There is often a moment in an entrepreneur's life when it's clear that working for someone else is no longer working.

There are some famous cases like Michael Bloomberg, who was at the Investment Bank Solomon Brothers.

He quickly climbed the corporate ladder, but despite his success there, he grew frustrated with what he saw as a lack of transparency in the finance industry.

In his case, in 1981, after being laid off, he decided he didn't want to spend the rest of his career simply following the rules.

He wanted to make his own.

So Bloomberg took a risk by using

his severance money to start Bloomberg LP, a financial data company, which soon revolutionised

how financial information was shared and it's now a multi-billion dollar business. The rest is

history. Well, Bloomberg's path to striking out on his own is not

so different from my guest on this episode of the decisions that made me. I'm Evan Davis,

and this week my guest is Ken Alisa. He's a renowned British entrepreneur, also Lord

Lieutenant of Greater London. His career has spanned technology, banking and philanthropy,

with numerous roles at leading companies. Ken, let's just start with how you got into tech,

because you did it slightly ahead of everybody else who now is in that world. You know,

before Silicon Valley was what... Evan, that's a very polite way of saying, I am quite old, yes, thank you. However, I just wanted to say that to obfuscate the actual answer to your question, because at school in the sixth form, on a Friday afternoon, the three of us had a choice. We could either go cross-country running, or we could go to the local university, Notting University, to study computer programming.

I had no idea what computer programming was, but it certainly didn't involve outside, running,

cold, wet and communal showers. So I went off and learned how to write computer programs in the 60s. So it was long before there was an IT industry. And then I was lucky enough to get a

gap year role at IBM in Nottingham. and the rest is history. But I can't really

claim any great strategic insight into that. It was anti-cross-country running. So so many

decisions have haphazard beginnings, don't they? Okay, so you've got your connection to IBM. You're

learning about tech. This is, at that stage, it's a sexy area, but it's not that sexy an area, is it? I mean, it's not... It was totally unsexy. I would go to cocktail parties or drink parties, and people would say, and what do you do? And I'd say what I did, and they went, I'm just going to get myself another drink. When we sold products, I was a servant as part of my career in IBM, when we sold products, there's no point in telling our potential customer what the reads and feeds and speeds were. So guess what? We worried about their problems and how a computer could solve them. And that was the essence of selling. And I think it still is today, where you work out what the customers need is, and then you tell them why you've got a better solution than anybody else. Yeah, really interesting. Now, you went from IBM, big American IT company, to Wang, which is a name that doesn't exist anymore.

No, it doesn't. No one bust.

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