Yorkshire Post
10 may 2024
We are standing on the shoulders of giants in Sheffield. In my family, our great-great grandfather founded and ran a steel company in the city in the early 20th century, forging a successful future for future generations before a Luftwaffe bombing raid killed him and his wife at their home at the start of the Second World War.
Eli and Lily Richards are buried under a tombstone bearing the epitaph, ‘In Loving Memory of Our Dear Parents… killed by enemy action December 12 1940’.
Like many before him, Eli left his home in search of fortune and headed to Sheffield, then the steel capital of the world, thanks to the efforts of entrepreneurs such as Sir Henry Bessemer whose eponymous invention enabled mass production to meet rocketing demand for new railways across the modern world. The Bessemer converter established Sheffield as a leading global city and served as the microchip of the industrial revolution.
Like Eli, I left my home in search of fortune and headed to Silicon Valley, the epicentre of the digital revolution, where I founded, ran and exited a series of software companies. After a quarter of a century in California, I returned to Sheffield, the city of my birth, at the turn of the decade and the dawn of a new industrial revolution powered by artificial intelligence that can inspire the next generation of innovators, risk takers and wealth creators.