Neale 00:08
Hi and welcome to another episode of Another Bright Spark Podcast. A special episode this week. We are at the headquarters of Raspberry Pi here in Cambridge and I’m talking to Roger Thornton Director of Applications. Roger, welcome to the show. Can you tell me a bit about your background, your position here as Director of Applications and what that entails?
Roger 00:35
So I’m Director of Applications so I look after a small team of engineers and our primary focus is on helping when people embed Raspberry Pi technologies in their products so when they use Raspberry Pi to build products we’re there to support them and give them all the support they need to get that product through prototype into production into sales and then also to make sure that we’re providing and sort of constantly iterating on what support looks like as well. So I’m trying to understand what customers are, you know, new needs that customers have.
Neale 01:06
…trying to achieve with their product and how you can help them along. Fantastic. Your offices are absolutely stunning. I mean you’ve got live plants down the the wall, shame we can’t get any shots to Mark, we should do that next time, get a little camera and go around the building. Arcade machines downstairs, breakout spaces, I saw non-alcoholic beer, Fridays. How important for Raspberry Pi is it to cultivate that sort of, that culture that you’ve got?
Roger 01:29
Incredibly important, I mean, still after 12 years and 65 million computers sold. Yeah, lots of, we’re still only an organisation of 130 people and that’s design of product, support, software and then all the big, all the functions that are growing business needs like finance and biz dev and administration. So the people are, the reason it can stay small is we get a lot out of every person and you have to make a nice place for people to work to get that kind of,
Neale 02:07
That incredible environment and that creativity, I suppose, a lot of outside of the box thinking, I mean, we’re a team of electronic engineers ourselves, we’re a Raspberry Pi design partner, and I think creative minds as well need that sort of environment through. You’re based here in Cambridge, do you feel that legacy of the computer… the history of computers and how important is the geographical location for Raspberry Pi?
Roger 02:30
I think, you know, incredibly important, you know, Cambridge is sort of this wonderful tech bubble that exists, you know. We’ve got the universities that generate incredible talent, but also, you know, it’s a place that people specifically move to, to get involved into tech. So, you know, as you were saying before, we, you know, if you look around the science part, which we’re based on, all the big names are here. And you sort of…
Neale 02:55
Microsoft next door, AMD…
Roger 02:57
Yeah, yeah Apple Nvidia that everyone has a presence here, but it’s not their headquarters, but it’s a presence Yeah, and that that’s really important So us being a company that grew up with its ties to the university. It’s always gonna be home. Yeah
Neale 03:10
You said 130 staff, do you operate hybrid working, what’s the sort of set up, I mean engineers can work for home computer connectivity, what do you find works best for Raspberry or Raspberry Pi?
Roger 03:22
Bar a few employees who are not based in the UK, we’re primarily a sort of office based. Some people may work one or two days a week from home, but the focus is being in the office. You get an awful lot done walking around the building when everyone’s in it. Emails are not needed when you can just go and ask someone the question.
Neale 03:45
Yeah, “hello”… Also helps those interpersonal relationships I suppose in terms of team building.
Roger 03:50
Yeah, I mean we’re at a point where everyone still sort of knows everyone in the office, you know. You keep that at 130, aren’t you? Yeah, and I think you’re going to sort of cling on to that as long as you can, and keeping everyone in one building makes that happen.
Neale 04:05
Last year you went public, so speaking about keeping people together, so you went public last year, you float on the London Stock Exchange, which is a huge milestone for the business. Has that changed the culture at all, or sort of the business roadmap? What difference has that made to the organisation?
Roger 04:21
Well, I was involved heavily in the IPO process and part of that process is you saying, as a company, we want to go and do these things, you’re laying out a sort of a grand vision of what you can achieve in the next few years and why people should come along, why investors should come along with you, but also why people should come along with you. So it was a great moment of sort of writing down everything that we’ve always thought. The vision, the roadmap, where you want to go to. And it’s always been there, but writing it down to present someone who’s never really interacted with Raspberry Pi was an incredibly useful process. We sort of found great narratives in what we’re doing and why we’re doing it as well. There’s still, whilst we’re no longer fully owned by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the charitable side of it, they’re still a major shareholder. While we’re not owned by that shareholder anymore fully, there’s still a huge amount of social good that Raspberry Pi is trying to do as well. We’re still trying to bring down that price point for embeddable computers, only helps people. So yeah, the IPO was a crystallization of a lot of hard work and a lot of long-term planning, and it has opened us up to a whole different set of requirements. We’re talking about annual reports. These things are non-zero bits of work that you have to do a lot of.
Neale 05:58
It’s quite tick-boxer for things that you have to answer to, as far as you have to…
Roger 06:04
And so there’s this new reporting, new sort of investor side of it, but equally it’s changed a bit of the way that Raspberry Pi is being perceived, and that’s one of the things we’re working on hard, is the perception of Raspberry Pi. We have this start in education enthusiast markets, and we still do, it’s not gone away. It’s just that this embedded industrial market has grown and grown and grown and grown for us. So now, 70% of Raspberry Pi sold, so 70% of that 7 million last year, go into industrial and embedded applications. So the vast majority of what we do is industrial and embedded, and one of the things we find sometimes is that perception question, like, oh, isn’t this a toy, or isn’t this a… And the answer is of course not, look at places like Heathrow in the UK now, all the monitors that you go, you see when you’re walking around there. They’re all powered by Raspberry Pis, so that’s a partnership with Sharp NEC. It’s not a toy, it’s doing kind of mission critical work, and so the IPO has helped in that sense, and people, we’re a FTSE 250 listed company now, people go, yep, that makes sense.
Neale 07:16
It makes complete sense. I know initially the concept behind the Raspberry Pi is trying to build a device that replicated the microcomputers of the 1980s. They were all BBC, so to get kids into programming. And then if you fast forward a few years later, there was a drop in Cambridge of people who were studying computer science. So you had the beginnings of the device, and there was a drop. But if you can give that to kids to train on, it’s business savvy. Because if you’ve got these young engineers who’ve grown up using a Pi, they grow up older and they go to work for NEC. They, oh, Heathrow needs some screen devices. What we’re going to use, well, we know Pi. We know it’s capable. We know it’s low-power, environmentally friendly. It’s adaptable. You can do a lot of stuff with it. I mean, it’s a great thing to do to educate people, but it’s great business then, surely, as well.
Roger 08:10
Yeah, I mean we’re incredibly lucky. We have some engineers who work for us now who grew up working with Rosapai as a student so that’s really wonderful to see and you know that part of the business isn’t going away you know it’s still used in so many computer science education settings.
Neale 08:30
Yeah. Why do people love Raspberry Pi so much? What do you think the key things about it? Why do people love getting their hands on it? I know we have a lot of customers who come to us, as I mentioned before, we’re a Raspberry Pi design partner, which is an easy sentence to say. We’re a partner. We have a lot of customers coming to us. So we have this device. We now want it to connect it to the internet so it can report. We want Wasp indication. We want it now. We want a new sensor and they won’t be able to measure heat as well as humidity or whatever that is. And we love working with Pi’s. But why do you think people love them so much?
Roger 09:06
I think it’s because it massively reduces that time to getting a first thing working. You’re buying, for a very low price, you’re buying 12 years worth of software development. So everything on it works. Things are supported. We have a huge community of people who have supported, but we also have a dedicated team of software engineers. So you have this huge amount of hours spent refining the software platform for it. A lot of work is going on in the background. Yeah. A lot of legacy, a lot of history. And that work shows up in loads of different places. One of the places is we still support old hardware. So you can still buy a Raspberry Pi One, it was launched 10 years ago, but it’s coming off the factory line today. So we still produce them. So we have an end of life. So that’s great. But also, you can take the latest software and you can put it on there, and it will still work. So we understand that it’s getting embedded somewhere, and people will be loath to change it. So we try to make it as easy as possible for them to do that. So it’s this kind of thought of there being this long tail of long-term support from software means it’s incredibly easy to pick up and get going. And that’s why you see people coming to Ignis and going, hey, look. I’ve already got the thing working in prototype. What do we do about production? And of course.
Neale 10:35
How do we scale for manufacture? How do we add extra bits involved into it?
Roger 10:39
And I think that’s the second bit where people are finding Raspberry Pi sort of beats out everyone else because going from a prototype to mass production is very easy with Raspberry Pi. If you can either sort of commercialize your single board computer and put it in a case, or you can design a sort of custom built carrier for a compute module. So you can embed Raspberry Pi into your solution and you literally port the software across and off it’ll go. So there’s this very straightforward route to market with Raspberry Pi.
Neale 11:15
I think it’ll plug it in adaptable. Yeah, fantastic. So last year you had the launch of the 2350 chip, obviously a big step for the company. You’ve had a board, you’re using other people’s chips, you’re now investing your own silicon and your own micro processing. How important that is for the business for you? I mean does it open doors? Does it tie into your road map? I mean it was a huge launch, our developers loved it, we got early access to it. We also talk about whales as well on the trips because the engineers are huge fans. But yeah, in terms of investing your own silicon, that’s a huge step for the organization. What was the thinking process behind it and where do you think that’s going to take the organization?
Roger 11:56
Well, you know, it’s been going on for eight years, eight, nine years now, you know, a chip doesn’t, your chips are hard work and not quick to get ready. You know, we started four or five years ago with our first microcontroller, our P2040. So that was our first foray into that world. And we’ve always had this belief that there’s a, you know, my Raspberry Pi computing sits in this kind of middle space where, you know, you can have some high power compute on it, you know, but the very low end part isn’t catered for by a Raspberry Pi product. And a microcontroller always seemed like a thing that, we would always be sort of half, we’d always be second guessing ourselves buying someone else’s. And so, sure, you got more.
Neale 12:45
You’ll control the more reliability if you know the ins and outs of it, I suppose.
Roger 12:49
it’s that very low level thing where you actually kind of want to just build something yourself. You know a lot of people here have a background in chip design so it was a it was it was a big leap but it was a leap that we could do you know it wasn’t brand new to us you know a lot of the team have designed chips before in previous companies but it was possible and you know 2040 was our first go in it. Then we had RP1 which is our south bridge for our main platform for our single board computers and that handles a lot of you know the iOS so that was a different type of chip as well you know and then of course we now got 2350 which is our sort of most secure you know sort of our best micro shoulder we’ve made today.
Neale 13:35
You say it’s the most secure, you had a really interesting launch in Vegas where you gave the chip away to a bunch of hackers I believe. Can you tell the story and the idea behind it, I don’t think it was amazing.
Roger 13:47
We’re always at DEF CON, who, you know, they know their stuff, you know.
Neale 13:53
Rocking roll, yeah, make a strip, you can’t get much cooler.
Roger 13:57
And we also launched a hacking challenge to basically challenge people to circumvent some of the security features on our chip. And we published results a few months ago and have addressed the very small, you know, the quite corner case things that we came through, you know. So, you know, one of the things we said when we did it was, you know, sort of security through obscurity isn’t secure, it’s kind of just, it’s a secret rather than it’s actually secure. And so we wanted to make a very secure microcontroller and this is how we’ve done it. It’s sort of said to people, we’ll go and have a go. And we’ve been proven roundly that it is a pretty secure part.
Neale 14:40
I mean apart from being a great bit of PR it’s engaging with your audience because of course people are going to want to get hands-on early try and break into it and as you say you’re completely honest and transparent about it and you’ve proved it was secure there might have been but you’ve sealed it fixed it but what I mean we’re in your boardroom now I can only imagine the conversation who first voiced it what was what was the conversation was it was everyone excited about it was it was a sort of oh can we do this what was the what was the like
Roger 15:10
You know, we haven’t got here by sort of doing easy things, you know, and so this was a good way of engaging with that community and sort of, and also lots of companies say they’ve got a secure part and we were able to prove it, you know.
Neale 15:30
You’re right, I mean, the whole idea that behind the Raspberry is a bit of a, like, we are here, you know, this is you, so I think it was a really, really bold move. How important, so what Ignis has been in design partner and stuff, and obviously you service customers when they have needs in a program, but how important are companies like Ignis and other design partners to Raspberry Pi? What do they bring to them? Because you really look after them, for people who don’t know, our head of engineering, one of our engineers was whisked off to Wales, they had a train ride with, you know, drinks and food, wonderful accommodation, we get hands-on early access to your devices, which is great for us because we’re in early access, and probably good for you so we can sort of go through and do some testing for you, but what is the idea behind the partnership relationship and how is that a benefit to Pi?
Roger 16:20
Well, you know, as I was saying earlier, Raspberry Pi’s a very small company and it’s full of engineers who are working on core product. And, you know, if you look at other businesses, sometimes they might have, you know, I look after the application team, there’s only six of us. It’s not a big, big group. We get a lot done, but we can’t do, like, individual customer support. You know, there’s this, there’s a wrinkle, there’s this constant tension, which is, you know, should you have a really massive team and be able to give everyone really expensive service, but then how do you fund that? You know, you’ve got to sell an awful lot of computers then to do, yeah. And so there’s always that tension. What we found over the years is we can, not automate that service, but we can provide tools or provide documentation that help people on their journey for that. And so like our, you know, our documentation and support is really good there, but there’s always going to be the set of customers who have a clear, clear idea what they want to do, but don’t have to do it, you know, sort of, you know, they’re a business that’s trying to solve a problem rather than an engineer who solved a problem trying to look for a business, you know.
Neale 17:34
You’re not trying to program something or getting around you actually solving a wider case. Yeah, and we
Roger 17:40
We had a lot of them coming to us, saying, I want to use Raspberry Pi, I need a designer to carry a board that looks like this and does these things, and you have to say, well, great, sorry, we haven’t got the people to do that.
Neale 17:56
we started to focus on making the best. Yes, everyone’s time.
Roger 18:00
up. And so Design Partners was what we came up with, which was, you know, we need people to send them to who are not going to do it because they’re good people. We need to sort of introduce into that customer relationship that, like, yes, that’s a thing, but you need to go to a consultant, you know, you need to go to a paid consultant and do your work with them. And so that’s why Design Partners exists. It’s a way for us to, like, vet companies who are sort of demonstrably good at providing Raspberry Pi-based consultancy. You know, it’s not just consultancy because, you know, we want to make sure that we’re handing people handing customers to people who will say Raspberry Pi’s right for the job. And we want them to say it’s right for the job because it is. So that’s where this education piece comes in with our partners is it’s on us to make sure you know everything Raspberry Pi can do. You know, sometimes it’s, you know, weird and wonderful things that you may say, oh, Raspberry Pi can’t do that. And it turns out it can with a little bit of work on our side. And so it’s having that relationship with a set of companies, you know, and we have 55 design partners and they’re spread around the world. And so they’re geographically diverse, but they’re also, like, expertise diverse in the sense that some provide mechanical engineering skills or firmware or, you know, hardware.
Neale 19:24
or work in specific industries, whether that’s agriculture or space or comms or
Roger 19:30
or whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we have built this group of design partners over the years to try and address what people are asking for. And that’s why, that’s how Design Partners works. You know, we provide a relatively hands-off service to the customer. And since I’m not taking customers in and pointing them to things, we try and make it a bit sort of democratizing the things that people get presented to website with partners on it. And they get to choose by speciality. It’s randomized in order and things. And that’s how it currently is. I’m not saying that, you know, in the future it might look different in the sense that we might, you know, we’re growing and the intention is to grow, so we might want to grow that network. But that’s how it exists at the moment. And it worked really well, you know, we’ve sent lots of customers to have lots of successful interactions with lots of design partners.
Neale 20:26
We do get inquiries from the website, I mean that’s trackable from clicks that we can see through Google Analytics, but also people do call us up and say, I’ve seen you’re a Russian pie partner, we have a pie on our device, we now wanted to do X, Y and Z, can you help? And I’d say we love working with a pie, it’s great. You talked then about, it may be something you do in the future, sort of extra customer support and commercial. I think people are interested in what is, I mean obviously I don’t go into too much detail of trade secrets, etcetera, but where do you see Raspberry Pi go in the next five to ten years? Do you think more down the Apple route, will you have different products and applications? Will it be more sort of commercial engineering helping our customers? Where do you see it?
Roger 21:10
I think what we’ll see is the grand vision is to see more and more computing happening on Raspberry Pi devices. So what does that mean? It means growing in the industrial embedded verticals, so that’s embedding compute module style products further into products, you know, that building those relationships with big embedded customers who want to build at scale. It’s working with that sort of enthusiast turning engineer side, so that’s promoting this idea that you can prototype on a Raspberry Pi and take it into production. And then there’s that lower level microcontroller based products, you know, there’s 27 billion microcontrollers sold, we’ve still got a long way to go until we’ve taken back.
Neale 22:02
big big market you know you’ve already got like a small slice of it and doing really well so just to increase that would be really
Roger 22:08
beneficial and you know how are we gonna do that well I’m seeing us teasing out bits of this thing that we’ve built that we weren’t aware of was important to people so security’s become a really big issue to people you know I said like the sort of the 2350 challenge and trying to prove our security credentials there we’re finding a security meaning a lot more to different people so there’s this sort of the cyber resilience act coming that we’re already clients with so we’re the red is in the radio yeah yeah so like providing people tools to be able to do that self-certification quickly so we’re moving you know we’re seeing that sort of the regulation bit being actually quite a driver for us that we’re actually well ahead of that and able to sort of say well yeah it’s fine yeah you are you are something
Neale 22:58
you know yeah you covered because it affects C markings and a whole host
Roger 23:01
It’s sort of, you know, it’s a new headache that people haven’t been involved, and much like what Raza’s attitude towards that compliance side of things is, we’ll do it all for you. You know, we’ll make it as modular as possible and provide you with all the documentation, so actually you carry on worrying about building your business, not worrying about it.
Neale 23:18
It’s a piece of mind, absolutely. We’ve got a lot of clients who don’t know about this directive at all, but from August, you know, your CE market can be invalid if you don’t have it. So I think it’s great, you know, you can offer that sort of security behind it, then you can just focus on…
Roger 23:34
business and I get it sorted. And then other bits of what are people wearing around security is where something’s made. We design it in Cambridge and we sell it and we design and manufacture it in Wales in the UK. Seven million computers a year out of the UK. That’s great for the UK in general. It’s great providing jobs. But people are also sitting there going, right, well, it’s a reliable supply chain. We know where it’s coming from. It’s sort of, it’s in more neutral locations than others, shall we say? Sure, yeah, in more secure, yeah. And that’s part of people’s worry then. They’re sort of almost willing to accept difference because of where it’s coming from.
Neale 24:16
Well, it was not that long ago where a lot of people are having a problem with chip shortages, you know, Covid, a lot of factories shut down. I was asking a question, I was going to ask you, actually, were you affected by that at all? Yeah.
Roger 24:25
Yeah, anyone who says they weren’t, there’s a lot of them. No, no, no, we were fine. Everyone got, everyone saw it, you know, it was a once in a lifetime problem. Yeah. So how we affected our supply of our main process and ship was severely limited. That just meant we had to limit what we could build. And how many you could sell and answer. Yeah, and it was a really, really tough time. Yeah.
Neale 24:53
What was the PR behind it? I mean, how did you address that? Were you open and honest?
Roger 24:59
What we had to do was take this decision that we would try and connect as well as we could with all our customers, understand what they needed, why they needed it, you know, and we had to prioritise people whose businesses, whose livelihoods relied on it. So if there’s someone saying, if I don’t get 250 rupees, I’m going to have to shut my business down, we had to help them, you know, and that was really tough to do, especially when you had this big community behind you. And, you know, no decision wasn’t taken lightly, but ultimately it helped a bunch of people carry on through that really rough period. And we’re out the side of it now, you know, we’re all guilty of trying to sort of forget. But yeah, we’re through it, and you know, supply is no longer an issue for us, you know.
Neale 25:52
No, no. It was an interesting time. I mean, if you watch a couple of early episodes, there’s actually one with a chap called Henry Olafiers. We’ll put a link down in the comments. He was the brains behind the Spectrum X computer. We did a case to do that as well. But yeah, he designed the Spectrum X plug and play with modern HDMI cables and his chips suddenly went from being a few pounds per unit to all of a sudden it was tens of pounds per unit and he had to order them in advance and there was no guaranteed date for when they would land. And in that situation, you’re almost being bent over backwards and there’s nothing you can do about it. But it sounds, I mean, it’s great that you actually took it on a case by case basis and looked at someone who was basically going to go out of business and say, look, really sorry, guys, we have to prioritize. I mean, a lot of organizations wouldn’t do that. So is that do you think that makes Raspberry Pi stand out as a
Roger 26:52
I’m biased and I think that makes us great, you know, and I think it’s this deep understanding that we’re building of who puts our products into their end products, you know, like understanding what people are using them for and is why you see us innovate around some of the sort of peripherals of the application stuff that we add in. It’s because we’re sort of addressing people’s needs and, you know, whilst it was a really tough period going through that supply crisis, did mean we’ve got to know a lot of our customers a lot better and, you know, there’s that level of trust there that we can talk a bit more about.
Neale 27:32
And you can build on that. I mean you’re the trust of the security. You’ve got trust that you’re going to do the right thing It’s not a bad thing for positions to be an organization. Yeah. Yeah
Roger 27:41
and we must capitalize on it and build solutions that people want, and that’s what we’re here to do.
Neale 27:50
Fantastic. I want to wrap up with one last question. You talked about Heathrow with the NEC screen, so there’s a Raspberry Pi on every screen. I know there’s a Raspberry Pi floating about in space, the International Space Centre. Roger, what is your favourite Raspberry Pi application that you know of a customer that’s being used?
Roger 28:12
Oh, yes. Which is your favourite child?
Neale 28:17
I’ll tell you what, since you’re your favourite child, I’ll let you list one or two, but go on, hit me.
Roger 28:24
There’s a company that’s embedding them in concrete at the moment to measure how concrete is curing. I just think it’s a wonderful use case for it. We see them pop up everywhere. I mean, a great one is, I’m a big fan of biking, the whole Brompton factory runs on Raspberry Pi’s. So if you buy a Brompton, it’s gone through like 30 odd stations that are all powered by a Raspberry Pi. So it’s like just taking, it’s an example of them, taking all the data from that manufacturing process and digitizing it. So they’ve got these records and they’ve been buying them for years and years and years. And it’s just love that you went to see the factory and you just see the effect that we’ve had on their production and you go, yeah, this is it. And it exemplifies a lot of those things that we think makes us stand out like they can still buy Raspberry Pi’s from us and the software is still supported and they know where it’s all made from. There’s that level of commitment to each other, which is like we’ll care on making them, you care on using them, you know, and that’s a really lovely place to go.
Neale 29:27
Important partnerships, yeah, fantastic. Roger, thank you so much for your time, it’s been great.