WEBVTT

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When I wrote my memoir,

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the publishers were really confused.

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Was it about me as a child refugee,

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or as a woman who set up a high-tech
software company back in the 1960s,

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one that went public

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and eventually employed over 8,500 people?

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Or was it as a mother
of an autistic child?

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Or as a philanthropist that's
now given away serious money?

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Well, it turns out, I'm all of these.

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So let me tell you my story.

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All that I am stems from when
I got onto a train in Vienna,

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part of the Kindertransport that saved
nearly 10,000 Jewish children

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from Nazi Europe.

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I was five years old, clutching the hand
of my nine-year-old sister

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and had very little idea as to 
what was going on.

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"What is England and 
why am I going there?"

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I'm only alive because so long ago, 
I was helped by generous strangers.

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I was lucky, and doubly lucky
to be later reunited

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with my birth parents.

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But, sadly, I never bonded 
with them again.

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But I've done more in the seven decades
since that miserable day 


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when my mother put me on the train

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than I would ever have dreamed possible.

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And I love England, my adopted country,

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with a passion that perhaps only someone
who has lost their human rights can feel.

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I decided to make mine a life
that was worth saving.

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And then, I just got on with it.

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(Laughter)

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Let me take you back to the early 1960s.

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To get past the gender issues of the time,

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I set up my own software house at one
of the first such startups in Britain.

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But it was also a company of women,
a company for women,

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an early social business.

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And people laughed at the very idea
because software, at that time,

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was given away free with hardware.

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Nobody would buy software,
certainly not from a woman.

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Although women were then coming out
of the universities with decent degrees,

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there was a glass ceiling to our progress.

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And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often,

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and I wanted opportunities for women.

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I recruited professionally qualified women
who'd left the industry on marriage,

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or when their first child was expected

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and structured them into a
home-working organization.

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We pioneered the concept of women
going back into the workforce

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after a career break.

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We pioneered all sorts of
new, flexible work methods:

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job shares, profit-sharing, 
and eventually, co-ownership

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when I took a quarter of the company
into the hands of the staff

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at no cost to anyone but me.

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For years, I was the first woman this,
or the only woman that.

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And in those days, I couldn't work
on the stock exchange,

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I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane.

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Indeed, I couldn't open a bank account
without my husband's permission.

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My generation of women fought
the battles for the right to work

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and the right for equal pay.

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Nobody really expected much 
from people at work or in society

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because all the expectations then 


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were about home and 
family responsibilities.

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And I couldn't really face that,

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so I started to challenge
the conventions of the time,

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even to the extent of changing my name
from "Stephanie" to "Steve"

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in my business development letters,

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so as to get through the door
before anyone realized

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that he was a she.

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(Laughter)

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My company, called Freelance Programmers,
and that's precisely what it was,

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couldn't have started smaller: 
on the dining room table,

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and financed by the equivalent
of 100 dollars in today's terms,

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and financed by my labor and 
by borrowing against the house.

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My interests were scientific, 
the market was commercial --

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things such as payroll,
which I found rather boring.

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So I had to compromise with 
operational research work,

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which had the intellectual challenge 
that interested me

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and the commercial value 
that was valued by the clients:

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things like scheduling freight trains,

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time-tabling buses, stock control,
lots and lots of stock control.

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And eventually, the work came in.

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We disguised the domestic and
part-time nature of the staff

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by offering fixed prices,
one of the very first to do so.

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And who would have guessed
that the programming

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of the black box flight recorder 
of Supersonic Concord

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would have been done by a bunch 
of women working in their own homes.

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(Applause)

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All we used was a simple 
"trust the staff" approach

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and a simple telephone.

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We even used to ask job applicants, 
"Do you have access to a telephone?"

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An early project was to develop
software standards

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on management control protocols.

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And software was and still is a
maddeningly hard-to-control activity,

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so that was enormously valuable.

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We used the standards ourselves,

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we were even paid to update 
them over the years,

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and eventually, they were adopted by NATO.

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Our programmers -- remember, only women,

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including gay and transgender --

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worked with pencil and paper
to develop flowcharts

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defining each task to be done.

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And they then wrote code, 
usually machine code,

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sometimes binary code,

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which was then sent
by mail to a data center

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to be punched onto
paper tape or card

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and then re-punched, 
in order to verify it.

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All this, before it ever got
near a computer.

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That was programming in the early 1960s.

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In 1975, 13 years from startup,

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equal opportunity legislation 
came in in Britain

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and that made it illegal to have 
our pro-female policies.

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And as an example of 
unintended consequences,

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my female company had to let the men in.

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(Laughter)

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When I started my company of women,

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the men said, "How interesting, because
it only works because it's small."

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And later, as it became sizable, 
they accepted, "Yes, it is sizable now,

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but of no strategic interest."

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And later, when it was a company
valued at over three billion dollars,

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and I'd made 70 of the staff 
into millionaires,

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they sort of said, "Well done, Steve!"

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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You can always tell ambitious women
by the shape of our heads:

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They're flat on top for being 
patted patronizingly.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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And we have larger feet to stand
away from the kitchen sink.

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(Laughter)

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Let me share with you 
two secrets of success:

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Surround yourself with first-class people
and people that you like;

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and choose your partner
very, very carefully.

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Because the other day when I said, 
"My husband's an angel,"

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a woman complained --
"You're lucky," she said,

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"mine's still alive."

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(Laughter)

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If success were easy, 
we'd all be millionaires.

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But in my case, it came in the midst
of family trauma and indeed, crisis.

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Our late son, Giles, was an only child,
a beautiful, contented baby.

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And then, at two and a half,

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like a changeling in a fairy story,

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he lost the little speech that he had

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and turned into a wild, 
unmanageable toddler.

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Not the terrible twos;

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he was profoundly autistic 
and he never spoke again.

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Giles was the first resident in the first
house of the first charity that I set up

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to pioneer services for autism.

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And then there's been
a groundbreaking Prior's Court school

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for pupils with autism

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and a medical research charity,
again, all for autism.

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Because whenever I found a gap
in services, I tried to help.

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I like doing new things 
and making new things happen.

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And I've just started a three-year 
think tank for autism.

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And so that some of my wealth does go back
to the industry from which it stems,

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I've also founded 
the Oxford Internet Institute

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and other IT ventures.

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The Oxford Internet Institute
focuses not on the technology,

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but on the social, economic, legal
and ethical issues of the Internet.

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Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago now.

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And I have learned to live without him,

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and I have learned to live 
without his need of me.

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Philanthropy is all that I do now.

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I need never worry about getting lost

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because several charities
would quickly come and find me.

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(Laughter)

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It's one thing to have an idea 
for an enterprise,

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but as many people in this room will know,

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making it happen is a very difficult thing

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and it demands extraordinary energy,
self-belief and determination,

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the courage to risk family and home,

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and a 24/7 commitment 
that borders on the obsessive.

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So it's just as well
that I'm a workaholic.

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I believe in the beauty of work when we
do it properly and in humility.

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Work is not just something I do
when I'd rather be doing something else.

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We live our lives forward.

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So what has all that taught me?

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I learned that tomorrow's 
never going to be like today,

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and certainly nothing like yesterday.

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And that made me able to cope with change,

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indeed, eventually to welcome change,

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though I'm told I'm still very difficult.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)