost of getting a solution out there. So a lot of our learnings over the years, we're trying to bring to bear in this, and of course more study as we talk to more customers. How do we just take more and more and more cost out of getting a solution working? And then once it's working as a
business, we can operate as a service business. So once the customer's getting value, that's a great time to get paid, and that makes us look much more like a classic SaaS business.
Yeah, so that's really compatible with those types of businesses, where perhaps businesses that are more oriented towards spending a load of capital to block, deploy infrastructure, they tend to become those kind of businesses that support them as well, that there's upfront projects, capital projects, very expensive projects, which means high risk as well, and that money has to come from somewhere, rather than coming from the customer who you're giving the value to
as quickly as possible. So I really like, there's a lot of things here that are really exciting, that mean that we can operate like a service business, but make that really attractive for the end customer who fundamentally just wants to get going and getting the value out of the product. So anything we can do to align with that, I think, is really going to pay off there. So getting actual hotspot devices, fixed Bluetooth readers that are running, plugged into the wall,
or running on batteries is expensive. And you, is what you're saying that there are a large proportion of use cases that can just be addressed by having the network running on employees' phones, they kind of bring your own device to work, and when you walk past the fridge, we'll listen for the temperature readings from a sensor in the fridge. Is that the kind of...
Exactly, yeah. And yeah, so I mean, you know, I think one of our observations, you know, so there was a bunch of observations that led to realizing they're really, you know, there was an opportunity for the company because there was this problem that just repeatedly, I would be looking at companies who had an amazing idea, they knew they wanted to use Bluetooth, and then, you know, six months later, they were an infrastructure company, and that's really
actually quite depressing when you repeatedly see that. So that that need is pretty obvious. But yeah, the things that kept coming up were, why can't I just use a phone? Why can't that just be the bridge, you know, the, or whatever you want to call it? But in other situations, no, you really do want a physical gateway. And what we found is this sort of weird diversity of,
you know, people building devices with apps that would custom for that device. And it's a, you know, basically, you can't leverage much infrastructure when your infrastructure is custom, it knows about the product domain. And then you had these, you know, gateway solutions, which were just doing whatever they wanted, but it had no consideration of, could you use that architecture on a phone? You know, it doesn't even make sense, you know, beacons, scanners, and things like that.
And yeah, I think it became obvious to me at one point that, you know, if you could solve this architecture where it became interchangeable, and it worked more like a roaming cellular network, and people could use the same architecture, but have a lot of flexibility in how they deployed, because in their domain, they could take advantage of, yeah, like you said, you know, the maintenance staff walking around the hotel gives you effective coverage of every hotel room
over the course of a day. It's intermittent, but it is there. But some people want dedicated coverage. You are solving a problem that some people might underestimate. They might say, well, I'll just do it myself. What are the things that are hard that people may not have quite realized, so rather than just kind of contracting some software engineer out in China to knock up some software to do this, what are the things that they are underestimating that make this
more challenging? Okay, so I think there are two aspects of that. So, you know, at some point, this is technology, right? You can build technology, it's not about magic, but often what you find within companies is they can only take it so far. So they underestimate the complexity of how would you re-engineer the security model, how do you get that signed off? How's the topology work? We've kind of got an Android app working, but I hadn't really thought that Android has lots of
variants and is on lots of different phones and iOS as well. Oh, and I do actually want it running on Windows now, but we need a physical hotspot here, and that needs to be, you know, so there's lots of this sort of underscoping of the problem and not realizing, you know, and this is, especially if it's engineering driven, right? Because engineers don't know how to necessarily purchase things sometimes. You know, it starts off small and you don't really realize what you're getting into,
right? So that's a classic sort of engineering mistake, and fair enough, but even if you just assume you know everything and you're not making that mistake, which I think is a better position to take, you know, don't assume people make wrong decisions, assume they make decisions based on all information being available to them. Then, yeah, when you build, you see this in ARM,
you know, lots of people were building processors. ARM didn't necessarily build the best processor, but it certainly finished it, you know, it wrapped it up as a product, and that made it adoptable.
So initially, companies that didn't have a processor or suddenly needed a processor in the corner of their chip, where you could spin up a team, you know, you could, you could spend 18 months doing this, and by the way, at the end of 18 months, you may or may not have what you need, and certainly, you didn't get all the benefits of, you know, other things around it, or you could go and just get
on with what you needed to do. So, I mean, that's classic, you know, classic business, right? So, you know, you know, forgetting whether people make good or bad decisions, I think fundamentally, there's a lot of technology it takes to make something like this work and maintain it. It's 10 times harder actually to make it into a product rather than just be internal gaffer tape.
Yeah. But if I, you know, but if that can be then sold to 100 customers, well, then that's an amazing business, but it's also amazing deal for everyone who just gets to adopt, adopt the learnings of, you know, of all that technology and the robustness and things like that. So, yeah, there's lots of hard things, there's lots of technical things, there's lots of things that take time, it's hard to hire people that have these skills, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
But when you boil it down, actually for a lot of companies, if you can, if you can reliably and risk free make that problem go away and get on with what, you know, you're getting your product out there. I mean, what an amazing opportunity to your company to be successful. Yes, there's no magic. I'm afraid. So Simon, how did you get into computers? What was your, what was your first computer?
Oh, first computer, interesting. So I guess computers, very early computers, sort of like 86, like 8086, the acorn, if anyone from the UK would know that actually that, you know, with made by acorn computers that became ARM, those sort of computers were around. My dad was involved
in engineering, electronics and then more computing and things like that. So I guess really, yeah, very early on, I mean, I can still remember in primary school, you know, building robots, trying to hook them up to computers because I think our primary school had a BBC, you know, which is a big deal. Where did you grow up? Oh, so this was in, so yeah, so I'm currently based in Cambridge in the UK, but this was in some of the set in the UK. So, you know, down towards
a call more that direction for people to know. So yeah, grew up very, very small primary school, BBC Micro in the corner. Yeah, I remember that sort of building, you know, robots that were tethered and drawn around, did you work out? How do you get signals out of the computer and drive this thing around? So that was like a primary school. So in the UK, I guess that's what like,
you know, eight, nine. So it was quite, that was, that was already, you know, quite, quite young and then, yeah, doing a lot of electronics, making PCBs, you know, drawing PCBs etching them, programming, pick microcontrollers, like the early pick microcontrollers, stuff like that, in assembly, you know, just like really early general interest in this sort of stuff, probably driven by the one, I mean, I think this is quite common, usually by driven by the, the want to make something,
you know, achieve something and then learning how to do it, which I think is a great way to learn, right? You have a goal and then, you know, you're trying to pick out, well, how do I, how do I achieve that? And actually, I think most, you know, a lot of engineers, they start out that way with, they want to build a game, you know, so I'm sure I built a load of random, pretty poor games and things like that. But that's what motivated them, right? They had something they saw it was
possible to do it. They found some insight that meant they could do it themselves. So I think for electronics, that was probably seeing my dad, who, you know, getting to pick up a soldering arm when I was very little, and for computing, again, similar thing, seeing, you know, this sort of software, starting to happen, computers starting to happen and things like that. So yeah, that's, I guess, how I got into it and then, you know, it's just addictive, isn't it? And you keep learning.
Yeah, it's just so many layers to the onion, you go up, down sideways. So how did that evolve into your career? Do you studied at school? Did you study at university? Yeah, yeah, so I mean, up until, I guess, university, yeah, it was all sort of, you know, home, I was writing articles for magazines, building stuff, trying to work, you know, that sort of stuff. And then, yeah, I went to,
so it Southampton University. And for me, that was actually a really interesting university, because rather than computer science being in maths and electronics being in physics, which is, you know, in that age was the sort of where a lot of places had it. Southampton, they had sort of observed that these were actually going to, you know, they were really important together. And actually, there was a sort of computer science and electronics department. And it even had a fab, you know,
projects there. We built transistors, we built and gates, we built chip design, we built instruction sets for computers, we wrote assemblers, did it and actually fabbed a chip, got things running. You know, so it was university where I think it changed from, you know, it was more than a hobby, like I was really studying this personally to university where, you know, you've done maths,
you've done physics, you've done those sorts of things at college and go to university. And yeah, so I was at Southampton for four years doing that, which was a great experience in terms of giving you, you know, foundations. And then I think one of the research projects that I was doing there were one of my projects, which is about building Async, Kune Silicone. I somehow got that
in front of one of the, turned out one of the arm fellows, which was very lucky. And actually, my interview basically was turning up in a pub in Cambridge, talking to this guy who is an absolute legend. So really thankful for him. And yeah, and coming into arm, I think basically is the first sort of graduate hire into what was becoming an R&D group in arm. Because arm, you know, obviously this, this was about 2000 and 2001 or something like that. So arm was established.
It was still very small, but it was established. How many people would you say? At least a few hundred by that time, yeah. I mean, so I'd have to remember exactly. But yeah, I mean, it was definitely sort of, yeah, hundreds. I forget probably like 500, 600, I don't remember. But yeah, got in to there, started working in the R&D group as that was being formed with basically a bunch of really smart people who had built previous CPU cores for arm.
And we're looking at the next generation. And I'm realized it had to get ahead of, you know, ahead of the game and start planning what was coming next and things like that. And that became, yeah, so it was a research department, but it was very much, I think we used to call it like Little R Big D. It was basically advanced product development, I think. But at some level arm, in its entirety, is an R&D company, right? It's designing things, it's, and then licensing
that technology. So at some level, most companies would see the whole of arm as R&D, whereas arm itself saw what we were doing as more advanced product development and research was more academics, things that, you know, if it was in industry, we like what Microsoft research would do and things like that. We didn't really have that. This episode is brought to you by progressive insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some
cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates potential savings will vary not available in all states. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those owners to your contracts,
they said, what the f**k are you talking about? You insane Hollywood s**t. So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at MintMobile.com slash switch. $45 a month from 3 months plus taxes and fees from ODE for New Customers for Limited Time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month. So, full turns at MintMobile.com.
So arm-spacing Cambridge, right? Yeah, well that's where it grew up. Yeah, so I mean, obviously, one of the amazing things about Cambridge's huge amount of talent, huge amount of research into computers, ACON existing, which is really what gave birth to ARM when it was looking to build, it looking for a chip for its next generation ACON computer and that kind of led it down a path where it ended up designing its own. And there's a joint venture between spitting that out with
VLSI, with Apple, to build a processor. So that's what it came from. So yeah, in Cambridge. But I think obviously grew to some extent, it's still quite a small company compared to companies that have lots of, you know, fabs and engineering or sales people or things like that. Right. But I guess what's perhaps interesting is yeah, lots of talent in Cambridge, but grew globally actually because there's offices in the US and things like that. But I think perhaps what
really set the tone for the company is they weren't really customers in the UK. So from day one, it was traveling outside of the UK to be with customers. And I think, I mean, you know, this is my perspective and what I've learnt from being in the company, that really shaped the DNA of parts of the DNA, the company about getting out there, getting in front of customers, spending time.
And in some sense, it's made quite quickly a global company, I think. If you're doing business with America, but then you're doing another day, you're in Japan, and then another day, you're in Taiwan or something like that, maybe you're in Europe, you're getting quite a different sentence of how to work with different cultures. And an arm is, you know, at some level, a company that
relies on building a lot of trust with its customer. It's a sort of shared endeavor when you're building a new product that these other people are going to rely on. So yeah, I think that was quite interesting in the DNA. So yeah, yes, it was based in Cambridge in the UK, but actually, I think, you know, very quickly acted like a global company. And then, yeah, and now I think that's reflected in the way it's operated ever since.
Fascinating. And this is such a great kind of commercial principle, but I sort of think of, assume it was highly influenced by the academic environment of Cambridge and full of super smart people, but that's a great approach to driving any business. And I guess it's sort of partly a function of the business decision to basically license IP and designs. You can't really do that on your own. I guess you could, but it seemed much better to do it with customers.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously, there's, you know, this is, this is, you know, an area that's been studied quite well, I think, because in some sense, the IP model, I mean, IP model in concept is not novel, but actually a company applying it so successfully, it's really is quite amazing what happened. I mean, there's others like Rambus and things that did similar things, but in a different area.
But yeah, it's one that it's really, I think, an interesting case study to learn lots about how you build relationships, how you build trust, how in some sense you build a high margin business that's actually quite low risk, you know, by you're actually sharing risk across your customer base, but that's part of the value you're providing. And you know, you're having the foresight to not
try and overcharge for that, but charge enough and it becomes really valuable over time. And, you know, it taught me a lot about patients as well, like how sometimes you have to, you know, build something really special. Sometimes it does take a lot of patience, you know, building relationships and things like that. So yeah, really quite an amazing, amazing company in many ways.
Yeah. I'm interested in how that has, and you touched on it, but how that drove you in setting up your own company, how that informed you the things that you decided you wanted to do and wanted to not do based on, you know, a substantial amount of time working in this incredibly successful
company. I worked at Qualcomm for a while, not nearly as long as you at I, about seven years, but one of the things that just really struck me about it was the core of Qualcomm was a small number of very, very successful lines of business that was the patent business, the licensing of the intellectual property, basically getting a check every time a phone is made anywhere or sold,
anywhere in the world, pretty good business. And then the other one is the chip business and finding a few parts that are, you're just so good at that even people, the companies that hate you have to buy your product. And it was so hard for any other business to compete with the numbers from the IP, the intellectual property, the patent licensing business. We used to joke that you could, like, five, 30,000 people and just have a hundred lawyers that were caching checks and have this
amazing business, at least until the IP became intellectual property became stale. So back to my question to you, how did your time of arm influence your business decisions in starting up your own company? Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, that's a massive question, right? So, yeah, I mean, I was at arm for 17 years and very lucky, I think, I mean, arm itself is an amazing environment for any engineer or any, any, to be honest, not just engineering, but anyone in that company. I mean,
it's really an incredible company. But yeah, I was fortunate that, you know, I got to work on and I guess being involved in very early stages or even start some projects there that in the early days, maybe it was a couple of us or something like that, but, you know, grew really large and to have the opportunity to learn so much technically. So, you know, I got to work on transistors all the way up to, you know, chip design, architecture, compilers, in the end, all the way through to like
IoT services, right? So the ability to have the exposure to so many people with so much expertise and the very, you know, a culture where actually talking to anyone was fine and helping each other was fine was really powerful. So I think, you know, both the culture and the fortune to work on projects that she, you know, became quite substantial and allowed me to go through a whole cycle
from conception through to delivery into the market. I guess combined with my interest in just understanding and learning stuff and things like that, that gave me the opportunity to build a huge amount of technical expertise and how to do things right. One of the things that's interesting about ARM is you're building something but you don't necessarily know exactly how your customer is going to use it. So it changes perhaps the contract between you and your customer to become
incredibly defined and robust because of the lab. And we're assuming everyone understands who ARM is. So without having a whole episode on it, it's like a few seconds. What does ARM do? Okay, yeah. So, I mean, ARM, it's roots is a company that designs processes, you know, processes that weren't necessarily the things on your desktop. They were the things that got embedded in the corner of chip to be the processor embedded in an, an, an, an advice that didn't look like a
computer. And obviously the, the thing that really, that took off for ARM was mobile phones. So ARM designed the processes that chip companies like TI at the time would build a baseband and control processor for, let's say a Nokia phone or something like that. So silicon design, computer architecture, compilers, all those sort of tools that you need. It's actually a really complex mix of technology that needs to be in place to allow, you know, someone to just take off
the shelf and use in their own design. And I guess that's, yeah, that's the sort of roots of the company is, is processor design. And obviously over time that's expanded into transistors and graphics processes and things like that. But yeah, fundamentally, it's a design company that can sell its design to lots of, lots of other companies. How do you design a transistor? Isn't
it a transistor, just a transistor? Well, yeah, so you'd like to think so. But yeah, if you're trying to design transistors for different processes to try and achieve different trade-offs, you know, it's really quite a complex and artful process, especially if the physics and the processes haven't actually been tied down yet. And the processes we're talking about are the manufacturing processes for silicon, you know, it's a 22 nanometer TSMC process. The TSMC being the
company that makes the chips in the fabs for companies like Apple and the like. That's exactly right. Yeah, so it's effectively the drawing you put you put onto the silicon through a photographic process to make a switch. But that could switch could be fast, but that might mean it takes a bit of power through leakage or it might be slow, but it's very power efficient. You know, there's all these different trade-offs. It's a very interesting thing just to even build the building block
that you're going to build a logic out of. And so you were involved in designing transistors, that now makes sense. So thank you for that. What are your sort of the biggest projects that you look back on that you contributed to when you're at arm? Yeah, yeah. So from research point of view, I touched on a bunch of things, but the first one that I really got involved in on, I guess, saw coming over the horizon was, you know, large amounts of data processing. So at the time,
you know, SIMD processing, single instruction multiple data processing. So I was doing a bunch of research on that with a couple of other folks. And around, you know, this is sort of pre-iPhone. But it's around the time when Nokia's sort of starting to think, can we get colour screens? Can we start to even display images? Can we start to do video? Can we do audio? Things like that. So we were building, so I led what became the the RV7 neon architecture, which is almost like the
the expansion of the architecture to expand all these multimedia processing capabilities. Yeah, so, you know, so I was leading the architecture design. So I think design the computer architecture, the instruction set and things like that. And we were working on the compilers so that these could be coded. And then obviously with the team that was going to build that into the first processor, which is a process called Tiger actually built in Austin. So that's where that that one was built.
And that went kind of into the sort of first real smartphones, I guess. It was a really big bet for ARM. It was a massive step up. But yeah, that was an amazing project and got me in the door talking to, you know, the likes of Nokia and Ericsson. Obviously at the time, because they were leaders in mobile at the time. That's where I learned about Wibry actually that became Bluetooth Lonegy. So, yeah, so Bluetooth Lonegy was actually something else developed by who Wibry was developing?
Well, I mean, I think there's bits of pieces, but I think it was Ericsson and people like that were doing and Nokia were looking at this as well. They could envision this model of phones talking to peripherals and Bluetooth classic as it stood didn't really cut it. Yeah, so there was this project called Wibry and over time that evolved and then actually got absorbed into, yeah,
the Bluetooth standard. So that's that was my first discovery of that. But then I was also over in the US talking to Qualcomm with what a team they had just acquired, which actually became the Snapdragon team if you're familiar with Snapdragon. So that was really exciting, convincing them to take this new architecture we had designed. So that was their big CPU brand. So we now have Snapdragon Stadium here in San Diego. Oh, wow. Qualcomm's. Yeah, so at the time this was an idea.
I think it was next IBM team that they had just acquired. So I was over there with a sales guy basically and this was really interesting to me, obviously a technical background. But to be in that those meetings, talking to these people about why they should adopt this architecture, they weren't necessarily going to do this. And coming out and talking to the sales guy and realized that I've really helped, I've been working on the technology, but I'd help make this
actually come to exist in what became Snapdragon. That was a really interesting thing and that sort of realization that it doesn't matter how much you do the technology. If it doesn't get out there, it doesn't matter. It's just a fanciful project. So actually being involved not only in the technology, but then how do you mark it? How do you take it to market? I forget where I announced it. Full process of forum or something like that. So being on stage announcing this thing, very interesting,
and done that before, hadn't talked to press before. But then to be in with Motorola, Qualcomm, other companies, you can imagine, yeah, really just a really, really interesting time. So an absolutely amazing project for me to see from right from the start through to it being in a flagship product and working with so many amazing engineers and compilers in computer
architect and CPU design, such a privilege really. Yeah, great training for a emerging CEO, I imagine, and also just sort of touching on this so arm, you kind of licensed the arm architecture and you get a compiler as well. That's all part of the package that you get. So didn't you work on the M0 processor as well? So I didn't work on the processor itself, but yeah, it's a good point. So I've gone through that, which is, you know, this is all targeting
the emergence of, you know, what became smartphones, right, things like that. But I think arm quite cleverly was, it was also getting used in microcontrollers and an internal project, which was called Sankat the time. So Tiger was the big meaty application processor. There was a Sankat project and that was looking through lens of what, what if we designed a processor that was specifically designed for this emerging microcontroller market and really, how far could you push that?
And this was sort of an in-era where I guess 32 bits was certainly wasn't standard and for most people, they were skeptical that why would you need 32 bits for a microcontroller? So that was an amazing project. Again, done by some amazing people. And then, yeah, so early on and that, I got involved in with a guy called Chris building, well, what does the software ecosystem need to look like? Or how do you give, I mean, the way I thought about it is, how do you give the software
ecosystem a kick? Because so many things need to change as the industry is going to go forward. And also, how do we make this new technology with delivering accessible? So that it can be adopted, you know, take it to market. So yeah, we were building an initially embed project, which was software tools to make that kind of technology accessible. And over time, it grew more into operating
systems and IoT services and networking and radio stacks and all that sort of thing. So again, another really fortunate opportunity to start with a couple of people and what people thought was a cupboard. But then go through that whole cycle to it growing and becoming a division and acquiring companies to build the components and really doing amazing stuff. And to be honest, that's the one that exposed me a lot to companies building, market controller, IoT type devices,
all the different radio standards that you know and love in the IoT. We had people working on most of them. And being in with those customers and understanding all the sort of pains they were seeing. In some sense, that's the unfair advantage of building the company on building now. We got to see so much of what's possible, but also what people's pains were and things like that and just build yet more expertise among ourselves and the connections and network.
Yeah, another really quite amazing project to have the, yeah, fortune to work on really. And what was the thing that made you decide you wanted to run your own company? Because you were at home for decades, right? You for a long time. Well, yeah, so it's about 17 years. I mean, I think I'd set my goal, the project that we were building, I think I'd set a goal that, you know, I'll work on this for a long time. I tend to like work on things for a long time.
Because I think it's the combination of patience and chipping away a problem that, certainly the types that I like, you work on something for a long time. And people perhaps don't even understand why you think this is the thing. But then it pays off. And, you know, so I had the opportunity to work there, but the company, the division had got really big. It was about 300 people. I'd had, I'd been lucky enough to be able to hire a bunch of really interesting,
you know, the product managers and things like that. And yeah, I just, I guess I always wanted to, you know, do something else. And in some sense, take all the knowledge and connections I'd made and learnt. But also, as you were saying earlier, that, you know, my learnings of, how can you build a great company with integrity? And how do you, you know, solve a problem in a really interesting way? And what does a product look like versus, I know, a pile of code or some
consultancy? Yeah, and I really wanted, you know, as partly a test as well. But at the same time, yeah, I just kept seeing this opportunity around Bluetooth. And we weren't able to fulfill that as arm and the group that we were in. So, yeah, it just felt like a really good thing to do. There's an itch to scratch. And it felt like a really good time to go and, you know, yeah, try and build something again. Wonderful. Well, I've been asking a bunch of easy questions,
maybe not easy for most people, but easy for you. But the hardest questions are, what are the three songs that have meaning to you and why? Oh, interesting. Okay, so there's, I guess there's loads of songs that would have meaning to me. But I'm going to pick the song that are a little bit related to the world of, you know, what we're up to and stuff like that. So the first song I'm going to choose is a song called All I Need, which is Jake Collier's song. It features like a
Mahalya and Thai dollar sign or something like that. But anyway, Jake Collier, really interesting artist, super multi instrumentalist, sort of grew up in the YouTube era and sort of found fame by doing these sort of multi track YouTube videos. I suspect some people might have seen them.
I think that's how he got on the radar of Quincy Jones. So really, really, really talented person and really inspirational, I think, because, you know, really explores his art, really pushes it to limit very, very self driven to get behind things and challenge things, but then very willing to share that knowledge. So one of the things that happened down over lockdown is I found that he was doing live streams of logic breakdowns, which is logic is the program where you assemble all
these tracks. And he was just sitting on YouTube for two hours, explaining how he build all this stuff and his ideas. And it was just amazing to watch. And then he released this video called All I Need, which was him in a bathroom, I think, playing lots of different instruments, plus these acts that he'd bought, other people that he'd bought in. And it was just, it was such a joyous song, but also the story behind it. It just really resonated with me that someone can be so, you know,
they really, really studied. This is something they've spent years studying, self-driven, self-motivated, still honest, and then, and then sharing that with other people to inspire them. I just, I mean, for me, that's lovely in it. So I think it doesn't really matter out the song, but yeah, that was one of the lockdown ones, I guess. Wonderful. You're going to check it out. Right. Yeah, I mean, he's got those albums out now. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So what's the next one?
So the next one I'm going to choose is one called Many of Horror by a bank called Biffy Cliery, which is a bit more of a sort of Scottish rock band. And the reason I chose this one is because, again, really interesting band, they turned up on my radar, like when their first album came out, when I was pretty young, pretty harsh, really quite interesting, bit syncopated, but there's Simon Neil, the obviously great name, but the main songwriter writing these amazing songs, but they're
quite inaccessible, to be honest. And over time, just like this amazing songwriting machine, if you're into that sort of music, it's sort of rock, I suppose, and really quite interesting, lots of interesting stuff they've done. But the reason I chose The Many of Horror Song is, actually, if you know a program called X Factor, one of the UK, I think it was the UK, I mean, I don't watch X Factor, but they actually did a cover of one of these songs, and it was
very, you know, very, very poppy thing. And I just thought that was really interesting, because they must have had such a dilemma to give the rights to give this song to what is basically Simon Cowell X Factor, whatever, totally off-brand. Yes. And actually, I think got a load of backlash you get about it at some level. But, you know, two things happened, an amazing song that this band had written got out as a much more poppy song. This guy was very, I mean, I say successful, one hit
one, did no doubt, but whatever. But I also think it probably allowed people to discover this band, who over time, still doing really interesting stuff, but a bit more accessible. You know, so that just reminded me about those sort of dilemmas you have, where it's like people talk about selling out, or do I take this wrong customer? Is this pulling us in this wrong direction? You know, and those sort of dilemmas, and I often think, when you're in those things thinking,
is this the right path? Is this, you know, is this a zig, which is going to get me the zag, or is this just a toe or off? You know, that's the sort of song that makes me think about that. Yeah, and I think it's so interesting, they license their intellectual property, which is, you know, it kind of resonates echoes with the original. Yeah, I don't think about that level. Yeah, it's that dilemma. That dilemma of, is this a good choice? Is this on-brand? I have no idea.
Anyway, but just an amazing band, an prolific songwriter, with a great name, because he's called Simon. Very good. And number three. Okay, so for that one, I think there's a song by a band called Fatilus. If you've come across Fatilus, a bit more dancing band, and the song is called Mass Destruction. And it's quite a political song, actually, it's about war, and, you know, it's a classic sort of, you know, angsty type thing. Very good song again, really good band if people don't know Fatilus.
But it's got a few lines in there, and I don't generally listen to lyrics, if I'm honest. And one is it says, inaction is a weapon of mass destruction. It says a few other things, but inaction is a weapon of mass destruction. And that really sticks with me in terms of how decisions are made, because I think, especially in bigger companies and things like that, often indecision
isn't seen as a problem. And I think often it is. You know, so there's, there's a few things that I learnt, you know, so Mike English in arm used to say, you know, do 10 things and spend the time fixing the one you got wrong. Or Jeff Bezos, you know, had this thing about two way and one way doors. So, you know, if it's a two way door, you can go through the door. If it doesn't work out,
you can go back, you know, don't overthink it. If it's a one way door and you can't go back, you know, as it's very hard to undo that decision, then really, you know, that is the ones you want to spend the time on. And, and yeah, I mean, actually arm had a really great culture, and I think, you know, lots of things good. And so this wasn't really one of the issues. Certainly not in the, I saw in the core engineering, maybe in the sort of more operational parts of the business or support parts of
the business. But yeah, in decision, I think it is often not not recognized as how painful not making a decision can be to, you know, a person, a team, a company or whatever. So yeah, that, that always resonates me in, you know, challenge yourself. You know, am I overthinking this? You know, can I just make a decision and and move on and I'll learn something and and and maybe I
have to reverse it. But actually, I made more netfall progress or is this something that, no, this really is, this is a one way and it's very hard to go back and and therefore the level of those are the ones to really spend the time on. Yeah. So that that that that song always rings in the back of my head to remind me when I need to evaluate, are we in this sort of situation? Yeah. And are you musical in the sense of do you make musical?
Oh, well, I guess that's a yeah. So I I guess I grew up I was a drummer so I mean, self-taught. So I wouldn't say particularly good, you know, in a band and you know, you have to advertise, you have to put posters up, you have to try and get people to come to your gigs, you have to drive to the gigs, you have to set up, you have to play a band, you know, play a gig. All that sort of stuff have a brand. So that was really interesting. Yeah. So I was a drummer. I went, you know, good
enough to pull it off in a band, but you know, nothing special. And then yeah, some more over lockdown. I think it was a combination of the Jacob Collier stuff and finding a video a bit about some of the sort of music theory. I'd never liked wrote learning. It just didn't inspire me. That actually got me thinking about, you know, chords and construction and stuff in a way that I'd always been fascinated by music, but I'd never really found the way in that I enjoyed.
I didn't like the standard teaching methods. So yeah, partly down lockdown, I just started messing around on piano, like I wouldn't say I can, I'm good at it, but it's been really enjoyable experience. Yeah. Just learning it almost like theory in chords and things like that. And that was inspired by a couple of YouTube celebrities, I suppose. Well, I've really enjoyed listening to you talk. So thanks Simon for coming on the show. I really, really appreciate it. Hey, no worries, it's great.
So that was Simon Ford. And I really love that conversation. I talked to Simon periodically, we are paths cross and I always end up wanting to talk more to him. So, we probably will. I'm almost certainly going to invite him back onto the podcast. Thank you very much, loyal listeners and watches. You are loyal if you got one hour through this and you're still paying attention to still listening. It's something that really warms my heart.
I'm fascinated by the stuff that we drill into. It's pretty obscure. It's pretty arcane. It's not for everyone. So the fact that we have a little community around the world that shares that interest is something that really means a lot to me. I want to thank Aaron Hammock for his work editing this podcast and publishing it. And to see our world for, I mean, we're promoting the work that we do. And again, I want to thank you for listening. You're safe and until next time.
Earning your degree online doesn't mean you have to go about it alone. At Capelli University, we're here to support you when you're ready. From enrollment counselors who get to know you and your goals, to academic coaches who can help you form a plan to stay on track. We care about your success and are dedicated to helping you pursue your goals. Going back to school is a big step, but having support at every step of your academic journey
can make a big difference. Imagine your future differently at Capelli.edu.