Steel City son stands out from Silicon crowd Is that a depressing indictment of the inability of British technology companies to scale up? The 41-year-old, whose grandfather ran a Sheffield steel factory, says the fact that he is one of an estimated 250,000 British technology workers in Silicon Valley is worrying: "Autonomy and [chipmaker] Arm are two great British technology companies. Beyond that you struggle to name anyone. Wandisco has at least one thing in common with "knowledge management" company Autonomy: describing what it does hardly rolls off the tongue. In fact, its patented software allows engineers all over the world to access remote servers simultaneously. While most companies use a free-to-download version, customers including AT&T, the US telecommunications company; Honda; and Nokia, pay a princely annual sum of $72,000 (£45,000) on average, for a premium edition. What does Mr Richards make of "Silicon Roundabout." the Government-backed cluster of start-ups around East London's Old Street? It's a roundabout and some start-ups. What can you say? We can't recreate Silicon Valley in the UK. It cannot be more than a pale imitation. However, he says that there is no reason why the UK cannot have a broader, organic "tech revolution," if we could only get the funding environment right. Mr Richards gives a decent impression of Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's famously testy relationship with financiers. Where Mr Lynch complained that the City just does not "get" technology businesses, Mr Richards dismisses the UK's venture capital community as mere "accountants." The antipathy towards equity investors is rooted in a bruising experience he underwent when at his first American business, Insevo. He says "all kinds of garbage was getting funded" when he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1998. A site called dead.com, with the strapline the last site you'll ever visit, got $20m. I ended up in that bizarre, flip-flop-wearing, dogs-in- the-office world. He raised slightly more than that - around $25m - for the relatively sober-sounding Insevo, which connected accountancy software to the web, but the firm was sold "for a fraction of what it could have been," he says. We wasted all the money. You end up worrying about nonsense like the logo and what carpet you've got. When you haven't got venture money, you're focused on what people actually want to buy. Venture capital is awful for start-ups. But growing companies need it and in the UK, investors don't know how to back disruptive businesses. They would have said Facebook and Twitter were stupid ideas. The Aim flotation is not about an exit for its impatient backers, then? No, we don't have any venture capitalists throwing their bags out of the window and running as fast as they can. We've grown out of cash flow," he says.