# Beware Tech Tycoons with Piranha Tanks - with Katie Prescott

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 1 May 2026, 41 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/b5ddcf28-f1a4-4b11-ac33-b43b00fd0fcb/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

Mike Lynch was often lauded as Britain's answer to Bill Gates. Born into a working-class family, Lynch's incredible intellect and passion for computers led him to become a billionaire tech entrepreneur. But behind the scenes, Lynch was a bully who couldn't bear criticism and was prone to creative accounting. When computer giant Hewlett Packard bought his company, Autonomy, it triggered one of the biggest fraud scandals in Silicon Valley history. Tim talks to Katie Prescott, Technology Business Editor at The Times and author of the book The Curious Case of Mike Lynch, about the lessons we can take from a story no one could have predicted. For a list of sources see timharford.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. As always, London's Heathrow Airport is heaving. Security queues
[0:25] Speaker 1: shuffle forward. Exasperated parents trundle suitcases to the terminal with
[0:30] Speaker 1: toddlers in tow. Excited friends gather in bars to toast
[0:35] Speaker 1: the trip they're about to take. To it all walks
[0:38] Speaker 1: a heavy set, balding man in his late fifties. He's
[0:42] Speaker 1: wearing a smart suit and open shirt. But this man
[0:46] Speaker 1: is not on a business trip. The people walking politely
[0:50] Speaker 1: alongside him are not colleagues. They're police officers. They guide
[0:55] Speaker 1: him through the corridors of Britain's busiest airport and deliver
[0:59] Speaker 1: him to their American counterparts. Here civility acts. The US
[1:06] Speaker 1: guards promptly cuff his wrists, wrap chains around his waist,
[1:10] Speaker 1: and march the man who's more accustomed to champagne and
[1:14] Speaker 1: private jet to the very back of the United Airlines player.
[1:19] Speaker 1: It's the eleventh of May twenty twenty three, and Britain's
[1:23] Speaker 1: answer to Bill Gates is about to be extradited to
[1:28] Speaker 1: the US on charges of fraud. Once the darling of
[1:35] Speaker 1: the UK tech world, a member of the BBC's executive
[1:39] Speaker 1: board and a government advisor, Mike Lynch settles in for
[1:44] Speaker 1: the eleven hour flight. As London disappears beneath him, he
[1:50] Speaker 1: knows it will be a very long time before he
[1:53] Speaker 1: sees Britain again. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
[2:00] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales. Mike Lynch was the co founder and CEO
[2:29] Speaker 1: of the UK's biggest software company, Autonomy, which he sold
[2:34] Speaker 1: to the American hardware giant Hulet Packard for eleven billion
[2:39] Speaker 1: dollars in twenty eleven. But Hewlett Packard quickly began to
[2:44] Speaker 1: suspect something was awry at Autonomy. Soon, legal battles raged
[2:50] Speaker 1: on both sides at the Atlantic, revealing shocking truths and
[2:54] Speaker 1: incredible oversights. This story of a tech tycoon is a
[2:59] Speaker 1: rags to rich's tail, a business thriller, and ultimately a tragedy.
[3:05] Speaker 1: Here to tell us all about it is Katie Prescott.
[3:08] Speaker 1: She's Technology business editor at The Times and the author
[3:11] Speaker 1: of the book The Curious Case of Mike Lynch. Katie.
[3:16] Speaker 1: Welcome to Cautionary Tales.
[3:18] Speaker 2: Hello, good to talk to you.
[3:20] Speaker 1: So we should talk about Mike Lynch. His background. First,
[3:24] Speaker 1: fabulously wealthy at the time we pictured him walking through
[3:29] Speaker 1: heatho airport. But he didn't start wealthy.
[3:33] Speaker 2: No, quite the opposite. And actually, you know, in a
[3:36] Speaker 2: Britain which is still riven by class, Mike Lynch was
[3:42] Speaker 2: the outlier. So. Born to an Irish immigrant mother who
[3:47] Speaker 2: was a nurse and a father who was a fireman
[3:51] Speaker 2: but also a Irish parentage. They moved to Essex when
[3:55] Speaker 2: he was quite young, and very early on they spotted
[3:58] Speaker 2: that he was a super bright little boy, and his
[4:02] Speaker 2: mother put him forward for a scholarship at a private
[4:05] Speaker 2: school when he was eleven.
[4:07] Speaker 1: Yeah, so's he's studying with a bunch of rich, or
[4:10] Speaker 1: at least upper middle class kids whose parents are paying
[4:15] Speaker 1: large sums of money to send their kids to this school.
[4:18] Speaker 1: But he's in on merit because he is incredibly sharp
[4:23] Speaker 1: and academically. Where did his interest really shine? What was
[4:27] Speaker 1: he doing at school?
[4:29] Speaker 2: He loved computing and he loved engineering, and I think,
[4:32] Speaker 2: unusually for a tech entrepreneur, he wasn't a lonely geek
[4:37] Speaker 2: at all. Actually, far from it. He had lots and
[4:40] Speaker 2: lots of friends and he led societies. So he started
[4:44] Speaker 2: an electronics society for example. He also started a jazz band.
[4:48] Speaker 2: We like that because he loved playing the clarinet, and this.
[4:51] Speaker 1: Would have been with the late seventies early eighties that
[4:53] Speaker 1: he was starting these societies. So just as the personal
[4:57] Speaker 1: computer revolution is beginning and people are getting their z
[5:02] Speaker 1: X eighty one's or whatever, he's a teenager.
[5:05] Speaker 2: That's right. He said that there was a place local
[5:07] Speaker 2: to school that he used to go so he could
[5:09] Speaker 2: gaze at a commodore sixty four. It was an era
[5:14] Speaker 2: where the kind of computing revolution was taking off and
[5:18] Speaker 2: he was really enjoying that as a young boy.
[5:22] Speaker 1: Yes, there was this sort of sense that you computers
[5:25] Speaker 1: were things you could take apart and put back together again.
[5:28] Speaker 1: You could use them, for example, to play.
[5:30] Speaker 2: Music, and that was his early business actually with a
[5:34] Speaker 2: mate from school, making synthesizers, so you could kind of
[5:38] Speaker 2: muck about with music in a way that you couldn't before.
[5:42] Speaker 2: That's really how he got into the business of tech.
[5:46] Speaker 1: And then he goes to Cambridge, so this is presumably
[5:50] Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, ninety.
[5:51] Speaker 2: Eighty three, nineteen eighty three. Yeah, that's right.
[5:53] Speaker 1: So tell us about Cambridge in the early nineteen eighties
[5:58] Speaker 1: and the connection to the tech industry, because I think
[6:01] Speaker 1: a lot of people will picture these amazing Gothic chapels
[6:07] Speaker 1: and these magnificent buildings, and this is where Isaac Newton
[6:11] Speaker 1: held court. But there was something else going on in
[6:14] Speaker 1: Cambridge by the time Mike Lynch showed up.
[6:16] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an incredibly exciting time I think to be
[6:18] Speaker 2: in Cambridge if you loved computing and the bit to
[6:22] Speaker 2: you painted tradition is absolutely right. Mike Lynch went to
[6:25] Speaker 2: Christ's College, which is Charles Darwin's former establishment, and its
[6:31] Speaker 2: picture perfect with absolutely pristine lawns and that very famous
[6:36] Speaker 2: sandstone colored brickwork. But also there was the famous Cambridge
[6:42] Speaker 2: Computing Lab where people were putting together computers and experimenting
[6:49] Speaker 2: in this new age a bit like people are today
[6:51] Speaker 2: with AI. Actually I find the parallels really similar. And
[6:55] Speaker 2: Mike Lynch was really interested in something called signal processing,
[6:58] Speaker 2: so this is kind of audio video technology. And he
[7:03] Speaker 2: had a professor who really took him under his wing
[7:07] Speaker 2: and convinced him to stay on and do a PhD.
[7:12] Speaker 1: Yeah, and he was working on noise canceling headphones and yes.
[7:16] Speaker 2: Exactly all sorts of things like that. And they had
[7:18] Speaker 2: a project going on to digitize audio as well and
[7:22] Speaker 2: sort of try and smooth out some of the crackles
[7:24] Speaker 2: from old gramophone records.
[7:27] Speaker 1: He doesn't become an academic, he's more of a business person.
[7:31] Speaker 1: Tell us about that.
[7:32] Speaker 2: He then started a company called Cambridge Neurodynamics.
[7:36] Speaker 1: Must be clever because I've got no idea what that means.
[7:38] Speaker 2: Well, that's exactly why they picked the name. It sounded
[7:40] Speaker 2: clever and it sort of picked up on keywords at
[7:42] Speaker 2: the time that were hot in the tech world.
[7:45] Speaker 1: So this is the early nineties before Google. But one
[7:50] Speaker 1: of the products he works on for a while is
[7:54] Speaker 1: the sort of thing that Google turned into a trillion
[7:57] Speaker 1: dollar business.
[7:58] Speaker 2: People were trying to work out the best way of
[8:01] Speaker 2: sifting through vast amounts of digital information. Mike Lynch emerged
[8:07] Speaker 2: with a company called Auton, and the business sifted through
[8:12] Speaker 2: information rather than in a clunky keyword search kind of
[8:17] Speaker 2: way by as Mike Lynch described it, in marketing material,
[8:21] Speaker 2: looking for concepts. When you're talking about corporations, which is
[8:25] Speaker 2: where this software ended up being sold to, who've just
[8:28] Speaker 2: got huge amounts of information. It seemed like a real
[8:32] Speaker 2: magic bullet.
[8:33] Speaker 1: It was a huge thing. I mean, those of us
[8:35] Speaker 1: who are old enough to remember the world before Google,
[8:38] Speaker 1: but after the world wide web. So these few years
[8:41] Speaker 1: of there's a lot of stuff on any computer with
[8:45] Speaker 1: an Internet connection, but there's no way to find it,
[8:48] Speaker 1: and so we used to swap notes about well, how
[8:51] Speaker 1: do you search for a thing? And so oh well,
[8:54] Speaker 1: so one idea is, if there's something there's a particular
[8:57] Speaker 1: expert in the field, you might search for that expert's name,
[9:01] Speaker 1: and then web pages which have that expert's name, which
[9:05] Speaker 1: is going to be unusual, those web pages will probably
[9:08] Speaker 1: be relevant what you're looking for. That sort of kind
[9:12] Speaker 1: of hack, rather than just as we would do today,
[9:16] Speaker 1: to go to Google or to go to an AI
[9:18] Speaker 1: and just say, oh, I'm just looking for this sort
[9:20] Speaker 1: of stuff and it will just find you. We take
[9:21] Speaker 1: it for granted that this stuff will be found. But
[9:25] Speaker 1: it is an incredibly difficult problem, and a problem that
[9:30] Speaker 1: Google turned into a trillion dollar business. But Lynch was
[9:34] Speaker 1: on it before Google even existed.
[9:35] Speaker 2: It's very hard in today's age to understand quite how
[9:40] Speaker 2: novel this was. Lynch always said he regretted not selling
[9:45] Speaker 2: it to the consumer market and not turning it into Google, but.
[9:49] Speaker 1: Instead so autonomy. So it's not Google, it's not doing
[9:52] Speaker 1: consumer directed web search. So what sort of search and
[9:55] Speaker 1: what sort of information retrieval is it doing and who
[9:57] Speaker 1: is paying for it?
[9:58] Speaker 2: All sorts of enormous corporations in the end, as well
[10:02] Speaker 2: as organizations within governments around the world. So rather than
[10:06] Speaker 2: finding information in neat databases, look through your emails, voicemails,
[10:12] Speaker 2: things like word documents, this kind of enormous trove of
[10:16] Speaker 2: information that corporations create. And that's who he was selling
[10:22] Speaker 2: it to, which made sense as a market at the time,
[10:24] Speaker 2: because it seemed incredible They've got the money right, very
[10:27] Speaker 2: lucrative and a more obvious place to sell something to
[10:31] Speaker 2: than the consumer market.
[10:32] Speaker 1: So Autonomy, Mike Lynch's company in the late nineteen nineties
[10:37] Speaker 1: is jumping into this space where there's this opportunity because
[10:42] Speaker 1: corporations have started generating enormous amounts of digital information that
[10:45] Speaker 1: is unstructured, there's no way to make any sense of
[10:48] Speaker 1: the stuff, and Autonomy does that and it's a very
[10:52] Speaker 1: successful company. So what was it like to work at Autonomy?
[10:59] Speaker 2: I think what sums up the atmosphere was the Piranha
[11:01] Speaker 2: tank in reception, something not something you often see in
[11:06] Speaker 2: the roundel of the Autonomy logo, and Lynch used to
[11:10] Speaker 2: joke that that was the tank that he would throw
[11:13] Speaker 2: failing salespeople into.
[11:15] Speaker 1: Charming.
[11:16] Speaker 2: It was a very very difficult place to work. Mike
[11:19] Speaker 2: Lynch was a very hard taskmaster. He could be brutal,
[11:23] Speaker 2: he could be very aggressive, and I'm afraid I heard
[11:27] Speaker 2: very early on from researching the book some real horror
[11:30] Speaker 2: stories about how people were treated within Autonomy, and that,
[11:34] Speaker 2: I think, because the tech world in Britain is very small,
[11:38] Speaker 2: much much smaller at that time, leaked out very quickly
[11:41] Speaker 2: and it got Mike Lynch's certain reputation.
[11:43] Speaker 1: When you say a certain reputation, I mean that all
[11:45] Speaker 1: kinds of things go on in companies that we could
[11:47] Speaker 1: describe as horrible. But what was he actually doing.
[11:51] Speaker 2: There was one woman who worked in the marketing team
[11:55] Speaker 2: who he thought wasn't working hard enough, and he would
[12:00] Speaker 2: yell at her repeatedly, and after an incident when he
[12:04] Speaker 2: saw her and some colleagues mocking him for his James
[12:08] Speaker 2: Bond obsession, because I loved James Bond, and he named
[12:10] Speaker 2: all of the meeting rooms after James Bond villains. He
[12:13] Speaker 2: put her desk first inside his office and then just
[12:16] Speaker 2: outside so he could look over her shoulder. The whole
[12:18] Speaker 2: time and see what she was doing. There were tons
[12:21] Speaker 2: and tons of examples of people being fired at will.
[12:24] Speaker 2: People were very scared of him, so.
[12:27] Speaker 1: Very demanding, cool, mean, angry.
[12:30] Speaker 2: Bullying, and I think I'm afraid it was deliberate cruelty.
[12:34] Speaker 2: I think he enjoyed the power. He had a tiny
[12:38] Speaker 2: team around him, and I got the impression they were
[12:42] Speaker 2: like his henchmen. And that's how the company was run.
[12:47] Speaker 1: So how does it do financially? Because it grew very
[12:50] Speaker 1: fast and it was floated on the London stock Market
[12:53] Speaker 1: and became a foot Sea one hundred companies, So this
[12:55] Speaker 1: is one of the one hundred biggest companies listed on
[12:59] Speaker 1: the London Stock Exchange. So that sounds good.
[13:02] Speaker 2: It does, and I think we have to be very
[13:03] Speaker 2: careful here. It's certainly benefited from the dot com boom.
[13:07] Speaker 2: It actually had a very ino it software product. However,
[13:12] Speaker 2: at the time that it went into the Footsy one hundred,
[13:15] Speaker 2: that's because its valuation, so what shareholders vestors thought it
[13:19] Speaker 2: was worth was way above the money that it was
[13:22] Speaker 2: actually making.
[13:23] Speaker 1: People were very very excited.
[13:24] Speaker 2: I think it was making something like forty four million
[13:27] Speaker 2: pounds a year and it was valued at four billion
[13:30] Speaker 2: pounds because people were very excited about its future prospects.
[13:34] Speaker 2: And we're seeing that similar valuation difference in AI businesses today.
[13:39] Speaker 2: So yes, it was doing well for a startup, but
[13:43] Speaker 2: its revenue certainly didn't match up to its valuation, and
[13:46] Speaker 2: it very quickly actually fell out of the Footsy one
[13:48] Speaker 2: hundred when the dot com bust happened.
[13:51] Speaker 1: I would love to talk about the bust, but let
[13:54] Speaker 1: us do that after the break. We are back and
[14:05] Speaker 1: I am talking to Katie Prescott, the author of the
[14:08] Speaker 1: que Serious Case of Mike Lynch. Katie, we promised to
[14:13] Speaker 1: talk about the dot com boom and bust. Before we do,
[14:17] Speaker 1: we should probably introduce a new character, and that is
[14:21] Speaker 1: the Reverend Thomas Bays. Lynch was obsessed with him. So
[14:27] Speaker 1: what did he do and why was it relevant to
[14:30] Speaker 1: Mike Lynch.
[14:31] Speaker 2: He was an early academic in the field of probability.
[14:36] Speaker 2: He came up with this concept that sounds very simple,
[14:40] Speaker 2: that what has gone before informs the probability of something happening.
[14:45] Speaker 2: So if you walked into a room where people had COVID,
[14:49] Speaker 2: it is more likely that you would come out of
[14:51] Speaker 2: it with COVID, and Lynch like embrace this both as
[14:57] Speaker 2: part of his business, but he also, i would say,
[15:00] Speaker 2: mainly used it to inform his philosophy of life. Right,
[15:04] Speaker 2: So he was constantly weighing up the odds of things happening,
[15:08] Speaker 2: and his teams were very used to him saying I
[15:12] Speaker 2: put twenty percent on that, eighty percent on that. If
[15:16] Speaker 2: he was hiring someone, he'd say, Okay, who are they
[15:19] Speaker 2: like that? We know, yes, just trying to work out
[15:22] Speaker 2: the odds of things happening. And one of the things
[15:25] Speaker 2: that struck me in writing this book is that everything
[15:28] Speaker 2: about Lynch's life was completely improbable. And the working title
[15:32] Speaker 2: of the book was actually improbable Odds because it's so
[15:36] Speaker 2: unlikely that someone from his background would go to private school,
[15:40] Speaker 2: would go to Cambridge. He was born with no fingerprints.
[15:44] Speaker 2: Most startups fail, I don't know there are There are
[15:47] Speaker 2: so many improbable things.
[15:49] Speaker 1: He was born with no fingerprints. He slipped that one in.
[15:51] Speaker 2: He was born with no fingerprints.
[15:53] Speaker 1: Wow, he really is a Bond villain.
[15:55] Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, And that was part of the joke. He
[15:58] Speaker 2: used to say to analysts in the city. Look, I
[16:00] Speaker 2: have got no fingerprints. I'd make a brilliant criminal.
[16:03] Speaker 1: So he's this brilliant guy. He's a bully. He has
[16:07] Speaker 1: set up this business, he's launched it on the stock market.
[16:11] Speaker 1: So tell us then, about what happened when Autonomy ran
[16:16] Speaker 1: into the dot com bust.
[16:18] Speaker 2: Lynch was only thirty at this point, running a startup
[16:23] Speaker 2: out of a coworking space in Cambridge, and it went
[16:28] Speaker 2: from footsy one hundred company too, and you can see
[16:31] Speaker 2: the share price plummeting, and Lynch really wanted to work
[16:35] Speaker 2: to get that share price up again. Now, on one level,
[16:40] Speaker 2: it was still doing well and still making the sales
[16:43] Speaker 2: that it was and its technology was still valued. Just
[16:46] Speaker 2: because it had dropped out of the list of shares
[16:49] Speaker 2: hadn't changed what it was doing.
[16:51] Speaker 1: I mean, it's worth being clear. The reason it was
[16:53] Speaker 1: a footsy one hundred company was because it was valued
[16:56] Speaker 1: by investors very highly. And the reason it was valued
[16:58] Speaker 1: by investors very highly was not because it was making
[17:01] Speaker 1: enormous profits. It was because they were very optimistic about
[17:04] Speaker 1: its future prospects. So when they become less optimistic about
[17:08] Speaker 1: all these tech companies, it drops out of the foots
[17:11] Speaker 1: one hundred.
[17:11] Speaker 2: But it's not because it's doing anything wrong.
[17:14] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not done anything wrong.
[17:15] Speaker 2: All the big tech companies did drop at that point
[17:19] Speaker 2: to me, even the likes of Microsoft. This is the
[17:22] Speaker 2: first time that Lynch faced the reality of running a
[17:27] Speaker 2: public business. You've got the glory of being in the
[17:30] Speaker 2: foot seat one hundred, of being, you know, the young
[17:32] Speaker 2: cool guy in Britain's tech scene during the dot com boom,
[17:36] Speaker 2: but then during the bust. Actually, you've got the pain
[17:39] Speaker 2: of trying to convince the press and trying to convince
[17:43] Speaker 2: people in the city who are scrutinizing your company and
[17:46] Speaker 2: telling investors whether they should put their money into it.
[17:49] Speaker 2: You've got the pain of really trying to get them
[17:53] Speaker 2: on board. And he really hated criticism, especially when it
[17:57] Speaker 2: came to Autonomy. He had very very thin skin.
[18:00] Speaker 1: He is subject to a level of scrutiny that he's
[18:03] Speaker 1: not used to. He doesn't like it, and he wants
[18:05] Speaker 1: to prove that Autonomy is for real. There's a certain
[18:10] Speaker 1: pressure to make the numbers do what Mike Lynch wants
[18:14] Speaker 1: them to do at this point, so.
[18:17] Speaker 2: Every quarter Autonomy would publish their results publicly.
[18:22] Speaker 1: This is what we sold, this is what it costs.
[18:25] Speaker 2: Exactly right, so how much money we made And kind
[18:27] Speaker 2: of unusual for a British company, because reporting every six
[18:31] Speaker 2: months here is more normal. But Autonomy had been listed
[18:34] Speaker 2: on the Nasdaq and Lynch always wanted to make parallels
[18:38] Speaker 2: with his company and the very successful tech businesses in
[18:42] Speaker 2: the US, so he was forced every three months, or
[18:46] Speaker 2: he had chosen every three months to publish.
[18:48] Speaker 1: Their results as a condition of Nasdaq listing.
[18:51] Speaker 2: So he had to not only keep up with the
[18:56] Speaker 2: forecast or the predictions that Autonomy made about their expectations
[19:01] Speaker 2: for their sales, but also the predictions that would be
[19:04] Speaker 2: made by city analysts in London who were making their
[19:08] Speaker 2: own predictions, and really that set a target every three
[19:13] Speaker 2: months to hit, and when Autonomy didn't hit that target,
[19:17] Speaker 2: its share price would fall.
[19:20] Speaker 1: He didn't want that to happen, and he.
[19:21] Speaker 2: Didn't want that to happen. If you fast forward towards
[19:25] Speaker 2: the financial crisis of two thousand and eight, companies stopped
[19:29] Speaker 2: buying software in the way they had done because budgets
[19:32] Speaker 2: were squeezed, understandably, But to continue hitting those targets, Autonomy,
[19:38] Speaker 2: which had always prided itself and boasted about being a
[19:41] Speaker 2: pure software company, started selling hardware and reselling other people's
[19:47] Speaker 2: hardware from companies like Dell, So things like keyboards and laptops,
[19:51] Speaker 2: very basic things mice.
[19:53] Speaker 1: That doesn't sound like a high margin business.
[19:55] Speaker 2: Well no, and that's the problem because analysts in the
[19:57] Speaker 2: city and investors liked Autonomy's pure software model because it
[20:03] Speaker 2: had an enormous margin because you're not paying to manufacture
[20:08] Speaker 2: something physical. When you're selling software, it's the dream. You
[20:11] Speaker 2: create some IP and then you can just ping it
[20:14] Speaker 2: around and so your margins are massive. But clearly when
[20:18] Speaker 2: you're reselling hardware that you've bought from somebody else, that's
[20:21] Speaker 2: very different. And Autonomy bundled all these sales into one
[20:26] Speaker 2: set of numbers and still told investors that they were
[20:32] Speaker 2: a pure software business, but actually a chunk of those
[20:35] Speaker 2: sales in one quarter, the biggest time that this happened,
[20:40] Speaker 2: twenty percent of those sales came from reselling hardware.
[20:44] Speaker 1: Just explain to me in a nutshell, what were Mike
[20:46] Speaker 1: Lynch and his team doing to make Autonomy's numbers look better.
[20:50] Speaker 2: So they were essentially wrapping the sales of more expensive
[20:53] Speaker 2: hardware into their software sales and putting expenses that came
[20:57] Speaker 2: from that in the marketing budget, moving numbers around around
[21:02] Speaker 2: the accounts. They were clocking sales on their books before
[21:07] Speaker 2: they'd actually happened by using resellers, which are very common
[21:11] Speaker 2: in the software industry, but they should really have had
[21:15] Speaker 2: a deal signed before they passed it on to the reseller,
[21:19] Speaker 2: and so that created holes in the accounts every quarter
[21:23] Speaker 2: that they struggled to fill. And then also they were
[21:27] Speaker 2: writing down sales as sales to original equipment manufacturers or OEMs.
[21:33] Speaker 2: So they'd say, we're putting Autonomy software in Dell, but
[21:36] Speaker 2: they were calling all sorts of companies OEMs, including Tottenham
[21:40] Speaker 2: Hotspur Football club. Linch. She used to describe it as
[21:42] Speaker 2: the Pinacolada model. He'd sell to an OEM and then
[21:45] Speaker 2: you could sit back on the beach with your cocktail
[21:48] Speaker 2: while someone else sold it for you.
[21:49] Speaker 1: And I'm curious. Autonomy had auditors, professional accountants, independent coming
[21:56] Speaker 1: and looking at their accounts. What were the auditors doing.
[21:59] Speaker 2: The auditors were signing off the accounts behind the scenes,
[22:03] Speaker 2: there were often questions about how things were being registered
[22:06] Speaker 2: as sales. The auditors, Deloitte were later fined over the
[22:11] Speaker 2: Autonomy accounts. There was an extraordinary investigation by the accounting
[22:16] Speaker 2: watchdog into how they handled them, which essentially found that
[22:21] Speaker 2: Deloitte Cambridge, which was a branch of the main Deloitte
[22:25] Speaker 2: office in London. Bear in mind they're one of the
[22:27] Speaker 2: top four accountants, wanted to keep its relationship with Autonomy.
[22:32] Speaker 2: It was its only footzy one hundred.
[22:33] Speaker 1: Customer keep the customer satisfied.
[22:35] Speaker 2: They wanted to keep the customer satisfied. And the relationship
[22:38] Speaker 2: was just too cozy with the company.
[22:41] Speaker 1: And so people looking at these numbers are just going
[22:44] Speaker 1: to fundamentally misunderstand what is actually going on inside the company.
[22:48] Speaker 2: Yes, and there was one particular analyst in the city,
[22:51] Speaker 2: a chap called Dowd Khan, who wrote a rather negative
[22:55] Speaker 2: note about Lynch, and this sparked a very bizarre reaction.
[23:02] Speaker 2: He ended up banning Dowd Khan from Autonomy's meetings. From
[23:07] Speaker 2: their results meetings, so normally they didn't oounce their results.
[23:09] Speaker 2: They invite everybody in an analyst would be able to
[23:12] Speaker 2: ask questions, and he said, you're you're not allowed to come.
[23:15] Speaker 1: This is the equivalent of the White House saying we
[23:17] Speaker 1: don't want a reporter showing up to the presidential briefings
[23:20] Speaker 1: because we don't like the way you write your news.
[23:22] Speaker 1: That a similar sort of energy yes.
[23:24] Speaker 2: It was. It was very strange, and a little group
[23:29] Speaker 2: formed of it was quite maverick analysts in the city
[23:32] Speaker 2: who started to question Autonomy's numbers and be quite vociferous
[23:37] Speaker 2: about it.
[23:38] Speaker 1: So they're cutting various corners in terms of their accounts.
[23:42] Speaker 1: Did they need to do this? Was it existential that
[23:44] Speaker 1: basically they were they were just going to run out
[23:46] Speaker 1: of money or run out of funding if they hadn't
[23:49] Speaker 1: stepped across the line occasionally, or was this entirely Mike
[23:53] Speaker 1: Lynch's vanity.
[23:55] Speaker 2: I think there were definitely problems with the technology. They
[23:57] Speaker 2: weren't investing enough in research and development, and there were
[24:01] Speaker 2: very serious competitors. Google had created a version of the
[24:05] Speaker 2: technology that was much much cheaper, but there was still
[24:09] Speaker 2: selling it. And actually there are some bar charts in
[24:13] Speaker 2: the book which show how much they inflated the revenue
[24:19] Speaker 2: each quarter, and you're not talking about enormous sums. They
[24:25] Speaker 2: probably could have kept going and actually probably pivoted to
[24:29] Speaker 2: other sorts of technology. So Lynch was very very early
[24:32] Speaker 2: to the cloud, but he was so very proud.
[24:37] Speaker 1: Well, he had a lot to be proud about. So
[24:40] Speaker 1: he'd created this very successful company. Is a pillar of Society.
[24:45] Speaker 1: He's being celebrated as a tech genius. He has an
[24:49] Speaker 1: obe kind of medal given to him by the Queen.
[24:53] Speaker 1: He's a fellow of the Royal Society of Engineering. He's
[24:56] Speaker 1: on the executive board of the BBC, he's an advisor
[24:59] Speaker 1: to the British government. All of these great things. Then
[25:03] Speaker 1: he is approached by Hewlett Packard, who want to buy
[25:08] Speaker 1: his company? Or what were they hoping to gain.
[25:11] Speaker 2: It's probably worth turning and having a look at the
[25:14] Speaker 2: state that Hewlett Packard was in at the time, which
[25:17] Speaker 2: was not brilliant. They'd cycled through a number of chief executives,
[25:22] Speaker 2: they'd made a number of acquisitions for many billions of
[25:25] Speaker 2: dollars which had failed.
[25:27] Speaker 1: And they're famous making hardware, so that most famously printers,
[25:31] Speaker 1: but you know, they make computers exactly.
[25:33] Speaker 2: And at a time when the new cohort of tech
[25:39] Speaker 2: companies were coming through, Hewlett Packard felt like a dinosaur
[25:44] Speaker 2: in Silicon Valley. And they got a new boss, a
[25:47] Speaker 2: guy called Leao Apottica from the software industry. So his
[25:51] Speaker 2: big vision was, Okay, we're going to find a really
[25:54] Speaker 2: interesting innovative software business to bolt on to. Hewlett Packard's
[26:00] Speaker 2: massive customer base and it'll be a winner. And then
[26:04] Speaker 2: came across autonomy.
[26:06] Speaker 1: Leo Apoteca is convinced that this is a brilliant idea.
[26:09] Speaker 1: Is he did everyone at Hulett Packard think that autonomy
[26:12] Speaker 1: is a steel or of eleven billion dollars? Whatever it was.
[26:15] Speaker 2: Certainly his advisors, the various banks and consultants that he
[26:20] Speaker 2: was talking to, were very positive. In fact, they encouraged him.
[26:25] Speaker 1: They're on a percentage, right, they're on commission if they
[26:29] Speaker 1: shepherd this deal through.
[26:30] Speaker 2: They encouraged him to do the deal quickly because someone
[26:34] Speaker 2: else might buy it. Because somebody else might buy it. Yeah,
[26:36] Speaker 2: that's right, and that ended up being a massive problem
[26:42] Speaker 2: for everyone.
[26:42] Speaker 1: Yes, you have a beautiful description of this in your book.
[26:48] Speaker 1: You describe Hewlett Packard's due diligence as more akin to
[26:52] Speaker 1: squeezing fruit at a market stall that a full on dissection.
[26:56] Speaker 1: I love this idea. With him just saying yeah, seems
[26:59] Speaker 1: about right felt.
[27:01] Speaker 2: Like the obvious analogy. Because they only spent eighteen days
[27:07] Speaker 2: on their due diligence.
[27:08] Speaker 1: And there's been eleven billion dollars.
[27:11] Speaker 2: You would spend far more time than that buying a
[27:15] Speaker 2: house or I don't know, probably buying lots of making
[27:19] Speaker 2: lots of major purchases.
[27:22] Speaker 1: Should Hewlett Packard have been a little bit more wary
[27:26] Speaker 1: We will find out after the break. We're back, and
[27:38] Speaker 1: I'm speaking to Katie Prescott, the author of the Curious
[27:41] Speaker 1: Case of Mike Lynch. So, Katie, the computer giant Hewlett
[27:47] Speaker 1: Packard has just agreed to buy Autonomy for eleven point
[27:53] Speaker 1: one billion dollars after giving it a quick squeeze and
[27:56] Speaker 1: saying it seems about right. That did not last very long.
[28:03] Speaker 1: The honeymoon was pretty brief.
[28:05] Speaker 2: It blew up so quickly, so the CEO who'd been
[28:07] Speaker 2: in charge of the acquisition was fired almost immediately after
[28:11] Speaker 2: it happened.
[28:12] Speaker 1: So Lynch is still working for Hulett Packard now.
[28:15] Speaker 2: Right exactly, So, he is working for Hewlett Packard along
[28:20] Speaker 2: with many of the Autonomy team, and his new boss
[28:24] Speaker 2: is a lady called Meg Whitman, the latest in a
[28:27] Speaker 2: long line of HP CEOs, and was presented with Autonomy
[28:32] Speaker 2: as one of various headaches to deal with. And I
[28:37] Speaker 2: don't think she'd been a massive supporter of the deal,
[28:40] Speaker 2: and various others also on the board got cold feet
[28:43] Speaker 2: almost as soon as it had happened, So it was
[28:46] Speaker 2: a difficult situation for Lynch to be in. But I
[28:49] Speaker 2: also think he was not a man who was used
[28:52] Speaker 2: to having a boss. He'd been his own boss from
[28:54] Speaker 2: the very start. He said that Autonomy was treated like
[28:59] Speaker 2: an unwanted stepchild within Hewlett Packard, that they weren't welcomed.
[29:05] Speaker 2: They were setting him up to fail, was his argument.
[29:10] Speaker 2: On the flip side, I think HP not only regretted
[29:15] Speaker 2: buying Autonomy after a series of previous failed acquisitions, but
[29:19] Speaker 2: also was starting to realize that the company had some
[29:25] Speaker 2: quite serious problems, and they became quite alarmed by some
[29:29] Speaker 2: of the stories that they heard about how it was run.
[29:32] Speaker 1: And are these stories about the accounting irregularities or are
[29:38] Speaker 1: these stories about Mike Linch the bully?
[29:40] Speaker 2: Started off about Mike Linch the bully, And then there
[29:44] Speaker 2: was a showdown between Meg Whitman and Mike Linch when
[29:47] Speaker 2: Autonomy failed spectacularly to meet its sales numbers and he
[29:52] Speaker 2: didn't tell her about in in advance, and Whitman said,
[29:55] Speaker 2: this is completely unacceptable. This isn't how you run a company.
[29:59] Speaker 1: So she said it's unacceptable and you need to shape
[30:02] Speaker 1: up or it's unacceptable and you're out.
[30:04] Speaker 2: You're out right. She fired him.
[30:06] Speaker 1: But that is not the end of the saga with
[30:09] Speaker 1: Hewlett Packard and Mike Lynch.
[30:12] Speaker 2: A whistleblower stepped forward from within Autonomy. So you've got
[30:15] Speaker 2: the Autonomy team that's been absorbed by HP, and one
[30:19] Speaker 2: of them, a chap called Joel Scott, went to speak
[30:22] Speaker 2: to Hewlett Packard's chief lawyer about the accounting, and that
[30:27] Speaker 2: sparked an investigation.
[30:29] Speaker 1: And then what As the.
[30:31] Speaker 2: Company becomes more deeply absorbed into HP, it became obvious
[30:35] Speaker 2: that things weren't right. But in November twenty twelve, Hewlett
[30:40] Speaker 2: Packard came out and said that they were writing down
[30:43] Speaker 2: their acquisition of Autonomy. So they were saying that a
[30:45] Speaker 2: whole chunk of money, eight billion dollars of an eleven
[30:50] Speaker 2: billion dollar acquisition, was worthless.
[30:52] Speaker 1: Essentially, basically, we bought this company for eleven billion, we
[30:55] Speaker 1: should have paid three billion.
[30:57] Speaker 2: Oops.
[30:58] Speaker 1: Yeah, oops.
[30:59] Speaker 2: And they then said that they were accusing Mike Lynch
[31:03] Speaker 2: and his team of fraud. It was such a big
[31:06] Speaker 2: deal at the time that they actually called Number ten.
[31:08] Speaker 2: They called the Minister's office in Britain before they told
[31:11] Speaker 2: Mike Lynch because they knew it would cause such a
[31:14] Speaker 2: spectacular Transatlantic shock to accuse one of Britain's biggest companies
[31:19] Speaker 2: of fraud.
[31:21] Speaker 1: So it was a shock. How did the fraud case proceed?
[31:26] Speaker 2: Mister Justice Hildeyard, the judge in the British case, who
[31:30] Speaker 2: I think has more extensively than anyone on this planet,
[31:33] Speaker 2: gone through Autonomy's accounts and what happened at Hewlett Packard
[31:37] Speaker 2: actually said that HP brought the claim almost before they
[31:40] Speaker 2: had all the information. They decided that there was frauded Autonomy.
[31:45] Speaker 2: They were hearing that from various quarters they'd found some
[31:48] Speaker 2: anomalies in the accounts, but they went hell for leather
[31:51] Speaker 2: after Lynch without any proper analysis to support it, which
[31:56] Speaker 2: is fascinating. But their shareholders actually sued Hewlett Packard over
[32:02] Speaker 2: the acquisition, and I suspect that was one impetus for
[32:05] Speaker 2: them to really go after Mike Lynch and as well
[32:11] Speaker 2: his CFO sushavn Hussein, who they accused of conning them
[32:15] Speaker 2: essentially that you made your numbers look brilliant, much better
[32:18] Speaker 2: than they were, to make yourself look more attractive, so
[32:20] Speaker 2: we would buy you.
[32:21] Speaker 1: We heard he gets extradited to the US is he
[32:25] Speaker 1: first facing file in the UK.
[32:27] Speaker 2: Yes, it's a real tangle of litigation here. So there
[32:30] Speaker 2: was an enormous, incredibly complex trial in the UK which
[32:35] Speaker 2: started properly in twenty fifteen. So that's when the civil
[32:39] Speaker 2: case was brought in London when HP sued Mike Lynch
[32:42] Speaker 2: and his CFO Sashavan Hussein. While that was going on,
[32:46] Speaker 2: sushavn Hussein faced trial in the US, accused of fraud
[32:51] Speaker 2: by the Department of Justice, so sitting in front of
[32:53] Speaker 2: a jury in California, and he was found guilty and
[32:56] Speaker 2: then he was sent to prison with a five year sentence.
[33:00] Speaker 2: So you've got these two massive, massive cases kind of
[33:04] Speaker 2: going on almost simultaneously.
[33:05] Speaker 1: At what point does Lynched art to be facing down
[33:08] Speaker 1: the risk of prison.
[33:09] Speaker 2: When Sushevan Hussein, who is his number two, was sent
[33:13] Speaker 2: to prison, he started to take the whole thing very
[33:16] Speaker 2: seriously and started to worry about his future. He resisted
[33:20] Speaker 2: extradition and there was a lot of anticipation about the
[33:24] Speaker 2: verdict in the civil case. Once that came and the
[33:29] Speaker 2: judge categorically found for Hewlett Packard. Pretty Patel, who was
[33:33] Speaker 2: the Home Secretary in the UK and responsible for the
[33:36] Speaker 2: extradition signed the warrant to say that he could be
[33:41] Speaker 2: sent to America to face trial there.
[33:45] Speaker 1: So you've had his number two sent to prison. He's
[33:48] Speaker 1: lost the civil case. And then we're at Heito Airport
[33:50] Speaker 1: and he's having cuffs put on him and a chain
[33:52] Speaker 1: wrapped around him, and he's flying at the back of
[33:55] Speaker 1: the plane, which is not where he's used to flying
[33:57] Speaker 1: to the States.
[33:59] Speaker 2: But then what he landed in San Francisco actually expecting
[34:04] Speaker 2: to spend most of the time preparing for his trial
[34:06] Speaker 2: in New York with his lawyers. The judge said, I
[34:10] Speaker 2: think you're a flight risk. You're not allowed to leave
[34:12] Speaker 2: San Francisco. So in a rush, his lawyers had to
[34:16] Speaker 2: find him somewhere to live and some armed security guards
[34:21] Speaker 2: who would be willing to shoot him if he ran away.
[34:24] Speaker 2: So the two were actually quite incompatible. It's quite hard
[34:28] Speaker 2: to find someone to rent you a house, as it
[34:30] Speaker 2: turns out, if we were happy to have men with
[34:32] Speaker 2: guns there.
[34:33] Speaker 1: As well, very in line in the Bond movie though.
[34:36] Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. And then his trial eventually started in early
[34:43] Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, and it felt like the outcome was
[34:48] Speaker 2: very obvious.
[34:49] Speaker 1: Given everything that we'd heard. The Baysian in US would say,
[34:54] Speaker 1: he hasn't got a chance, so why did he walk free?
[34:58] Speaker 2: Well, it's another probability question. I think in a criminal
[35:01] Speaker 2: jury trial you need to find someone guilty beyond reasonable doubt,
[35:05] Speaker 2: whereas in a civil trial it's on the balance of probabilities.
[35:08] Speaker 1: Right, So implicitly he probably committed for but we are
[35:12] Speaker 1: not sufficiently confident to deprive him of his liberty. At
[35:16] Speaker 1: the same time that Lynch walked free, another senior Autonomy
[35:21] Speaker 1: executive was also exonerated.
[35:23] Speaker 2: Yes, so Stephen Chamberlain was vice president of accounting at
[35:26] Speaker 2: Autonomy and Cambridge. It was a very popular guy amongst
[35:31] Speaker 2: his team and in his local community. He'd also been
[35:35] Speaker 2: staying in San Francisco for the duration of the trial,
[35:37] Speaker 2: but unlike Lynch, who'd been under house arrest in an
[35:42] Speaker 2: enormous mansion, Chamberlain had rented a one bedroom Airbnb.
[35:47] Speaker 1: Can you hire the security guard on Airbnb as well?
[35:50] Speaker 2: He didn't need one because he didn't fight extradition, so
[35:54] Speaker 2: he was never seen as a flight risk. So the
[35:56] Speaker 2: two men were in extremely different positions and their lives
[35:59] Speaker 2: got tied together by this trial.
[36:01] Speaker 1: Yeah, and at this point, if this was a conventional
[36:07] Speaker 1: Hollywood movie, Lynch and Chamberlain would sail off into the
[36:11] Speaker 1: sunset to enjoy their freedom, but that is not what happened.
[36:16] Speaker 2: Mike Lynch took his family and Chrisma Villo actually his
[36:21] Speaker 2: lead lawyer, and Jonathan Bloomer, who'd been the chair of
[36:24] Speaker 2: his audit committee at Autonomy, on holiday, along with a
[36:28] Speaker 2: number of other lawyers to celebrate that acquittal, to celebrate
[36:31] Speaker 2: winning the case. And it was the last day of
[36:35] Speaker 2: their holiday when they heard that Stephen Chamberlain, his co defendant,
[36:40] Speaker 2: had been hit by a car while he was out
[36:43] Speaker 2: running in Cambridgeshire and was on a life support machine.
[36:46] Speaker 1: In hospital and he did not survive.
[36:49] Speaker 2: He didn't survive, and later that night Lynch's yacht, which
[36:55] Speaker 2: was called the Beaijan, was hit by a freak storm
[37:00] Speaker 2: and knocked over in fifteen seconds and Lynch and his
[37:03] Speaker 2: daughter Christmas alone and his wife, and Jonathan bloom and
[37:09] Speaker 2: Judy Bloomer and the chef on board as well Ricaldo
[37:12] Speaker 2: Thomas all drowned.
[37:15] Speaker 1: It's really incredible. Immediately after this dramatic victory, all of
[37:20] Speaker 1: these people are killed. The conspiracy theorists, of course, have
[37:23] Speaker 1: had a field day.
[37:25] Speaker 2: They have, and I'm sorry to say, I haven't found
[37:27] Speaker 2: anything that stands up any idea that the US Department
[37:31] Speaker 2: of Justice, or that Hewlett Packard or any of the
[37:34] Speaker 2: other big players in this story are responsible for this
[37:38] Speaker 2: at all. It seems these were both just tragic accidents.
[37:42] Speaker 2: It's extraordinary, and it's certainly not the ending of the
[37:45] Speaker 2: book that I thought I was going to write.
[37:48] Speaker 1: On cautioning tales, we try to learn lessons from what's happened,
[37:54] Speaker 1: and some of what you've told us, Katie, is so extraordinary,
[37:59] Speaker 1: so unique, that I think there are no lessons to
[38:01] Speaker 1: be learned. But some of it is strangely familiar. So
[38:07] Speaker 1: if you were drawing lessons, what lessons would you draw.
[38:10] Speaker 2: I'm glad you said that, because I agree with you.
[38:12] Speaker 2: I think it's very hard to generalize about this story
[38:17] Speaker 2: because it's so absolutely extraordinary. But the one that jumps
[38:21] Speaker 2: out for me overall is about pride, you know, the
[38:26] Speaker 2: judge in the civil case, and I think this goes
[38:29] Speaker 2: back to your point about why there was ever any
[38:34] Speaker 2: need to inflate the sales figures. The pride that caused
[38:39] Speaker 2: Mike Lynch, I think, to fight with people and to
[38:44] Speaker 2: trample over relationships which caused so many problems, so many
[38:48] Speaker 2: unnecessary problems, and especially in the era that we're in
[38:54] Speaker 2: now of AI hype, which reminds me so much of
[38:57] Speaker 2: the dot com boom and bust. I think there are
[39:01] Speaker 2: lessons for this new cohort of startup entrepreneurs coming through
[39:08] Speaker 2: about how to notate this wild world.
[39:12] Speaker 1: Katie, thank you so much for talking to Cautionary Tales.
[39:16] Speaker 1: You can get Katie's book, The Curious Case of Mike
[39:18] Speaker 1: Lynch wherever you buy books, and of course you can
[39:21] Speaker 1: also read Katie Prescott's work in The Times newspaper, where
[39:26] Speaker 1: she is the Technology business editor.
[39:29] Speaker 2: Thank you, Katie, thanks for having me.
[39:35] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harfin with Andrew Wright,
[39:39] Speaker 1: Alice Fines and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills
[39:44] Speaker 1: and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are
[39:47] Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design by Carlos
[39:52] Speaker 1: San Juan at Brain Audio and Dan Jackson. Bend A
[39:56] Speaker 1: d af Haffrey edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't
[40:00] Speaker 1: have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne,
[40:04] Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan and Owen Miller. Cautionary
[40:12] Speaker 1: Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like
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