Five minutes with: Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi Foundation

The executive director explains the difficulties of securing funding and why it's important for entrepreneurs to have passion
Eben Upton, executive director, Raspberry Pi Foundation
'The worst thing you can do is to blow through all your capital before finding out if anyone wants your product,' says Eben Upton. Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos/ Antonio Olmos

Hi Eben, can you tell us a little bit about Raspberry Pi and why you founded it back in 2006?

A group of us at the University in Cambridge had become concerned that the number of young people applying to study computer science was declining precipitously, and that the level of practical experience of the candidates was much lower than it had been a decade before. Raspberry Pi is an attempt to recreate the bedroom coding opportunities that I had as a child for a new generation.

What were the challenges in setting up the company?

Beyond securing funding, there were no real challenges involved in setting the organisation up. We had a number of technical engineering challenges bringing the product to market at the target price point, but we have some great engineers, so these were overcome fairly quickly.

How have you found the process of securing funding?

We were completely unable to convince any of the usual sources of loan and matched funding (banks, the old regional development agency) that we had a saleable product. Equity finance was unavailable as we're a charity.

In the end, some of the trustees, myself included, contributed unsecured loans totalling roughly £100,000 to get the business off the ground; these loans were repaid within a couple of months.

What tips would you give to someone thinking about founding their own startup?

Make sure you're doing something genuinely revolutionary, and that you believe in. Starting a business is hard work, and you'll need that level of passion to sustain you through the bad bits. If you just want to do something quotidian 10% better then perhaps you're best off doing it as an employee of a company.

Finally, find a way to test your ideas against the market quickly: in business-school jargon this has become known as failing fast. The worst thing you can do is to blow through all your capital before finding out if anyone wants your product.

Finally, do you think much has changed in the way we teach computer science in the past 5 years? How has Raspberry Pi had a direct impact?

Very little has changed in the last five years. I think we're just now at the dawn of a realisation in government and educational circles that we can't go on teaching ICT (PowerPoint and Excel) and need to equip our children with high-value skills for the future. The new National Curriculum for Computing, to be introduced in 2014, is a great opportunity to put things on the right track.

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