Tech City chair Eileen Burbidge on her plan for global domination: 'Eventually everything will be digitally enabled'

Silicon Roundabout may be booming but Eileen Burbidge has a plan for global domination. The new chair of Tech City tells Susannah Butter about rationing screen time and taking on the hackers
High flier: Eileen Burbidge at her Clerkenwell HQ
Rebecca Reid
14 October 2015

As one of London’s highest-flying venture capitalists and now chair of Tech City UK, mother-of-four Eileen Burbidge “doesn’t do the being involved in school clubs thing”. But when her son, then aged seven, told her that the girls in his class had to play netball instead of football with the boys she made an exception and became an accidental campaigner.

“I cannot tell you how much it confounded me,” she says, still perplexed at this segregation. “My son was confused because at that age he doesn’t know there is a difference between girls and boys. These subtle things early on mean that by the time a girl is choosing her GCSEs she has already been told in subconscious ways that she is different to boys, and if something is deemed a guy’s thing she won’t do it.”

A woman of action, Burbidge, aged 44, successfully lobbied for the school to introduce girls’ football. She is now an expert on netball — “it was invented in Victorian times by an American man, so that women wouldn’t perspire. I don’t think anyone minds girls sweating any more.” And don’t get her on skorts (skirt/shorts) — “Can we get over skorts already? Just put your daughter in shorts.”

Burbidge has met me in a glass-walled meeting room at White Bear Yard, the Clerkenwell co-working space where her company Passion Capital is based, along with 12 of the start-ups it has invested in. On the walls there are posters celebrating Passion’s successes — it works with 42 firms, which together are worth £407 million.

Last year 2,000 people pitched for cheques and many of Passion’s investments, including direct debit provider Go Cardless, are in financial technology — part of what drew Chancellor George Osborne to Burbidge. She replaces fellow American Joanna Shields as the middlewoman between technology and the Government. Shields is now the Government’s minister for internet safety and security and Burbidge hopes they will work closely together.

“Terrible” at Excel and having never studied business, Burbidge claims to be “an accidental venture capitalist” who “never wears a suit — I live in black jeans” — but she makes up for a lack of formal qualifications with forensic, enthusiastic knowledge of her patch.

She is proud of London’s thriving tech companies, “despite taxi drivers always assuming working in tech means IT support jobs”. “Digital is already 10 per cent of UK GDP and it is forecast to be 15 per cent in 2017.

“Tech is the sector with the greatest job creation compared to the national average and we have 10 times as much venture financing coming into London tech as we had five years ago.

“The sector is growing anyway but it’s fantastic that the Government has recognised it — economic growth is consistent with its mantra as a government but also in terms of job creation.”

Prime Minister David Cameron talks with Eileen Burbidge
Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images

But this doesn’t mean we have it sussed: “We need more success stories — to demonstrate that others can do it too and feed the ecosystem — when companies do well they become investors themselves or start second companies. London has the highest concentration of software developers in the world but still there is a global shortage, so it’s good that coding is being introduced into the school curriculum. And we need to attract more investment.”

After our interview Burbidge will be flying to Tokyo on a trip with the Mayor, Boris Johnson, to promote Japanese investment in London. But before we come to that she must eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup — “I’ve been busy but it’s OK now because I have chocolate. I drink two Cokes a day and I love McDonald’s.”

Burbidge grew up in suburban Chicago “with a hard work ethic. Nothing was unachievable — if you weren’t doing well at maths you had to work more at it.”

Her parents emigrated from Taiwan to study and while she is aware that “women are underrepresented in tech and across business”, she says that “being from an ethnic minority doesn’t make you as sensitive about your gender. I was much more sensitive about being Chinese and used to think things would be easier if I was white. It never dawned on me that it would be easier if I was a boy as well.”

Her father was an engineer and her mother worked in finance so she grew up thinking she would go into business. After a degree in computer science, “before it was trendy”, at the University of Illinois, she worked for a telecoms company which sent her to the Bay Area of San Francisco, which was then in the process of being transformed into Silicon Valley.

“Everything was wonderful,” she says. “The topography, the sense of progress, parties every night. There was foolish money being spent. I thought it was what it must have been like on Wall Street in the Seventies — a boom time.”

She left telecoms for a job at Apple and then software company Open Wave. It floated on the stock market in 2000 and Burbidge made $1 million.

When the dotcom boom came to an end, Burbidge says: “I saw really smart people get nothing but others who hit the jackpot — even though they weren’t that hard-working but because they had timed it right. One of my guiding principles now is that the best you can do is try to increase your exposure to luck and recognise lucky options.”

She moved to London in 2004 “to gain international experience”, working as Skype’s product director. She didn’t know anyone here and didn’t sell her Porsche or 600cc motorbike in California because she thought she would be back within two years. “Skype was the best year-and-a- half of my career. We worked two all-nighters a week. It was fulfilling, gratifying, terrifying, challenging.”

She was sacked after a disagreement with the company’s co-founder Niklas Zennström. “I was devastated. People cried, I cried. But I have the greatest respect for the company.”

Burbridge says that Skype was the best year-and-a-half of her career
Rebecca Reid

By then she was hooked on London: “It’s so much more fulfilling to work in tech in the UK because it is earlier in its life cycle and you can shape it more.”

After Skype she become director of communication products at Yahoo! and started advising a tech fund on the side, which led to her founding Passion Capital with former last.fm chair Stefan Glaenzer and Robert Dighero. “Investing in start-ups allows me to recapture that feeling I had at Skype. I’m too old for two all-nighters a week but I want to live vicariously through the companies we help.”

She does a lot of working remotely so she can spend time with her four children — aged nine, seven, five and three. They live in Highgate and she separated from their father, Duncan, who runs a video streaming company, 18 months ago.

The children have a nanny who comes between 8am and 6.30pm. Burbidge says: “I don’t think any working parent thinks it’s easy. But it was important to me to continue working. I wasn’t necessarily going to have kids, I had my first at 35, so I already had a professional persona and it was important to continue — when you do something you love it makes you a happier, stronger person and better parent.

“I know lots of people don’t have this luxury but I so enjoy doing the school drop off and pick-up. It means my hours in the office are shorter than they should be and I make up for it by taking cabs so I can schedule calls then.”

She has a Blackberry for emails and an iPhone6 for Twitter. Her ex was strict about limiting device time and the family don’t have phones at the dinner table but Passion’s co-founder Dighero jokes that he knew when Burbidge had delivered her last baby because she had been emailing him and there was a 40-minute window when he didn’t get any messages.

Her eldest child has started coding and her three-year-old loves jigsaw puzzles. All of them use tablets, rationed to an hour a day, and play Minecraft. Is she a tech tiger mum? “That is extreme. I believe in everything in moderation.” She does say that the concept of parents saying a school is “too academic” is alien to her — “as a product of a Chinese immigrant family there is no such thing.”

Burbidge is inundated with invitations to speak about women in tech but says “I don’t do it much because I would rather be a demonstration of how you can be a woman in tech. We do need more women in tech but being conspicuous can be an opportunity to stand out — it is so gratifying to show up people who expect you to be dim-witted. They are floored when you have something intelligent to say.”

What does she look for in founders of start-ups? “It helps if they are almost compulsive, with a strong psychosis driving them — to prove their parents, ex or old boss wrong. It’s not the healthiest but there will be such highs and lows so it has to be more than ‘Oh I’ll spend my day doing this’.”

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Passion has recently invested in a cyber-security company called Digital Shadows. “Cyber security is becoming important. The Sony hack, the Ashley Madison case and Mumsnet made people realise that it wasn’t just about money in banks,” says Burbidge.

“Working to stop hacks is about anticipation — you can’t prevent hacks so how much warning can you give and how resilient can a system be?”

She believes in a holistic approach to tech. “One of the UK’s strengths is that it has such a powerful confluence of industries and points of view. In America you have to fly to Washington DC to meet a policy officer or New York for finance, here you can bump into them in a coffee shop.”

She doesn’t want to turn London into Silicon Valley because “our standards should be higher”, nor does she see tech as a separate sector: “You can be excited about fashion or the media and that isn’t different to tech. Eventually everything will be digitally enabled.”

Follow Susannah on Twitter: @susannahbutter

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