Women4Technology caught up with entrepreneur, engineer and computer scientist, Dr Rosemary Francis for the first in a series of interviews with inspirational women in technology. The Founder and CEO of Ellexus, Rosemary served as Chief Scientist for HPC and Cloud at Altair, following the successful acquisition of Ellexus in 2020. A Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Rosemary recently joined CommonAI Compute as CTO, where she’s aiming to make AI infrastructure more democratic and inclusive. Rosemary shared her thoughts on the value of a diverse team in innovation, how to encourage more women into technology, and the role played by emotional intelligence in technology and leadership.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us and congratulations on joining CommonAI as CTO. The transition from Founder/CEO to CTO is an interesting career move. How are you applying lessons learned from building Ellexus?
That’s a good question. In every company the exact roles of the CEO and CTO are defined differently, and when I built Ellexus I was the CEO and CTO. As I built the company, we had engineering managers who took on parts of the CTO role. After I sold the company, I was working as part of a bigger team as Chief Scientist at Altair. So, from that point of view, the move to CTO at CommonAI is not that different. Obviously, it’s a smaller team now, but I’m still used to having people around me.
At Ellexus, importantly, I didn’t raise external funds. One of the things that often consumes a huge amount of time from the executive team is raising money and liaising with the investors, keeping that relationship healthy. And I didn’t have that to manage when I ran Ellexus. This time round, we’ve partnered with a VC fund, Anthemis, so having our CEO, Gavin Ferris, alongside the other founders and directors of Common AI, has been immensely supportive. It means that I can focus on the technical offering and building the team, rather than having to manage the investor relationship.
Female CTOs in AI companies are not exactly common, but you’ve said that you shouldn’t be unusual and that there should be hundreds of Rosemaries running tech companies. What made the difference for you? Were there any pivotal moments or people who influenced your decision to pursue a career in this field?
It constantly irritates me that there aren’t more women in computing. All fields need a gender balance, for diversity of thought, for diversity of ideas, for making sure that your product fits for everyone and not just for a narrow group. And obviously gender diversity is only one axis within that plane. There certainly wasn’t just one thing that encouraged me. I would say it’s more that I’m that person who managed to have continuous help and support. My parents were very supportive. My mum taught IT. My dad was very interested in IT. I went to a school with a strong science and maths background. I was encouraged by my teachers and I also took part in a lot of programs to try and get pupils into STEM. So it’s certainly not one thing. It’s got to be a continuous journey of encouragement, and without that, I don’t think you end up as a CTO of a tech company. So for me, in making sure that there are more opportunities for women it’s about having that continuous journey of opportunity. The work of Raspberry Pi is absolutely transformative in that regard, such as the code clubs introducing children to technology at an early age. But it’s also important to have follow-on support into early adulthood, to encourage students to go into STEM and to go into business as well. I’ve had support and training and mentorship in science and technology, but also in business, and those two aspects are equally important.
Ellexus started out in St John’s Innovation Centre in Cambridge, and I’d like to ask about your experiences of growing a business within that community. What made St John’s Innovation Centre the right choice for Ellexus, and how did the environment there contribute to the growth of the company from start up to successful acquisition by Altair.
When you’re starting a business, community is everything. They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it takes a city to raise a business, and you need to have those networks of people around you, to bring in expertise and mentorship. It actually forms the heart of what we’re doing at CommonAI. We formed CommonAI to make small AI organisations look like big companies, to surround them with expertise in technology, IT infrastructure, route to market, as well as in deep tech AI, to give them the tools to succeed. And that’s part of the success of St John’s Innovation Centre. I came across SJIC because I was working as a contractor for a number of companies within the building, and I chose to base my business there, and it was absolutely invaluable being able to knock on the door of various engineering companies within the building, and actually not just engineering companies, but lawyers, accountants, HR specialists, and being able to say, I have this problem – what should I do? And just 15 minutes of their time was immensely valuable in building the business. It’s that all-important recipe for success. Now there are more incubators available, but being part of an ecosystem like that is absolutely essential. I don’t believe you’ll build a successful company without having that support around you. It’s part of the success of Cambridge, having that generosity of spirit from everybody and a general quest for success within the city or within one of the smaller ecosystems like SJIC. That, I think, is why companies here are successful.
You mention generosity of spirit being present in Cambridge. If we fast forward to today, you’re now giving back as part of that ecosystem, as a role model and a mentor, through your experience as Founder and CTO and also through your work with Raspberry Pi Foundation and Royal Academy of Engineering. What do you value about giving back and what have you’ve learned from mentoring and advising founders at an earlier stage in their careers?
I feel embarrassed if I’m given too much credit for giving back and mentoring early stage startups, because it’s really fun. I get genuine enjoyment out of working with new companies, helping founders in the early stage of their journey, being able to share with them the lessons that I was taught by people giving up their time and helping me through different problems. I had a fantastic set of mentors when I ran my company, as well as the other companies within St John’s Innovation Centre, giving me a huge amount of support so I really enjoy sharing and passing on that knowledge and that experience and, of course, working with organisations like Raspberry Pi or the Royal Academy of Engineering. They’re just such fantastic people. It’s such fun to hear what they’re doing and to think about how we can do better and get more out of the fantastic technology industry that we have in the UK. . I also do it because it’s the right thing to do, and we’re going to build a better future for the children. But, ultimately, it’s just really fun.
Women4Technology is championing “inclusive innovation”, and from your experience building and leading teams that are addressing complex technical challenges, what value does a diverse team bring to innovation and what advice would you give founders about embedding diversity and inclusion in their business right from the start?
There’s so much evidence that diversity improves your product and improves your profitability. There are plenty of research papers showing that companies with diverse boards return better margins for the shareholders. But also, anecdotally, it’s crazy that such a small sliver of society is responsible for building platforms for everyone. As an example, Facebook has now improved a bit, but at the beginning Facebook did not cope well when somebody died. It’s very obvious to see that the vast majority of developers were relatively young. Had they had more older developers, then that’s something that I think is likely to have been picked up sooner. Equally, Etsy, they’ve done very well in their diversity programs. But it’s because they realised that the vast majority of their customers were women and the vast majority of their staff were men. And employing men to build platforms for women is kind of nuts. So it’s diversity of thought, diversity of experience. I don’t believe you can build a product for the general population, unless you have the general population represented on your staff. You’re going to make a mistake. You’re going to misunderstand how people consume your product, and it’s going to cost you when you build the wrong thing.
You’ve talked about the importance of working hard, but not too hard, and making sure you look after your health and your family and your staff, and you’ve spoken very openly about some really difficult decisions that you made while you were running Ellexus, with scaling back the company and having to make redundancies, which you handled really sensitively, arranging at least one interview for for every person affected. So it’s really clear that you bring a high level of emotional intelligence to your role as a leader and an innovator. How important do you feel that emotional intelligence is in technology leadership and innovation, particularly in the context of the rapid rise of AI.
That’s a question with so many layers. First of all, yes, I do think that businesses have a responsibility to take care of their staff. You’re responsible for people’s mortgages, their livelihoods, their homes, their families, and I think you should behave responsibly with that. So, I’ve always taken that into account when hiring people. We make sure we have the money to pay them for a good amount of time. If it looks like we won’t be able to do that, then making redundancies early, while we can still pay for redundancy or pay for visa transfers. Taking care of people is important.
I’m not sure that comes under the same category as emotional intelligence. I do think emotional intelligence is very important in any leadership role, including technology leadership. There’s a tendency within the technology industry to give people undue respect if they have low emotional intelligence, but are technically very good developers or good mathematicians, almost to the point of crediting people with more technical skills if their emotional skills are lacking. And that’s a real shame. I think it’s one of the things that disadvantages women, who present differently. So I would like to see that balance redressed.
I certainly would prefer to hire a developer who’s got the emotional intelligence to build something useful rather than something that is complicated and clever but actually not what I want. So, I think everyone needs to have a good level of emotional intelligence in order to function correctly and effectively in a team.
As a woman now, there’s a separate angle. I think there’s a lot of pressure to be nice, and I would also like to see that changed. I do think everyone should be nice, but the additional pressure to have a higher level of emotional intelligence, is just another way in which women are disadvantaged. It is perfectly possible as a man to be actually quite unpleasant and still be very successful in the industry. And while I don’t think that should be the case, I would like women to have equal opportunities regardless of their skill set.
I certainly don’t like the way there is a higher emotional intelligence burden and a higher level of emotional work expected of women in the industry. It’s just another thing that makes it harder to get ahead when you’re spending more time on that, in a way that male leaders are not expected to.
That’s a great answer. Thank you so much. I know that women’s healthcare and sustainability within computing are two areas that are close to your heart. With AI advancing so quickly, where do you see the biggest opportunities in these sectors, but also the biggest risks?
AI is very exciting. It’s certainly not a mature technology yet, but it’s going to change the world. It’s going to change our experience of everything.
I’m excited about the advancements in sustainability. If AI helps us accelerate material science and product design, then improving battery technology, green energy technology and improving the way we consume compute, that’s going to be transformative. Compute is so bad for the environment. We bin these very expensive machines after just 3 years and they consume a lot of energy in that time. So it’s an area that desperately needs a revolution, and I’m hoping that AI will be a catalyst and an accelerator for cleaning up compute and cleaning up technology sustainability in general. The risk is that for example, for a while, air conditioning was extremely uneconomical, but once it became cheap to run, people started building cities in deserts. So, making something more sustainable, in isolation, doesn’t necessarily translate to wins for the planet. I’m optimistic, but with a healthy level of scepticism.
And in healthcare, I think there are revolutions to be had as well. You can’t expect your GP to know everything that could possibly be wrong with you. That’s an area in which augmenting medical care with AI is really set to give us a lot of wins, particularly in women’s health, where there hasn’t been as much investment in research. And, of course, there are the image processing areas in medicine, for detecting cancers or examining X-rays and we already know there are huge advantages in AI. We have to be very careful in how we develop and apply those AI technologies and very mindful of deploying them safely and responsibly. And that means thinking about the AI technology and safeguards but also applying processes so that AI decisions can be challenged – in the same way that, hopefully, human decisions can be challenged. We mustn’t lose sight of those appeals processes and review processes just because we have a human and an AI in the mix. We still need to have a mechanism to challenge decisions and that’s as important as refining the technology itself. So, I’m tremendously excited and optimistic. I think healthcare is going to improve immensely for everyone but especially women.
Ending on a not altogether serious note, you’ve previously said, in the context of selling, that to be successful your product must be something that your customer is thinking about in the shower. If it’s not too personal a question, what is currently grabbing your attention whilst you’re under the water?
Well I should say that I stole the idea, but I love how distilled that is. It’s really important. A lot of people think you can sell something to someone if you solve a problem for them but it’s not true, it has to be the most important problem. What am I thinking about in the shower? Well, I’m immensely excited about what we’re building at CommonAI so I’m thinking about what our product’s going to look like, our target customers, building the team and so on. Because we’re at an early stage in our career, but with a very clear mission, there’s a huge amount to think about.
Mostly though, I just sing very, very loudly. Maybe if I’m taking a break from singing then all of these other things are on my mind. But, I’m a loud showerer.