Inside the life of Mike Lynch, who sold his search startup to HP for $11 billion and was charged with fraud

He had humble beginnings: his mother was a nurse and his father was a fireman.

Lynch said that his father regretted not having the chance to go to university. "He realised the importance of education so that was something that was very much fostered in my home," Lynch told LeadersIn.

Lynch got his first taste of management from running a band in his early twenties. The name of the band isn't known.

After graduating, Lynch went on to complete a PhD at Cambridge in signal processing and communications research. It was titled: "Adaptive techniques in signal processing and connectionist models."

The PhD can be viewed here.

The company produced designs and audio products for the music industry. One invention included a sampler for the Atari ST known as the Lynex. That was followed by the ADAS sampler for Atari, Mac, and PC.

Autonomy's first attempt to commercialise its technology was in a consumer product. It featured a virtual dog that would take commands to help internet users manage information.

However, soon after it launched, corporates started buying the technology in large numbers.

This, coupled with the emerging trend of free consumer products online, was enough to persuade Lynch to shift towards concentrating on corporates. It was a key strategic move for Autonomy.

Autonomy's software could also be used to sift through emails in place of humans and the company's pattern-matching algorithms were able to abstract meaning from a jumble of information.

Autonomy witnessed the full power of the dotcom boom (and subsequent bust) when its shares climbed to over £100 in the late 90s before falling to 80p when the bubble burst in 2000/2001.

Lynch told The Telegraph that managing a company through such tumultuous swings provided great training.

"It was like the Wild West back then for volatile stocks," he said. "All sorts of things went on that don't go on these days. It was very good training, you learn how to deal with quite outrageous situations."

Chandratillake told Business Insider: "Mike is a uniquely talented entrepreneur, especially within the European ecosystem. It's rare to find someone who is a PhD in data science but also a visionary product marketer and talented organisation builder.

"I learned a great deal about business, product, marketing and the competitive element that is at the core of really successful organisations through the opportunity I had working for him as Autonomy's US CTO. Years later when he sold the company to HP, I wasn't surprised that it was the largest AI exit ever (still the case) and one of the top three technology exits from Europe in history (still the case)."

Autonomy made a number of other sizable acquisitions including: search software rival Verity ($500 million, December 2005); email archiving and litigation support company Zantaz ($375 million, July 2007); records management software firm Meridio Holdings (£20 million, October 2007); enterprise content management firm Interwoven ($775 million, January 2009); and online backup provider Iron Mountain Digital ($380 million, May 2011).

The acquisition turned out to be highly controversial and many of HP's shareholders claimed that HP had overpaid at the time.

Lynch took £500 million from the deal, according to ComputerworldUK.

In December 2012, the US Justice Department began its probe into the Autonomy sale. The US Securities and Exchange Commission was also informed.

Around the same time, auditing giant Deloitte, which had been involved in the acquisition, came out in support of Lynch and Autonomy.

It's this court case which has resulted in the wider spaghetti of legal entanglements between HP and Autonomy's former executives.

In its filings to the UK High Court case, HP unveiled full details of the acquisition. It said that Lynch inflated revenues by $700 million (£541 million) over a two-and-a-half year period.

After writing off three quarters of Autonomy's value, HP sold what was left of the company to British firm Micro Focus in September 2016 as part of an $8.8 billion (£6.8 billion) deal that involved other HP business units.

In October 2015, Lynch counter-sued HP in London's High Court for more than $150 million (£116 million) over the allegations of massive fraud it levelled against him. Lynch accused Whitman of trashing his reputation and hampering his venture capital fundraising efforts.

Commenting on the fallout between HP and Autonomy at TechCrunch Disrupt last December, Lynch said: "It's a sad thing that happened in the end."

He added: "The UK model is there's no way of stopping a takeover. So when Hewlett Packard came along and wanted to make its offer, we couldn't stop them. The people that were doing it at the time, Leo and Shane (head of strategy), had an amazing strategy. What they wanted to do was to take the company, refocus it into this new age of big data and software and machine intelligence and that was exciting and we got convinced by them.

"We could see the future was that way. The problem was the week after the deal they get fired and we're left with a hardware group that used to call us the step-child. All the understanding of clever, high growth, software people wasn't there."

The Invoke Capital fund was formed in 2012 and Lynch is using it to invest in up and coming UK and European tech firms. Invoke isn't like a normal venture capital fund, instead turning to unnamed backers who give it capital as and when it wants to make investments. So far it backed around 10 technologies, according to Lynch, with tens of millions of pounds spent. However, only four companies are listed on the Invoke Capital website.

"I've got about 60 of the people from Autonomy that work with me at Invoke," Lynch said at TechCrunch Disrupt. "We raised a billion and now we go out and invest in European tech."

He added: "We raised our billion and what we're doing is taking bright ideas from bright people and turning them into impact and reality."

Other startups that Invoke has backed include data driven medicine startup Sophia Genetics and legal startup Luminance.

The company's technology, which can spot unusual email activity and suspicious file uploads, is underpinned by complex maths that was developed at Cambridge University.

"The reason I liked it was that it was a completely new approach," said Lynch during a phone call with Business Insider last July. "Most of what's out there in cybersecurity is based on knowing what you’re looking. So things like anti-virus and that sort of stuff or trying to build a big wall around the outside of your company, a boundary.

"The problem is that the world’s moved on and the attacks no longer have signatures. You can get kits that make attacks that don’t look like anything that's been done before. But also every day you allow loads of people to walk through your wall and so the wall is pretty porous. The reality I was familiar with from some of my other roles as directors of large companies is that it's very, very hard to keep stuff out. The reality is almost every company is infiltrated. So you have to take a different approach. You have to do it much more like an immune system."

Darktrace is worth $1.65 billion after its most recent funding round. In an interview with Business Insider, Gustafsson said: "Mike is a brilliant mind, he's got incredible experience at growing organisations from nothing to something very significant."

A US jury found former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain guilty of fraud. They found he had played a key part in the takeover by HP, which boosted his own wealth by $7.7 million.

Hussain's sentencing has been postponed, and it's thought US prosecutors are trying to persuade him to give evidence against Mike Lynch. Sushovan has said he will appeal the conviction once sentencing has been passed.

US Department of Justice filed 14 charges of fraud and conspiracy against Lynch in November 2018. The charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, while US prosecutors would also like to see Lynch give up the $815 million he made from the Autonomy sale.

It is expected that the case will go trial, although it isn't clear whether Lynch will travel to the US voluntarily to fight the case or face extradition.

"I keep rare breeds," Lynch told Leaders In during an interview that was uploaded onto YouTube last June. "So I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the medieval times and none of them have any Apple products whatsoever."