Many of Lynch's colleagues, and his wider network across Cambridge and London, will attest to his hard-working style and insatiable desire to win. He said he had never encountered a leadership team more insecure and fearful of their boss than the Autonomy team he met at a social gathering in Shoreditch many years ago.
It was nearing the end of the quarter, and Lynch wanted results. He could fill an Olympic swimming pool with sweat. And this was Autonomy's heyday, before the dot-com bubble burst.
“He was an extremely controlling personality and was undoubtedly and relentlessly at the apex of an unusual regime of control,” Judge Hildyard noted.
But there's another side to Lynch than just being a ruthless businessman: He's a CEO with the curiosity of a true researcher, the inventiveness of an engineer, and the determination to bring those inventions to market.
The Essex-born entrepreneur holds a PhD in neural networks, the basis of today's generative AI, and by the age of 30 he had started several companies in demanding and diverse sectors such as audio hardware and fingerprint recognition.
The foundation of Autonomy and its IDOL software was Lynch's insight into Bayesian inference, then a little-known and frontier area of mathematics, with its uncanny ability to find relevance in unstructured data.
Customers I know found this an amazing discovery six years ago when Google News was launched, and it has proven the concept once again.
He did so again with his investment in Darktrace, a cybersecurity company that looks for patterns.
The media has dubbed him “the British Bill Gates,” a comparison that flatters Gates, not Lynch.
Let me put it this way: If a highly advanced alien civilization appeared in Earth's skies and I wanted to know what they were saying to each other, who would I call? I'd definitely call Lynch. Not Gates.
And there is no doubt that today's British government advisers rely more on rhetoric and self-promotion than on technical or engineering qualifications.
Lynch has served twice as a technology policy adviser to the government, but it seems unlikely he'll be asked to do so again.
But maybe one day aliens will come along and remind us that we need Mike Lynch after all.
