Steel City son David Richards stands out from Silicon crowd with a 'Made in Sheffield' twist

What do football manager Neil Warnock, crooner Tony Christie, and an obscure Californian software business all have in common? Strangely, they’ve all used the “Made in Sheffield” marque to help sell their wares.

Steel City son David Richards stands out from Silicon crowd with a 'Made in Sheffield' twist
Wandisco is due to be the first technology company to float on Aim this year.

While the city’s registered trademark is still most likely to be given to manufacturers, the respective authors of a sporting autobiography and a pop album might nevertheless feel they have a stronger claim to it then a Silicon Valley tech firm.

However, the Steel City calls a tiny portion of the world’s technology capital its own because Sheffield entrepreneur David Richards leads Wandisco, which has found an unwieldy name is no obstacle to its software being used by 5m companies.

Mr Richards is planning to float the company on London’s Alternative Investment Market (Aim) at the end of April in a move to raise around £20m. He claims the business could be the next Autonomy, that all-too-rare British tech success story, that was sold last year to Hewlett-Packard for £7bn.

Mr Richards and co-founder Jim Campigli established the company in California in 2005. It’s now as much a British business as an American one, he says, since it employs 40 of its 70 staff in Sheffield. Sales are managed in the US, where it makes 90pc of its revenues, and production takes place in South Yorkshire.

Wandisco is due to be the first technology company to float on Aim this year. The market was chosen over Nasdaq for its lighter- touch regulation, Mr Richards says, and also because it presents an opportunity for the business to stand out. “In Silicon Valley, we’re one of thousands of software companies. On Aim, we look different, which will make it easier when we compete for money,” he says.

Is that a depressing indictment of the inability of British technology companies to scale up?

The 41-year-old, whose grandfather ran a Sheffield steel factory, says the fact that he is one of an estimated 250,000 British technology workers in Silicon Valley is worrying: “Autonomy and [chipmaker] Arm are two great British technology companies. Beyond that you struggle to name anyone.”

Wandisco has at least one thing in common with “knowledge management” company Autonomy: describing what it does hardly rolls off the tongue. In fact, its patented software allows engineers all over the world to access remote servers simultaneously.

While most companies use a free-to-download version, customers including AT&T, the US telecommunications company; Honda; and Nokia, pay a princely annual sum of $72,000 (£45,000) on average, for a premium edition.

What does Mr Richards make of “Silicon Roundabout”. the Government-backed cluster of start-ups around East London’s Old Street? “It’s a roundabout and some start-ups. What can you say? We can’t recreate Silicon Valley in the UK. It cannot be more than a pale imitation.”

However, he says that there is no reason why the UK cannot have a broader, organic “tech revolution”, if we could only get the funding environment right.

Mr Richards gives a decent impression of Autonomy founder Mike Lynch’s famously testy relationship with financiers. Where Mr Lynch complained that the City just does not “get” technology businesses, Mr Richards dismisses the UK’s venture capital community as mere “accountants”. The antipathy towards equity investors is rooted in a bruising experience he underwent when at his first American business, Insevo.

He says “all kinds of garbage was getting funded” when he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1998. “A site called dead.com, with the strapline the last site you’ll ever visit, got $20m. I ended up in that bizarre, flip-flop-wearing, dogs-in- the-office world.”

He raised slightly more than that – around $25m – for the relatively sober-sounding Insevo, which connected accountancy software to the web, but the firm was sold “for a fraction of what it could have been”, he says.

“We wasted all the money. You end up worrying about nonsense like the logo and what carpet you’ve got. When you haven’t got venture money, you’re focused on what people actually want to buy.

“Venture capital is awful for start-ups. But growing companies need it and in the UK, investors don’t know how to back disruptive businesses. They would have said Facebook and Twitter were stupid ideas.”

The Aim flotation is not about an exit for its impatient backers, then? “No, we don’t have any venture capitalists throwing their bags out of the window and running as fast as they can. We’ve grown out of cash flow,” he says.