A network for change

When it came to that vital nudge that pushed John Lazar towards a life in engineering, he cites his father who was a GP in South Africa but also “very practical and good with his hands”. His father liked making and fixing things and insisted on having the right tools for the right job, which helped develop Lazar’s respect for people who make and build things.

His father’s interest in technology influenced his own medical work. He switched from being a GP to specialising in radiology and pioneered the use of new medical technology in South Africa. Lazar senior was one of the first radiologists to introduce medical NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) and CT (computed tomography) scanners into the country. He also sowed the seeds of interdisciplinary thinking in his son, who recalls the time when an eminent palaeoanthropologist asked to use his father’s medical kit to X-ray fossil skulls.

Beyond parental influence, Lazar first encountered his ultimate professional engineering domain, computing, at an early age. At 10 years old, he started a computer course where he learned to program with punched cards and a mainframe computer. He recalls: “I thought it was complete magic. I took to it like a duck to water and it just made sense to me.” Lazar’s technically inclined dad supported his son’s interest in computing, buying him one of the first Sinclair programmable calculators. “That’s where it started.”

Choosing a degree course wasn’t difficult – he studied computer science at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Unlike the system in the UK, degree courses in South Africa took four years and were broader in their remit. So, Lazar also opted to study political history, an interest that proved invaluable later on.

After graduating, Lazar lectured in computer science in Johannesburg for a year. In 1983 he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he enrolled on a master’s degree in computer science and embarked on a project on natural language processing for his master’s thesis. “Even at that stage I was interested in AI,” he explains. He wanted to carry on studying the topic at doctorate level but at the time Oxford’s PhD programme was highly mathematical and full of formal logic. Lazar looked into the possibility of joining Donald Michie, an eminent AI pioneer, but the scholarship didn’t allow a move to Edinburgh, where Michie was based. So, he stayed in Oxford and changed subject, revisiting another longstanding interest and completed a DPhil in history and politics. Lazar didn’t see this as a setback. “I always knew that my future would be back in technology,” he explains. As he saw it studying history would help him “as a rounded person”.

The return to technology came at the end of Lazar’s time at Oxford. In 1987 he started “an entry level job” as a software engineer at Data Connection Limited (DCL), a supplier to the major telecoms businesses. Lazar’s “junior job” turned into 28 years of what he calls “a wonderful, wonderful ride”.

The 1990s were interesting times in computer engineering, especially network technology. Old-style telephone systems, with their large exchanges and networks, were feeling the heat from the rapidly rising use of the internet. Computing and telephones were coming together, and DCL played an important part in enabling that change. It evolved from supplying subsystems to major telecommunications operators into a driving force that helped to change the shape of the industry. At the end of the 1980s, telecoms revolved around a handful of global suppliers delivering massive, purpose-built network systems. DCL had few direct dealings with network operators. The notion then was that operators needed resilient, fault-tolerant, heavy duty, bespoke hardware with highly embedded software. Lazar says: “The original business [of DCL] was designing communication components that got embedded into the products of large equipment providers and OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. I grew up through that as an engineer. It was fun.”

Building a business

In the late 1990s, Lazar was part of a small team of software engineers at DCL that set out to change the major supplier model. “We took some of our componentry and built new technologies to start a new business,” he explains. That business, Metaswitch, set out to bypass the telecoms giants. “We were selling directly to service providers and carriers.” It started small. “We built products where the hardware team was never more than 10 people. We were using mainly industry standard hardware with some developments around that to improve it, supporting highly fault-tolerant and scalable software. It was pretty groundbreaking in the way that they designed that.” Lazar likens this change to what became cloud computing.

The start of Metaswitch also laid the grounds for Lazar’s growing business role as he moved from engineering and product management into leading a new division within the company. He set up an office for the new division in the US and jokes that in his time there he “did a lot of travelling around to the small carriers. I visited 42 states.” By 2009 about 80% of Metaswitch’s business was in the US. As Lazar explained at the time: “We had a UK heart and our R&D was primarily based here, but we were beyond thinking of ourselves as a UK company. The original market was always going to be in the US.” The US, unlike the UK and much of Europe, had plenty of small telecoms operators. The US government’s breakup up of the ‘Bell System’ (a group of telecoms companies owned by Bell and later AT&T that dominated the US’s telephone systems) in the 1990s unleashed a wave of competition and innovation as new operators entered the market. Metaswitch was able to help the newer decentralised and regional operators. The strategy worked: Metaswitch’s business took off and global growth followed. The brand also caught on to the extent that the whole company became Metaswitch. 

Lazar’s time at DCL took him through numerous engineering and customer-facing roles, ending up as CEO and then chair of a business in an area of technology that had changed beyond all recognition. In 2016, after 28 years with the company, Lazar stepped down as chair. Along the way the company had helped to change the shape of telecommunications engineering. 

After leaving Metaswitch, Lazar combined his enthusiasm for engineering with his understanding of what it takes to create a successful technology business. In particular, he wanted to address the challenges of financing technology, especially startups. He also wanted to help these to develop the skills needed to run a new business. 

Lazar was also keen to build on another lesson from his GP father and to meet social needs. He describes his post-Metaswitch move and hopes of combining these ambitions as being like a Venn diagram. “Engineers like Venn diagrams,” he jokes. “My number one interest was in engineering and technology. Number two, I was very interested in education and entrepreneurship.” The third circle in Lazar’s Venn diagram is being involved in engineering that meets social needs and does good in the world.

Sharing expertise and knowledge 

At Metaswitch he had devoted time to working on tech-related non-profit initiatives in Africa. And while part of the Academy’s International Committee, he chaired the steering group that organised the Global Grand Challenges Summit held in London in 2019, which focused on engineering in an unpredictable world.

More recently he has acted as a mentor in the Academy’s Enterprise Hub, helping to guide technology startups in turning engineers’ ideas into successful businesses. In 2022, he became chair of the Academy’s Enterprise Committee, which oversees the Hub’s work.

Since its launch in 2013, the Enterprise Hub has supported nearly 400 researchers, graduates and SME leaders who have gone on to start up and scale up businesses. Awardees have created nearly 6,000 jobs and have raised over £1.3 billion in extra funding. The Hub is now recognised as a leader in fostering startups. In 2024, it was rated ninth out of 125 startup hubs in Europe in FT-Statista’s first ever rankings of such organisations.

As Lazar said of this achievement: “The Enterprise Hub has helped them to transform breakthrough engineering innovations into disruptive spinouts, startups and scaleups that seek to solve the pressing problems of our time. We hope this ranking helps us to attract even more engineers from all backgrounds to apply for our schemes and get the support they need.”

Another of Lazar’s activities with the Academy parallels the work of the Hub. Since 2016 he has been a judge and mentor for the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. Launched in 2014, the prize sets out to stimulate, celebrate and reward innovation and entrepreneurship across sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past decade, the prize has backed over 140 African innovators, who have created over 28,000 jobs, and introduced more than 470 products and services to the market in more than 40 countries.

One activity that falls into the third circle in Lazar’s Venn diagram of what makes him tick, engineering that does good for society, is his role as Chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation since 2020. The foundation exists so that future generations can experience the enthusiasm for IT that set Lazar into a career in computer engineering. “It was something that I was very keen to do.” It’s an area that he had already started work on in another Academy role. While a member of its Education and Skills Committee he was very involved in the joint work the Academy did with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, on developing the programme of study for the new computer science curriculum.

The foundation is the charitable arm of Raspberry Pi. It owns a large chunk of the company that makes and sells these credit-card-sized computers (see ‘Chips that changed the classroom’, Ingenia 72). The commercial operation floated on the London Stock Exchange earlier in 2024, with the foundation receiving £150 million for its global mission, while still retaining the largest share of the business.

The foundation, with its aim of making digital skills and programming accessible to young people and to support people worldwide, especially from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, is another activity that ties in with Lazar’s interest in encouraging engineering in Africa. Kenya and South Africa are two of the foundation’s largest targets for its global programme. “There are programmes in both countries where we work with partners and with governments to try to improve access to computer science education and also AI education for young people.” 

Investing in innovation 

Lazar’s work with the Academy’s Africa Prize and the Raspberry Pi Foundation runs alongside another African engagement. For many years, Lazar has been an ‘angel’ investor, funding early stages of tech startups. Then, along with two colleagues, David Cohen and Mike Mompi, he set up Enza Capital in 2019, a venture investor that supports startups and nurtures them through the earliest stages until larger investors enter the picture. 

The fund’s mission is to invest in “teams using technology to solve large and meaningful problems across Africa”. Many engineers and business founders in those startups use IT in domains “from health and logistics, to fintech and human capital management”. Enza’s portfolio also takes in startups in education and energy and climate change. Lazar points to examples in healthcare, remote health monitoring and “hospital at home” services, to illustrate Enza’s interests. 

One reason for Lazar’s interest in, and enthusiasm for, African engineering is simple demographics. “It is a young continent.” The population is younger than in most of the rest of the world. Africa has a lot of bright young people with great ideas, he explains. As backers, Enza Capital can help the founders and teams running new tech businesses to tackle the usual challenges of management, marketing and manufacturing. The fund has invested in more than 
30 African ventures so far.

This support mirrors Lazar’s work with the Enterprise Hub. As he points out, wherever they are, startups face the same key question, “How do you scale?” – demonstrating another parallel between Enza and the Hub. It can help startups to find the critical infrastructure that they need to get somewhere. For example, Lazar mentions the lab space that innovators may need to work on their ideas.
Lazar brings other lessons from his experience with the Hub. One is the complexity of what should be the simple bureaucracy involved in doing deals. “Every university has a technology transfer office,” he explains. “They all operate in different ways which throws up barriers. Something like reaching an agreement on intellectual property and licensing can take ages. Adopting a standard approach would be a great help.” This is an approach that Lazar is keen to also bring to his role as the Academy’s President: “I want our new strategy to provide us with the clarity and simplicity to continue to make a difference to our profession, the UK and the world.”

Just as Lazar uses an engineer’s approach and a Venn diagram to explain his interests, another diagram could encapsulate how his various past and present roles fit in with becoming the Academy’s President. One circle would be his continued interest in keeping up with technology and engineering that can benefit society. Another circle would include his role in starting businesses, beginning with when a handful of DCL engineers created an internal ‘startup’, Metaswitch, and went on to change the shape of networking and to build a global tech business. Then there would be a circle for Lazar’s work as an investor and mentor for startup tech businesses. All this overlaps to encompass many of the key roles that he will encounter as President of the Academy.