Key points
- Simon Segars recounts his 31 years at ARM (1991-2022), joining as a design engineer among a 15-person team and becoming the company’s third CEO before leading its 2016 acquisition by SoftBank for $32 billion.
- He credits ARM’s growth to a licensing model, rather than manufacturing chips itself, which let the company scale from a Cambridge startup into a supplier whose technology is now used in over 280 billion chips.
- Segars describes ARM’s first international licensing deals, including Texas Instruments in the US, Sharp in Japan and Samsung in Korea.
- Asked about his investment in Impossible Metals, Segars says open-pit mining is environmentally destructive and that he was drawn to the company’s precise robots built to carefully remove seabed minerals rather than damage the ocean floor.
