Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today was born in

Austria, learned about entrepreneurship from his wine trader father and about physics from his

academic uncle, and then he moved to Cambridge in England to immerse himself in the

1980s world of computing. Herman Hauser proved himself to be a brilliant innovator and businessman.

He co-founded Acorn Computers with just 50 pounds of his own capital,

and within five years he was delivering £100 million in revenue.

After Acorn was taken over by the Italian company Olivetti,

he turned himself into a venture capitalist, spotting new tech ideas and new businesses

and backing them with early funding. He's been involved in the launch of numerous successful

start-ups, including AR, which saw Acorn team up

with Apple to create a company which became a world leader in microchips. Much to Hauser's

frustration, Arm is currently being taken over by the American tech giant, Nvidia, and that is part of a pattern which is becoming

familiar in Europe. Tech companies with great ideas and big ambition don't scale up and become

global giants in Europe, as often as they do in the US, and increasingly China. Many are

bought out instead. Why? And as tech becomes a battleground

for big power strategic competition, is Europe losing out? Well, Herman Hauser joins me now from his

home in New Zealand. Welcome to Hard Talk. You are a renowned tech entrepreneur and when we look at the

global tech sector that we have today with vastly wealthy companies, vastly successful entrepreneur

innovators who lead them, it is tempting to see all of this as an expression of raw and pure

capitalism. Is that the way you see the evolution of the tech sector? Partially, yes. And of course,

in America in particular, capitalism has brought about some of the most dominant tech companies in the world. We've seen

the top ten, eight of the largest companies in the world are American and most of those are

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