Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy, is a reluctant interviewee. Although he is effusive about the search software company, he is nervous of personal questions. “I don’t want to be asked what my favourite toffee is,” he says.
In 1996 when the search software company was set up, he struck a grudging bargain with co-founder Richard Gaunt to be Autonomy’s public face. “When you start a small company, the danger is you can get buried under the noise. One of the tricks is to link the story to a person. At the time Richard had had children and I hadn’t – it was his trump card, and so I had to do it.”
