Raspberry Pi CEO Inspires Students ​​​​​​​

We had the wonderful opportunity to listen to Phillip Colligan, CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, when he came to our school to give a talk where he discussed a variety of business and technology related topics that he had encountered across his professional life.

He started his talk discussing the evolution of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. I found the fact that the company was founded out of the charity quite interesting, comedically interluded by the fact that an "educational charity" would legally not be allowed to sell products to "middle aged hobbyists" who happened to be their main customer upon launch.

He also discussed his experience of listing Raspberry Pi on the London Stock Exchange which was very impressive, along with the struggles of having a small team facing overwhelming success. They had received thousands of applications for a handful of jobs multiple times and had received huge volumes of orders before they had even manufactured their first computer.

The more technical aspects were also discussed which I think display the wide range of skills required to run an organisation. Some students asked him questions about the logistics of the Astro Pi Challenge, where a piece of code is run on the International Space Station. It turns out that all of the code is vetted carefully so that a mischievous student would not be able to run a piece of malware in space!

As somebody who meddled with a few Raspberry Pis as a child, both for fun and for more practical purposes, I've always been fascinated by the fact that it was possible to make such a small, low-cost computer with a respectable amount of computational power. I'm really glad to have been able to meet one of the guys behind them and listen to him talk, both about the computers and the journey of the business.