Robin Saxby

Robin Saxby was recruited as the founding CEO of Arm Ltd. In 1991 after a career in the semiconductor industry that included senior commercial roles at Motorola and European Silicon Structures (ES2). Saxby brought commercial discipline and a licensing-centric strategic vision to the nascent company, insisting from the outset that Arm should be a licensor of intellectual property rather than a manufacturer of chips. This conviction, radical for the semiconductor industry of 1990, would prove to be the foundational strategic decision that enabled Arm's notable scale.

The founding of Arm (Advanced RISC Machines) is a quintessentially British technology story, born out of a desperate need to build a more efficient computer processor. The company's roots lie in Acorn Computers, a pioneering British tech company often referred to as the 'British Apple,' founded in 1978 in Cambridge by Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry. In the early 1980s, Acorn achieved success with the BBC Micro, an educational computer used in schools across the UK. However, as Acorn sought to build a more powerful successor to the BBC Micro, they ran into a critical bottleneck. The existing microprocessors on the market, like the Motorola 68000, were powerful but consumed too much energy and were ill-suited for the elegant, responsive operating system Acorn was designing. Frustrated by the available options, a small, effective team of Acorn engineers, led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, decided to design their own processor from scratch. Wilson designed the instruction set (the basic language the processor understands), and Furber designed the microarchitecture. Their defining innovation was embracing the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) philosophy, which prioritized simplicity and efficiency over complex, power-hungry instructions. The resulting Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) processor was a marvel of engineering, running significantly faster than rival chips while consuming a fraction of the electricity. This extreme power efficiency caught the attention of Apple who was desperately searching for a low-power processor for their new, influential handheld device, the Apple Newton. In 1990, Apple, Acorn, and VLSI Technology formed a new, independent joint venture named Advanced RISC Machines (later simply Arm). While the Apple Newton was a commercial failure, the foundational IP established by Wilson, Furber, and the founding engineers at Arm laid the architectural groundwork for the entire global mobile computing revolution, ensuring that decades later, almost every smartphone on Earth would run on their foundational designs.