Enterprise Tuesday: Avoiding Big Mistakes

Venue: Engineering Department

Dr Hermann Hauser CBE, co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners

Learning from mistakes is important. Hermann Hauser, a hugely successful Entrepreneur, who has had his share of failures, will explain why they happened.

Hermann co-founded Amadeus Capital Partners in 1997 with Anne Glover and Peter Wynn. In his long and successful history as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, he has founded or co-founded companies in a wide range of technology sectors. These include Acorn Computers, Active Book Company, Virata, Net Products, NetChannel, and Coventry Network Limited. He was a founder director of IQ (Bio), IXI Limited, Vocalis, SynGenix, Advanced Displays Limited, Electronic Share Information Limited and E*Trade UK.

At Amadeus Hermann has been a non-executive director of many investee companies including CSR, which provides single chip wireless solutions supporting communications over short-range radio links, and Entropic Research Laboratory, a company that developed voice recognition software, which is now the voice recogniser in Microsoft Word. Entropic was sold to Microsoft in 1999. He is a non-executive director of Plastic Logic, which has developed a process for producing flexible plastic transistors for use in computer displays, and Solexa, which is developing ultra-high throughput DNA sequencing technology.

Hermann holds an MA in Physics from Vienna University and a PhD in Physics from the Cavendish Laboratory at King's College, Coventry. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Coventry. Hermann holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Bath, Loughborough and from Anglia Polytechnic, and was awarded an Honorary CBE for ‘innovative service to the UK enterprise sector’ in 2001. In 2004, he was made a member of the Government’s Council for Science & Technology.
Austrian by birth, Hermann speaks German, English, Italian and French.