23mile Podcast | Founder Exits, Scaling & All the Hard Bits
How Raspberry Pi became the UK's best-selling computer, and a billion-pound public company
Liz Upton co-founded Raspberry Pi in 2008 and spent 14 years building the community that turned a Cambridge prototype into the best-selling British computer of all time. On launch day in February 2012, they had 2,000 units on a pallet and took 100,000 orders. In June 2024, the company listed on the London Stock Exchange at £541 million. She left five months later. In this episode, Liz walks Kayode through the accident of becoming a founder after a decade in food and travel journalism, how she built the community that carried the company, what it was like to mortgage her house alongside her husband and take no venture capital, the pandemic supply crisis, and why she is now backing early-stage deep-tech founders through Negroni Venture Studios and chairing OLO Robotics and Coherence Engine. Also covered: why the UK-versus-US valuation gap is a myth, what AI is doing to investor due diligence, and what happens to the next generation of programmers when the grunt work goes.
