Foreword
In April 2011 I was coming to the end of an executive MBA program at Cambridge and looking forward to spending some quality time with my wife, Liz. The old joke is that MBA stands for married but absent, and after two years of barely seeing each other, the last thing on our minds was jumping straight into another startup.
But after our accidental announcement of the Raspberry Pi educational computer project the following month (see “Funny Story...” sidebar), we had little choice but to knuckle down and make it happen. Liz, a freelance journalist by background, dropped everything to run our nascent community at www.raspberrypi.org. I, along with my colleagues at Broadcom and my fellow Raspberry Pi Foundation trustee Pete Lomas, started to figure out how to actually deliver the $25 ARM/Linux box that we’d so rashly promised to build.
Nine months later, we launched the Model B Raspberry Pi, taking 100,000 orders on the first day and knocking out both our distributors’ websites for a period of several hours. In the 18 months since then, we’ve sold nearly two million Raspberry Pis in ...