An investor was located and introduced by Vuman (Pond
Venture Partners)
3
. Pond put a significant effort into finding
the first potential customer and application and then made
an initial investment of $3m. The University's own venture
arm (The Manchester Technology Fund) co-invested. Note
here: Richard Irving (POND) was an alumnus of UMIST.
The sales office for the technology was located in Los
Gatos, California – with access to the right markets - but
the centre of gravity of the research and development
remained in Manchester. The core team and Alasdair
wanted to stay there.
The initial Transitive team was joined by former colleagues
from the department who had previously left the area
but who wanted to come back to Manchester and
who were keen to work with such a promising and
demanding application.
The University also gave the company a direct pipeline to
recruit exactly the right type of students.
www.ibm.com
67
3
One of the challenges met and overcome with
the help of Pond was coping with the industry
perception that what Transitive was doing was
widely known to be impossible
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■ TALENT ■ CULTURE PLACE ■ HISTORY ■ SUPPORT ■ OPEN/INDUSTRY ORIENTATION ■ GLOBAL LINKS ■ RESEARCH
Why Manchester?
Chart illustrates the factors that influenced Transitive
Computing history: a replica of the university's
original 'Baby' computer, built in the 1990s
