Mike Lynch: HP bureaucracy drove out Autonomy talent

Software vendor's former leader salutes vision of Léo Apotheker and asks again for HP to clarify accusations

Mike Lynch has praised the "vision that was articulated" for Autonomy by Léo Apotheker and lamented the fact that the inherent "bureaucracy" at HP "saw a lot of talent leaving" following the acquisition.

In an interview at the London Web Summit, Lynch claimed that, as leader of a listed company, he effectively had little say over when and to whom his company was sold.

"The reality of a public company - and for all of you who are entrepreneurs out there it is important you understand this - is that you have no control over whether the company gets sold. There are no poison pills in the UK," he explained.

"If someone offers a premium (and, because it has relatively little tech, the London market is used to premiums of 20 to 30 per cent) they will sell the company. Where you get a tech premium of 60 per cent, [as we did with Autonomy], the company is sold."

Lynch went on to claim that Apotheker, alongside "visionary" former CTO Shane Robison, who has now retired, had offered a compelling vision for the future of the British software company.

"Robison understood that [there] is a change which is going to rewrite the fundamental layer of how software processes information," he said.

The former Autonomy boss claimed HP's "flip-flopping" over its hardware strategy had changed the outlook for the "trajectory" of the company he founded. Lynch denied there was an insurmountable culture clash between the two companies, but claimed that Autonomy's pool of comparatively young engineering talent had become disenchanted with life at HP.

"The cultures are different but I am not sure that, with good management, it would not have been possible to put the two together," he added. "Our programmers were used to getting things done quickly and without bureaucracy. But with any large company there is [a great deal of] bureaucracy and process.

"The most important thing was to retain the talent. But once capable people get in a situation where they feel they are getting bogged down in paperwork, form filling and conference calls, it becomes harder to retain them, and we saw a lot of talent leaving."

During the interview Lynch (pictured) reiterated that he has not been contacted by anyone from HP or any authorities other than the independent auditing regulatory body the Financial Reporting Council. He claimed to not know what he and his previous company are accused of.

"Perhaps if someone had asked me [beforehand], we might have been able to explain," he said.