A technology pioneer and investor who took up his five-year term as President of the Academy in September 2024, Sir John is the first ‘tech entrepreneur’ to hold the post since the Academy was founded in 1976. He graduated from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar with an MSc in Computation and a DPhil in History, following an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Sir John is Chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which aims to help young people realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. Raspberry Pi recently completed a successful IPO of its commercial subsidiary on the London Stock Exchange.
He is co-founder, General Partner, and a Limited Partner, at Enza Capital, which backs founders and teams using technology ‘to solve large and meaningful problems across Africa’. He sits on the boards of multiple African technology companies, previously served as the Chair of What3words, and was awarded a CBE for services to engineering in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016.
He has deep experience of building and managing businesses. He joined Metaswitch Networks in 1987 as a software engineer, and became CEO in 2009 and then Chairman in 2015. He stepped down in 2016, and Metaswitch was acquired by Microsoft in 2020.
Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2011, Sir John has chaired its Enterprise Committee, which supports startups and scale-ups across the UK and globally through the Enterprise Hub. As a member of the Education and Skills Committee, he played an active role in developing the programme of study for England’s school Computer Science curriculum.
He has also served as a judge and mentor for the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, which trains and backs early-stage African engineering companies, having spent many years working on tech-related non-profit initiatives in Africa, especially supporting ‘digital blacksmiths’ and ‘maker labs’. He has been an active ‘angel investor’ and technology start-up mentor in the UK and Africa, with over 40 pre-seed/seed investments.
He also led the programme development for the 2019 Global Grand Challenges Summit Engineering ‘in an unpredictable world’, which brought 900 engineers from across the world to London to address the challenges posed by disruptive technologies, climate change, and providing resources for a growing world population.