The Refugee Who Led a Software Revolution - with Ben Walter

Pushkin. Hello, Tim Halfed here with a bonus episode of caution retails. Today, I've got a story about someone, I think everyone should know about, a trailblazing entrepreneur who changed the way we think

about tech, redefined roles for working women, made many members of staff, millionaires,

and founded the first autism research charity in the UK.

This episode is sponsored by Chase for Business. And joining me again is their CEO Ben Walter, who also hosts the very excellent podcast, The Unshakeables.

“Ben, welcome back to caution retails, how are you doing?”

- I'm great, thanks for having me, Tim. Although I'm very cold, I'm in New York City. It's about nine degrees Fahrenheit for those of you across the pond about minus 12. So it's a bit chilly outside.

There's Isla on the Hudson. - Nine Fahrenheit. You know, Ben, I discovered just today that the, you know, the Celsius scale begins with a freezing point of water.

I did not know that the Fahrenheit scale, zero is the freezing point of brine. You may be new that.

- I did not know that either.

So it is at least based on something as opposed to haphazard, which is what it seems like for everything else in the imperial system. - It is based on something. But anyway, look, we're digressing already

and we shouldn't. Last time, we spoke. I told you about a 19th century champagne baroness. At this time, we're going to leap forward in history. This is a 20th century story.

It's a very 20th century story. I have to say, how, well, tech savvy are you, Ben? - In absolute terms are a relative to my kids. (laughing) We're all well behind the curve relative to our kids.

But you know, which way up is in a computer?

“- For a 50 something gentlemen, I think I do okay.”

I mean, we certainly, I work in a tech forward business. So I keep up with the latest on most things. - I mean, I feel reasonably tech savvy. Actually, you compare to yourself to your kids. I compare myself to my parents.

My mother was a computer hacker and my dad worked in information technology. He's in entire life. - Wait, Tim, your mom was a hacker. You got to say a little more.

You can't just let that hang there. I mean, I make it sound very dramatic. I mean, she was just one of these great computer enthusiasts. In the 1980s, we had lots of these kind of classic 1980s computers around the house.

And she would take them apart and put them back together. And I think I could probably say this. I mean, she's long dead. No, I was gonna come for her. She would just strip off the copy protection

on these computer games. She would say, well, I'm not paying all this money to buy you a computer game. If I get the computer game, take off the copy protection,

make a copy of the computer game and then send the computer game back to the library or give it back to your friend or whoever you borrowed it from. So, yeah, she wasn't cracking into the Pentagon or anything like that.

“But even they, I think, pale into insignificance”

with the text having us of the entrepreneur that I want to tell you about today, Steve Shirley. She really saw two huge gaps in the way people thought about the computer industry. And she, and you may be wondering, Steve,

she will get to that. She faced absolutely astonishing challenges during her life, right from the beginning of her life. And I think her story can teach us a lot about success and about resilience in the face of failure.

So, you ready to go? Yeah, get me to hear about it.

Before we get to her incredible story

and your take on her experience, here is the theme music, "I'm Tim Halford." And you're listening to caution retails. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Steve Shirley was born in 1933. And she wasn't called Steve Shirley. She was called Veda Booktile. And she was born in Germany in 1933, which, okay, instantly a problem, tough time.

Yeah, and she was Jewish. So her father was a judge in Dortmund. So first, the Booktile family moved to Vienna and then shortly before the Second World War broke out, Verras father decided they had to get their two daughters

out of the Nazi spirit of influence. So they were, they were put on this train.

So you've got a couple of thousand children on this train which went all the way from Vienna to Britain. So this was Veda, so Steve Shirley, age five, her older sister who was nine. And they were fostered in Schrobshire in the Northwest of England.

Her parents actually survived the war, but the family didn't survive the trauma of this experience. So Steve later said that she felt she had been completely rejected and abandoned by her parents. And of course it was only later that she realized

quite what they'd gone through and what a difficult decision they had made. The most loving thing any parent could have done.

But that is the first few years of Steve Shirley's life,

what a start. Yeah, what a difficult way to start your life. The trauma that it must cause at that age to not understand what it's all about and to be starting your life over, I can't imagine.

It does define imagination. She did reflect on this later and one of the things she said was that she had this survivor's guilt and she felt that her life had been saved in this spectacular way and that she then wanted to live a life that had been worth saving.

So she really felt this need to justify her existence

“and her survival, and as we'll see, I think she really did.”

She sounds like a fascinating woman already and she hasn't done anything yet. It's a buckle up because there's a lot to this story. So Steve, she was still there at the time, Steve grew up in Schrobshire. She loved Schrobshire.

She found the town very welcoming of these immigrant children, refugee children. She did work at school. She learned fluent English. And she was really passionate about maths

and the problem was they didn't teach maths to girls. And so she had to fight for special permission to go to learn maths at the nearby boy school and the reaction of the boys was I think a preparation for the rest of her life, in fact.

What did they do? Cat calling, whistling, heckling. The boys were not kind, but she wants to learn maths. She powered through it. She, you'll see, she powers to a lot of things.

She became a British citizen at the age of 18 and she took the name at Stephanie Brook. And she decided not to go to university, even though she was clearly very bright.

“And do you want to guess why she didn't go to university?”

She couldn't afford it. I mean, sorry, I know that's a very American answer, but it has a very American answer. I think she probably would have been fine on that count. The issue was she wanted to study science

and then may have been some science courses available to women, but she could only find one. And do you want to guess what? What was the science that they let young women study? Any guesses?

- Nursing. - It was botany. - Okay. - So the girls could study the pretty flowers. Anyway, she didn't want to study botany.

She wanted to study maths or physics or something. Engineering, she didn't see any opportunity to do that. And so she just went straight to get a job. And she got a job at the post office with search station in Dolis Hill.

Where is Dolis Hill? - Good question, it's just part of Northwest London, but the post office research station, this is the mail, but they're also plugged into telecommunication. So they're doing this cutting edge research in computing

and she is operating basically as an assistant.

She's doing maths, she's doing calculations. And she also took a maths degree in evening classes. And she got a promotion and she started working on electronic computers. - This is in the 50s term, this is in the late 50s.

Computers are these huge mechanical, very expensive constructions, but they are moving rapidly.

“They're clearly going to be very important.”

- This is in the days of any act in Univac and all the big mainframes. - Yeah, absolutely. And it did some of the people at Dolis Hill were involved with Colossus,

the one of the very first computers. - Yeah sure. - Unfortunately, the computers were great, her colleagues were not great to record and being bullied, being harassed, being grouped,

as a matter of course, obviously being paid less than the man to do the same job. On the plus side, not only did she like the computers, she found love there, so she met a physicist called Derek Shirley. So this is 1959, she is now Stephanie Shirley.

And so she leaves the post office research center, she gets a job at a company called CDL.

- I've never heard of CDL, if you Google it,

I don't think you're gonna be able to find anything relevant. - Computer developments limited. - As you can imagine, an awful lot of computer companies that existed in the 1950s, no longer exist.

She was the chief programmer there. She loved the work, she loved the colleagues, but she realized that there was a glass ceiling there. So she quit after two years, because she said, it was quite clear to me that I couldn't progress far.

- Yeah, so she was frustrated.

She realized that she's basically not gonna win

playing the game by their rules. So she's gonna have to make up her own rules. And she's now 29 years old, and she decides to start her own business. - Probably also unusual for a woman at the time.

- Especially a business in computing, which is what she wanted to do. So I mean, you've worked with lots of entrepreneurs, it's support, lots of businesses.

“What are the key ingredients for starting up business?”

Would you say? - Obviously, number one is an idea. So you have an idea of what you wanna do and why you think there'll be product market fit for it. You need access to capital for sure.

- Yeah, she's got six pounds of capital. - Okay, so short on that front.

And then the third things, connections leads

to initial clients, initial employees, a network that can support the ecosystem you're trying to build. - Well, she's got a new baby and a kitchen table. I don't know if that works as a substitute. You said you need an idea.

She's got a very good idea. So actually, she's got two very good ideas. So idea number one, and this is really radical. So at the time, this is now about 1960. Computers are big, but software is not really an industry.

So software is a thing that you just get packaged along with your hardware. - Sure, the hardware runs the software, and that's all it is.

“- Yeah, and it's a sort of a joint deal,”

but she realizes, well, hang on. There's a lot more that you can do with these computers if you write your own programs. And so she realizes that standalone software to run on these huge computers,

it that's gonna be a thing.

And so she basically sets up a software company.

And think about it, this is now, it's about 20 years, roughly 20 years before Bill Gates sets up Microsoft and becomes for a time, the richest man in the world. So she's well ahead of that particular curve.

- I mean, it sounds like she's one of the mothers of the software industry, really. - Absolutely, she is. She has the second realization, which is that there are a lot of people like her.

Well, there's nobody really like her, but there are a lot of smart women. A lot of those women are involved in the computer industry. It laid to became very male dominated, but a lot's are not so women who are kind of around who can code,

but are basically being pushed into intellectually demanding but organisationally subservient roles. So they're smart and they're being underpaid and they're being undervalued. And if her experiences anything to go by,

they're also being harassed and grouped in the office. And so why doesn't she, for this new company, why doesn't she tap into this underappreciated workforce of women programmers? So that, as what she did, she said,

I had a gut feeling, there was a programming industry of some kind waiting to be born, and I liked the idea of being in at its birth. - Well, I mean, that is something else. I mean, that's quite an intellectual leap.

It's easy to look back now and say it's obvious, but at the time I can imagine it wasn't at all to most people. - No, absolutely, so she's got this great idea for a product, which is software.

She's got a great idea for how to make this product, which is to hire lots of frustrated women programmers. So there's a third leap that she takes,

“which is Ben, you have all heard of working from home?”

- Yes, I confess, I'm not much of a fan, I get nothing done at home, it's not for me, I know it's great for some people, but it's just, it's not my bag. - Well, Steve Shirley was a fan.

Again, this is like 1959, 1960, so this is so far ahead of the curve. But she realizes that a lot of these women have the domestic responsibility, so a lot of them are mothers like her,

a lot of them are housewives, so they've got these domestic duties, but actually to be a programmer at the time, you don't actually need the computer, you need a pencil and paper because code is just not that big.

So a lot of these women are writing code on their kitchen table. So yeah, you just need a telephone, pen and paper, and a way you go. So she calls her company freelance programmers, and how do you reckon it goes in the first few months?

- I mean, first of all, it sounds like it was the world's first gig job. - Yeah, first of all, for a company almost, first gig job, she really was ahead of her time. I mean, my guess is the hardest thing was probably selling, but maybe I'm wrong.

- No, you are not wrong, selling was a huge problem,

because all of the customers were getting these letters from this woman called Stephanie. Trying to sell them software,

and they were like, okay, first of all,

it's software's not a thing, and second, we don't buy product from girls. - Sure. - And this is why we are calling her Steve Shirley, because her husband rather brilliantly said,

"Are you just sign your letters Steve instead of Stephanie?"

“And that's what she did, and the way she recalled,”

she said, "It seems to me that things really picked up, once I stopped signing myself Stephanie and started signing the letters Steve." - Yeah, I can look at looking back, it seems horrific, but even today,

you see when people look at names, when they look at resumes, when they look at pitches, everybody has their own unconscious or conscious bias, and back then, but the very conscious bias was,

this was for the world of men.

- I mean, there are experiments run by economists and other social scientists where they send out resumes, and they just swap the name on the top of the resume, so it's a distinctively male name or a distinctively female name, or maybe a distinctively white name,

or a name that's most commonly associated with people from an ethnic minority and immigrant name, and, you know, depressingly enough, it makes a huge difference. People are more likely to invite job applicants

“in for interviews if they appear to be white guys.”

- So, she saw all that, and she worked around it. - I find myself a bit torn because in today's world, we would say, "Oh, that's a shame." She had to hide who she really was to be successful and isn't that tragic, but back then there was no other way,

and so I actually, you know, deep down, have a lot of respect for it. - Yeah, also, she didn't hide who she was for that long, 'cause of course, they'd invite her in from meetings, and then she'd show up wearing a fur coat.

She thought the fur coat was important to kind of maintain this idea that the company was doing well. And she said, "Once you threw the door, "there's a moment of surprise, but then she very often "would make the sale."

There was one other little piece of deception. She adopted, which is that she would play, she had a tape recording of, you know, office sounds, like, you know, typing and things like that phones ringing. And so if she was on the phone to a potential client,

she'd just be playing this tape recorder, so that drowned out the washing machine, the baby crying, and you had the typing and the telephone incident. - That is clever. That's the modern version of that is the blurred out zoom background.

- Absolutely, yes. So yeah, she gets some clients and things go well. They work for the company that designs the supersonic airplane concoord, show this company programmed their black box,

flight recorder, they provide a software for Rolls Royce, for British Rail, for NATO. - So she's got big institutional clients. - She's got great clients, and that idea,

“you said Ben, having the idea was important,”

she has proved that the idea works. There are difficult moments. So in the 1970s, the UK was hit by a pretty bad recession and really squeezed the company, and Steve was being squeezed on the home front as well.

So her son had been born, and it quickly became apparent that he was autistic and he needed an enormous amount of support. He has very complex needs, and yeah, he had sometimes been violent.

And meanwhile, Steve is trying to run this business with which he's running into a cash flow crisis. Things got very tough, Steve had a bit of a breakdown. She needed a lot of support, but then she bounced back from that.

And one of the things that she did was to to set up a home for young people with autism with lots of support needs that not only her son, Giles could live there, but other young people who had similar needs

could also live there. So she's starting to take steps into the world of philanthropy as well. The other thing that's working is this plan to recruit women.

So the first 300 employees, 297 are women.

And she only has to change that in 1975. The UK government introduces the Sex Discrimination Act. Generally designed to prevent hiring men in favor of women, but of course it applies equally. So at that point, she has to let them in.

But by then, the company's a huge success. The business model is kind of hybrid working, the supplying of software, it's all going great. And yeah, so she takes that in her story. - Well, I mean, she's resilient if nothing else,

but to be able to do all that, get through that tough time at home,

keep it going, change the business model fundamentally because of the law, that's quite a journey.

- It's an incredible journey.

Can I ask, I'm just curious, what did she go by Steve socially as well, or did she go by Stephanie socially? - She went by Steve, so my wife met. - Wow, a few years ago.

In fact, this is, I came to hear of her because my wife met her and was hugely impressed by her. So this is why we're having this conversation at all, Ben. So my wife's a portrait photographer. She makes these beautiful photographic portraits

of the great and the good. And she heard about Steve Shirley at some photographic launch. And she contacted Steve and said, I would love to come and meet you and make a portrait of you

and hear your story. So this was about six or seven years ago.

“At this time, Steve was, I think, in her mid-eighties.”

And she just said, this woman is incredible, incredible.

She was, at the time, Dame Stephanie Shirley. And yeah, pretty much the first thing she said to my wife was call me Steve. - Wow. - So what became her the company?

So the company went public in 1993. - Wow. - Yeah. So at that point, Steve was worth about $100 million. 70 of her workers became millionaires.

So all these early programmers who had been given equity, they all became millionaires. So this is all, this is the kind of story you hear a lot about after the, you know, in Silicon Valley. But this is not Silicon Valley.

This is all happening in rural England in the 1960s, 1970s. So she creates all these female millionaires. And it is eventually bought by a larger software company.

“And she is left in the 1990s with a fortune.”

And also with a lot of grief because her son Giles dies at the age of 35, leaving her and her husband, absolutely bereft. She's got this loss and she's got a lot of money. And that's then the next three decades of her life,

which is trying to figure out how to give it away. So yeah, she spends 35 years making the money and then almost as much time giving it away. And she says she was determined not to leave some big foundation or trust fund.

She wanted to give the money away while she could. - It was sort of like act three of her life. I mean, act one was the resettlement to the UK. Act two was her building this company and raising a son despite the adversity.

And then act three was finding a way to take all that success and give back to the society that had supported her. - Absolutely. She found it at Oxford University's Internet Institute. For example, she gave the founding grant to that.

But a lot of the money was given to autism charities. Or rather, was used to set up autism charities that just didn't exist and needed to exist. So the school, prior to court school, this residential home that I mentioned,

she also set up autistic care, which was a national autism research charity in the UK. And she also gave money to refugee charities reflecting her experience as a refugee. And became the UK's ambassador for philanthropy

and she wrote several books. So it's really an astonishing life.

She always said she wanted to live a life

that had been worth saving. And wow, I mean, wow. And she died in August last year at the age of 91. So I don't know, looking back at all of those, all of those achievements and all those obstacles

“I overcome, I mean, what do you, what do you think of us?”

- I would say first of all, the amount of grit, when we meet with entrepreneurs who have gotten through this type of adversity, and although this is at a potentially a different level to him than what we see typically, but still,

we see a few common traits. And one is they are rarely driven fundamentally by money. - Yeah, and she was never interested in money, I think. - That doesn't surprise me. The second is they have incredible passion

for the underlying business that they're creating, whatever it is. And then third, they have a mental resilience that just exceeds the norm. And I think it takes all three of those

to be one of these stories of someone who is able to overcome this much hardship, this much adversity, and build something of real scale and value. - I think that's absolutely right.

And on the subject of money, she said, the money I have let go has brought me infinitely more joy than the money I've hung on to.

She lived to the age of 91.

“We've just been talking about her for a few minutes”

and you tell us scope, everything into this short period of time and it seems as though everything's happening at once. And of course, at the time, it's not necessarily like that. This overnight success that she had, in fact, took 30 years. And she said, I've learned that progress generally comes

from making a series of small steps rather than a giant leap.

I've also learned it's fine to make mistakes. The trick is to make them only once and learn from them. Which is a very cautionary tales lesson.

“- What are fascinating, woman and a fascinating story?”

- There's more we could say, but I think we're out of time. So Ben Walter, it's been great talking to you.

Thank you so much for joining me on cautionary tales.

- Thanks for having me, Tim, and thanks for sharing such a terrific story. - This episode was sponsored by Chase for Business. I was joined by Ben Walter, the CEO of Chase for Business. His podcast is The Unshakeables.

Season 3 has just gone live and you can find it. Of course, whatever you get your podcasts. - Corsionary tales has written by me, Tim Hartford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Tilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music of the work of Pascal Wise, Ben Nadaf Haftry, edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melding Guthridge, Genevieve Gorned, Stella Hartford,

Mercedes-Mano, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cone, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller.

Corsionary tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

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