Hermann Hauser — 40 years of experience in the service of technology startups

Hermann Hauser is a computer- and venture capital entrepreneur from Austria. He got well known due to his involvement in ACORN Computer in 1978 together with Chris Curry. The company developed one of the earliest personal computers in the world (BBC Micro) and the ARM processor, which can be found in billions of mobile phones. Founded with 100 pounds, the company was worth more than 200M on the stock market five years later.

Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Institutes of Physics at the Royal Academy of Engineering and honorary fellow of the Kings College, Hermann Hauser is a legend, everyone can agree on that.

“Did you plan on becoming an investor?

That just happened.

“What excites you the most about your work, and what is that single moment in your past that you are most proud of?”

My proudest achievement in life is ARM. As people probably know there is a cumulative sales number of ARM of over 70 Billions ARMs in the world, which means that in average there are 10 ARM that have been sold for every person on earth. Its very satisfying to give a speech lectures anywhere in the world and i can count on every 90 Percent of the people have one of our product in their pockets, because we we have got a 95% market share in mobile phones and now carry mobile phones with them.

“…and fails? We all have them, but what were your most spectacular ones? Of course only the ones you wish to share”

As a venture capitalist not all investments work out. There have been lots of failures.

The old saying that you learn more from your failures than from your successes is true, because it really hurts if something goes wrong and you will remember that.

“How do you find the most prospecting investments?”

I founded Amadeus Capital Partners in 1997 and the I.E.C.T. in 2015. We are seeing more exciting deep technology deal than i have ever sen in my life, so this is a very happy time for us. Thee are two things, that we as venture capitalists have to provide: We make our network of contacts work for the company and the second is, we help them think through the business model. They are very important to the success of tech companies as indeed ARM has shown.

“What do you anticipate the most for technology in the forthcoming 5 years? What are the things that knock your socks off?”

The sixth wave of computing is going to knock all our socks off. The first 5 are: Mainframe, minicomputer, workstation & PC, smartphone and the cloud. The sixth wave that is happening now is the internet of things and the machine learning. The machine learning goes with the internet of things because its the availability of the data that we are getting with the internet of things, that will allow all kind of really great improvements in our relationship with computer to happen in particular the change over to voice. We have seen a dramatic change of relationship because of touch. This is nothing with the change that is just about to happen with the Google assistant, with Siri, the amazon echo and others.

Within the next 3 to 5 years we will see the most dramatic change in our relationship with computers enabled by voice.

People ask me which kind of computers will we have - i always have a bit of a cheeky answer: No Computers. What i mean by that — you will not need a computer by yourself, because wherever you go there will be a computing environment and wherever you are you can just talk — talk to the computing environment. The biggest fight we are going to have is the one for the personal assistant, for the computer that really understands you. Not just in terms of understanding your voice, but also understanding your intentions, your preferences, what you like to eat, where you like to go, who you like to meed with, who you’re
trying to avoid — and this of course will be very helpful in our lives.

“In your opinion what are the single best and the single worst things running a startup from Central Europe?”

Sadly we don’t have a technology companies of the same size and financial firepower of the US. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of the European location. On the other side Europe is becoming a lot more innovative. If you look at the start-up scene in Berlin, Munich, Cambridge and London… they are clearly not as good as Silicon Valley yet, but the distance between silicon valley and those European clusters is shrinking, especially with the change to more software related product like FinTech and also a big shift into life sciences where Europe has some great assets.

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We at CESAwards stand with our hats in our hands each year in front of all the amazing innovation, the incredible stories and brave startupper who strive for more, who are here to build and change the status quo in the CEE region.

In this interview series we introduce our National Winners of 2017.

Meet the best minds of the CEE region on cesawards.com