Mike Lynch was born in Ilford, East London in June 1965, the elder of two sons of Irish immigrants, and brought up in Chelmsford, Essex. His parents were Michael, a firefighter from Co Cork “who advised against earning a living running into burning buildings” and Dolores, a trauma nurse from Co Tipperary who worked in the same hospital where her son had his first job, as a cleaner. Mike won a scholarship to the independent Bancroft’s School in Woodford (he would later become Lead Patron of Bancroft’s Foundation). He did well at school, encouraged by the enthusiasm of a science teacher “who liked blowing things up”, and played clarinet in the jazz band he led.
He arrived in Christ’s College to read Natural Sciences in 1983 and in his first year formed another jazz band, playing the clarinet initially and then the saxophone. Rebecca Duckworth (née Bright) recalls “Mike led the band with understated yet clarion authority - and with an unexpected suavity. I clearly recall him dishing out his selected music and quietly directing proceedings both with good humour and definite intention. He was in charge! I enjoyed singing Summertime and Georgia on My Mind. 'The Lynch Mob' was an apt name for our assortment of undergraduates (maths, classics, natsci, history, english, engineering - a rum crew). A valuable time.”
Mike’s interest in music was extensive. He set out to build a digital sampler while at school using the newly available digital signal processing chips. In his own words (from the British Library Sound Archive): “At the time there was a new kind of instrument that came out which was called a digital sampler that would sample music. And the problem with the digital sampler was that they cost £100,000…. So I set out to build one, and, which, without realising it, made me one of the few people in the world doing things with digital signal processing chips, which I think were designed for the front end of missiles at the time. And, after designing one for myself, someone heard about it and they bought the design. And so I actually started out by designing synthesisers which were, an incredible training, because it’s all real time, it’s all assembler code, multiple processors, and they were, I suspect, probably the most complex thing on the planet at the time. And, and that’s how I got started. And, it was, you know, an introduction to business in that, because people were, were paying for the designs, so that was funding me to, to learn more. And that was my first foray into commercialisation of technology. And that continued, much to the College’s annoyance, while I was an undergraduate.” Why annoyed? “The solder on the carpets in the room and that sort of thing.”
By 1987 Mike had developed a design for a 16-bit sampler for the Atari ST computer, and set up his first business, Lynett Systems, to produce electronic equipment for the music industry. Later he would attribute some loss of hearing to adjusting synthesisers for bands.
He had transferred to Electrical and Information Sciences for his final undergraduate year and, encouraged by his Director of Studies, Professor Peter Rayner, Mike stayed on in the Engineering Department to undertake PhD research with Peter continuing his third-year project work. His PhD thesis, submitted in 1990, was entitled “Adaptive Techniques in Signal Processing and Connectionist Models”. The signal processing challenge was in pattern recognition – in music, speech, characters or images – and the connectionist models are now more typically called neural networks. A further influence in these years was Professor Bill Fitzgerald (Fellow, 1990-2014; obituary pages 90-93 College Magazine 2014) whose enthusiasm for Bayesian statistical methods was infectious.
In 1991 Mike founded a new company, Neurodynamics, that matched fingerprints for the police and developed some of the world’s first automatic number plate readers, two examples of pattern recognition. But a growing challenge for the police was extracting information from large amounts of text. The number of witness statements in a large case could be such that no one sees all the information or it’s hard to spot that, for example, some years earlier there was a related crime. Using computers to analyse textual information was a major opportunity and in 1996 Mike spun out a separate business, Autonomy.
Autonomy’s software enabled a computer to search huge quantities of diverse information, including phone calls, emails and videos, matching themes and ideas. Within a few years customers already included the US State Department and the BBC and it looked as if Autonomy's product would be used by most of the world's largest companies. It was dual-listed on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange in 2000, quickly entering the FTSE 100. Autonomy's valuation was significantly inflated over this period reaching over £5bn, fuelled by the general exuberance surrounding internet and technology companies. As the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, Autonomy’s valuation dropped to just £0.3bn.
Around this time, early in the growth of the world wide web, Mike made what he described as perhaps his biggest mistake: listening to industry analysts. As analysts declared that the internet ad model was dead, Autonomy had a technology that Mike considered more advanced than Google (founded in 1998) and “we pulled the plug because we didn’t see a business model for it”.
Unlike many of the technology companies that had gone to market in the boom, Autonomy was already profitable and survived the bubble bursting. Over the next decade Autonomy grew its underlying business, helping large organisations deal with the explosion of digital data by sorting through unstructured data or information not held in easily searchable databases. Part of the strategy was to buy companies already in adjacent areas to gain access to their customers, replace their software and thus grow Autonomy’s market share. By 2010 Autonomy’s software was licensed to 65,000 customer organisations. It had carved out a globally recognised position in one of the most strategically important technologies of the time.
Though quietly spoken, Mike had a reputation for toughness. He thought sales people were paid a fortune relative to more technical people and he saw no problem with firing five per cent of the sales staff every year. He was a leader who tended to be loved or hated. As Autonomy grew, Mike had several run-ins with City analysts and, unusually for a business leader, he was prepared to confront them. It was considered bad form in the City when he threatened legal action over an analyst’s note, forcing a major bank to make a public correction.
Mike was a generous and thoughtful benefactor of the College. An early donation established the M.R. Lynch Engineering Prizes, and further donations supported Engineering teaching and the Bill Fitzgerald Music Room, with its Steinway piano, in our new Yusuf Hamied Court.
In 2006 he was awarded the OBE for services to enterprise and the following year joined the board of the BBC. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2011 he became a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, and in 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Suffolk.
In 2011 Autonomy was acquired by the US giant Hewlett-Packard for £7.1bn with an offer at a 64% premium to Autonomy's share price the previous day. HP had been a hardware business and wanted to change its strategic direction to grow services and software through the acquisition. But within months HP removed its Chief Executive Officer and its Chief Strategy and Technical Officer, the architects of the change of strategy. Thirteen months after the Autonomy acquisition, HP announced a writedown of assets claiming serious accounting improprieties by the previous management. The authorities investigated, and while the UK Serious Fraud Office found insufficient evidence, in 2018 the US authorities indicted Mike for fraud. Despite representations by senior politicians and accusations that the US authorities were attempting to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction, in May 2023 Mike was flown to the US to be held under house arrest in San Francisco. He was charged with wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy. On 6 June 2024, he was found not guilty of all charges.
After he left Autonomy in 2012, and not held back by what would be a 12-year legal odyssey, Mike founded Invoke Capital. Its purpose was to invest in and advise fast-growing fundamental technology companies in Europe and to realise the commercial possibilities of Britain’s science and deep technology base. Its successes include Darktrace and Featurespace, two companies with early links to College through Bill Fitzgerald.
Mike Lynch met his future wife, Angela Bacares, in New York, where she was an equity trader. Angela had started life as a child of Colombian immigrants and could not speak English when she started school but soon excelled academically. Mike and Angela were married in 2001 at St Mary’s Cadogan Steet, one of the oldest Roman Catholic parishes in London. Esme, their first child, was born in 2003 and Hannah in 2006. The family divided their time between a Georgian town house in Chelsea and a 16th century farm and estate in Suffolk. Both houses contained large, accurate models of steam locomotives, and Mike had six dogs all named after engineering parts: Faucet, Switch, Tappet, Pinion, Valve and Cam. The family shared many interests and loved sailing together.
Mike and Angela bought a 56-metre sailing yacht in 2014. They renamed it Bayesian after the 18th century minister and statistician Thomas Bayes, and reflecting the importance of modern Bayesian methods in Mike’s career. Bayesian was a sloop (a single-masted ship), and one of the world’s largest sailing yachts.
The voyage around the Gulf of Naples in August 2024 was to celebrate Mike’s acquittal with family and colleagues who had supported him through the trial. On 18 August, Bayesian was anchored at Cefalù on the northern coast of Sicily. The sea was calm, but thunderstorms had been forecast. It was decided to motor to the west for shelter and to anchor near the small fishing port of Porticello for the night. The safety investigation into the foundering of Bayesian is ongoing. The interim report of the Marine Accident Investigation Branch has found the probable transient presence of hurricane force winds well in excess of 64kts at the time of the accident, and that these winds were sufficient to knock Bayesian beyond its angle of vanishing stability.
The funeral of Mike and Hannah Lynch in the church of St James’s Piccadilly was packed with friends and family, politicians and scientists, business people and Hannah’s schoolmates. Amid the eulogies Sir Paul Nurse, former President of the Royal Society, criticised the Government’s decision to allow the extradition as “both shameful and shameless”. The overall mood was deep sadness and profound sympathy for Angela and Esme.
Mike Lynch had an ability to recognise strategically important technologies and the drive and acumen to commercialise them. He was a powerful advocate for and supporter of tech start-ups in the UK. His passing is a loss to us all.