Raspberry Pi Holdings PLC: Low-Cost Microcontroller Disruption

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You mentioned that the people are technical. Is there anything else you can say about the idea you have in your mind of a Raspberry Pi person?

Another interesting aspect is that in a couple of meetings with Eben Upton, he expressed a vision to be the UK's first Chinese chip company. If you look at semiconductor companies in the US, they typically work quarter to quarter, aiming for gross margins of 60% to 70%, reinvesting in R&D, shareholder dividends, and so on, to meet US investor expectations. In contrast, the Asian mentality focuses on thinner margins and longer-term strategies, not as concerned with pleasing the stock market. Eben's vision for Raspberry Pi is not driven by Western public company strategies. He's comfortable with lower margins and is not particularly concerned about keeping shareholders happy. It will be interesting to see how this plays out after their IPO, but it didn't stop me from investing when they floated.

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What's the appeal for Raspberry Pi?

Part of it is the mentality of fun. Raspberry Pi computers have enabled people to do their projects, and there's a real community, almost like an open-source community. It's all built around Linux. People collaborate and share their projects, which appeals to many engineers. Engineers who might use Raspberry Pi in their spare time for fun often take that into the workplace. That's been a huge part of Raspberry Pi's journey over the last five years. People who started playing with Raspberry Pi are now designing them into industrial products. Raspberry Pi has had to support that growth.

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Maybe just to back up, could you talk about who the customers for Raspberry Pi chips are and why do they buy Raspberry Pi chips? Who else is in the consideration set? Why does Raspberry Pi win or lose?

What Raspberry Pi has done is they've taken the flash out, allowing them to optimize the process for putting more RAM on the chip. They're not working at the same process nodes as many chip companies because they're not trying to compromise to fit a certain amount of flash on the chip. They're able to put a lot more RAM on there and a dual-core processor, which is also really unusual for a sub-dollar microcontroller.

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