James Lee, CEO and co-founder of Wave Photonics, talks to us about how they are enabling rapid photonic integrated circuit development for any wavelength or platform.

James explains how the design for integrated photonics uses the same scalable process used to make semiconductor electronics chips to make circuits for light. And he talks about the market opportunity for both tackling energy and bandwidth, and longer term with sensing and quantum.

We gain great insights about:

· Quitting a job maybe too early to start a business

· You don’t have to be impossibly smart and motivated to be an entrepreneur

· Building technology from scratch

· Experiencing different universities and accelerator programmes (both sides of the pond)

· Recruiting the right people

· Experiencing Silicon Valley next-level optimism and vision

· Targeting clients at such an early stage of a company

Watch this space as Wave develops their products and builds their go-to-market outreach.

Produced by Cambridge TV

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s not often that you get to talk to someone who has seen every press release and been part of innovation discussions for the last 35 years, not to mention who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the opportunities and challenges for our tech and science businesses.

In this episode we caught up with Tony Quested and Jamie Quested to talk about not just their #BusinessWeeklyAwards, but the much broader impact and reach of Business Weekly since 1990.

Here are some highlights

· Current trends include a rise in genomics, synthetic biology, and quantum computing

· The US will continue to buy up our companies, to access the brain power and innovation across Cambridge and the East of England cluster…

· …but they will now keep the business here - like Featurespace (Visa), IQGeo (KKR), and Darktrace (Thoma Bravo) – rather than lifting and shifting to the US

· The demand for 100,000 engineers by leading tech companies will require different thinking

· The importance of ‘Brain Gain’ and how 70% (£1.65bn) of fundraising in the last year came out of the University of Cambridge…

· … and how overall funding in the last year topped £2.3bn of which £1bn was for tech (remainder life sciences), and 50% of all funding went to Cambridge Science Park tenant companies

· Whether our entrepreneurs are thinking strategically enough, especially when VCs and funders may have different priorities

· And then we finally talk about the Awards, and the ability to spot the successes based on a level of due diligence that is incomparable.

Produced by Cambridge TV

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the second part of our conversation with David Cleevely, we talk about the Cambridge Cluster, the vital work with government and on policy, and the phenomena of serendipity and paying it forward.

David has been instrumental in the Cambridge Cluster for decades, with the founding of groups like Cambridge Network and Cambridge Wireless; creating a vision for Cambridge (a few times); the importance of marketing and having a logo; and keeping Cambridge competitive.

A charitable contributor, David firmly believes that if you make some money, you should give back to the community – something Sara Allen at The Cambridge Pledge will be delighted to hear. And we hear about David’s pivotal role at Raspberry Pi and the eight years from formulating a plan to a flotation.

We talk about why an active involvement in public policy and government liaison is vital, and how entrepreneurs can help to fill gaps and stop us sleepwalking into growth challenges – locally and globally.

And we finish with a discussion on serendipity – the approach that will determine your path by making chance encounters happen. Tune in for a future episode when we’ll cover David’s Book – ‘Serendipity – it doesn’t happen by accident’.

Produced by Cambridge TV

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.