Q5: Sir Robin Saxby, chairman of ARM

In this week's Q5 - the five questions we want answered - EW spoke to Sir Robin Saxby who shaped processor firm ARM during his years as chief executive officer. He is now chairman of the company.

Are you still involved day-to-day with ARM?

Yes but not as “full on” as when I was CEO. Warren East, our CEO, runs the business and leads the ARM team on a daily basis. This means I am not working full time for ARM, but I am in daily contact if required.

Are you an entrepreneur or a technologist?

I’m a bit of several things. My roots are in technology and business. I have been described as an entrepreneur and all companies must practise entrepreneurship to survive. I think to be a technologist, however, you need to be engrossed in the technology on a day-to-day basis and fortunately in ARM we are blessed with many great technologists and engineers.

What aspect of your time at ARM has given you the most satisfaction?

Starting a company, with 12 engineers and myself, taking it public, empowering a new team under Warren East to take us through the next phase of ARM’s development, have all been greatly satisfying.

It’s fun as chairman to give advice that hopefully can help the team get a more positive result than if you weren’t there.

What are the reasons behind ARM’s success?

We started with a great technology that was primarily the best Mips/Watt and Mips/$ microprocessor that was easily embeddable in system chips. We also had software tools and a proof of concept with the Acorn Archimedes computer.

We had a vision to be the global Risc standard and a detailed implementation plan on how to achieve this. The rest was a lot of hard work with many challenges. Fundamentally satisfying explicit needs of real customers got us ahead of the curve.

If you weren’t in the electronics industry, what would you be doing?

I think I was destined for the electronics industry. I had an electronics kit when I was eight and a tv repair business when I was 14.

However, I have learnt that all businesses work by the same rules, and with the same ingredients – people, cash, product and technology and customers.