Full Circle

About 13 years ago I was out of work...

EO, the startup company I put 4 years of my life into was crashing and had decided to shut down it's European operation altogether. I had started work when EO was called Active Book working for a guy called Matt Lee. Over the 4 years as Active Book morphed into EO and went onto produce what is now widely acclaimed to be the second worst piece of technology ever invented in history I worked with several great guys- Dave Flynn, Bill Oldfield, Keith Clark, Bart Adao, Andrew Sloss and of course Matt Lee to name but a few.

As EO Europe closed its doors for the last time I got a call from Matt asking if I was interested running a team of guys wanting to make their first commercial Embedded Software Development Toolkit. It didn't sound like much of a challenge to me, having spent most of time in 80's doing just that. However, I did have a mortgage to pay so I decided to take the job and help them out until a real job came along.

As I recall during the job interview, the head guy from the startup (he seemed to have quite an ego) asked me where I saw myself in 3 years time. "Working in California" I answered almost automatically.
"Hmmm it will probably take longer than that for us to grow our business sufficiently for you to be able to take a posting out there." he replied.
Well I am pleased to say Robin was wrong. 18 months later ARM launched its first commercial Embedded Software Development Toolkit and I moved into a hotel room in Los Gatos.

The rest is, as they say, history.

13 years on, I am still looking for that real job, just not as hard as I was back then, and in the meantime I have been given back the job I started at ARM with: making a commercial Embedded Software Development Toolkit. This time I’m not working with 12 people in an old pumping station. Now I am working with 120+ people across 4 offices, running a multi-million dollar business, but the song remains the same whether played by an ensemble or an orchestra and I am happy to conduct.