Yassaie, 55, a British-Iranian, is the CEO of Imagination Technologies, a tech firm that produced the first smart-phone processors and graphics technology—the technology that enabled firms like Apple and Google to produce the iPhone and the Android.
“We put the ‘smart’ into a lot of these devices,” he told This Is Money, a British financial website. “Phones weren’t smart until they started using our technology.”
Yassaie’s Imagination Technologies is a research-and-development firm that produces the intellectual property – the patent or the workable designs – that chip makers than manufacture and giants such as Apple use in some of their most iconic and cutting-edge products such as iPhones and iPads.
When he joined the firm, initially known as Video Logic, it had 40 employees and built the interface for Microsoft’s DOS operating system, which was the command-line predecessor to the graphics user interface of Windows. Today, Yassaie’s firm employs 1,100 people across several continents and has a market value of $2.7 billion.
The company’s client list includes literally all of the major high-tech companies: from Blackberry manufacturer Research in Motion to Apple, Google, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, LG and Fujitsu. All buy a major part of their technology from Yassaie’s firm.
Yassaie wants to use the success of his company to rejuvenate Britain’s lagging technology sector by inspiring children in Britain to enter the high-tech world and dream big.
“Britain should have a host of really big technology brands, like Apple, Microsoft and Google, but we don’t,” he told the Daily Telegraph in an interview. “We once had great technology companies, but we’ve lost them all and we are now unable to compete.
“We have a proven track record of developing cutting edge technology and we have some of the best brains in the industry, but we don’t have the companies or the brands,” he said.
He has made it his personal mission to change that by inspiring the next generation of British tech entrepreneurs. “We need to allow people to be ambitious,” he told This Is Money.
Yassaie’s own story testifies to the importance of inspiration and ambition in business success. It was his first brush with technology at the age of four in Iran that sparked the seed.
“I remember I got electrocuted when I was four years old after sticking my hands into a huge radio with valves in it and trying to work out what was going on. So I ended up permanently interested in computers and computer science.”
But inspiration is only one component of his quest to make Britain a new tech empire. He is also seeking to lobby the government to create a tech venture capital fund to help finance promising startups and scale them into larger companies.
By encouraging British techies to be ambitious and increasing government support, Yassaie believes he can revitalize the country’s technology scene to compete globally with the likes of the US Silicon Valley.
Yassaie went to Britain in 1976 and graduated from the University of Nottingham with a PhD in computer science. He held a series of technology-related jobs until 1992, when he joined Imagination as director of research. He became CEO in 1998.