Arm is a very different company now, says chief people officer Kirsty Gill

Arm is now a very different company to the one that Nvidia was looking to buy, according to the company’s chief people officer.

Kirsty Gill spoke to the Cambridge Independent in the wake of Arm’s return to the stock market.

She confirmed that the company’s Cambridge headquarters would continue to see investment, underscored the belief that the demand for Arm technology was only going to grow and spoke about the opportunities that the IPO opened up.

Some 3,000 employees came into the Fulbourn Road HQ to watch the momentous occasion Arm returned to the stock market. There has been disappointment that a Cambridge-founded company with such strong British heritage turned to New York’s Nasdaq exchange rather than the London Stock Exchange but Kirsty, who has spent about 20 years working for Arm, said the UK remained at the heart of the company.

“We are a global organisation and we’ve got that British heritage. The UK is our biggest employer of people,” she pointed out.

“We are continuing to invest in all of the sites across the UK – Cambridge, Manchester, Sheffield – and we are opening a new office in Bristol. There is continued commitment to headcount growth, to innovation, to engineering delivery, and that is what makes the employees really excited: their ability to do that meaningful work and see their technology and innovations on the world stage.

“We continue to be headquartered in Cambridge and there are no plans to change that.

“We continue to generate IP out of the UK and there are no plans to change that either.”

Arm has successfully repositioned itself under CEO Rene Haas’s leadership “from designing general-purpose CPUs for smartphones and consumer devices, to designing purpose-built CPUs for specific markets”, as he described it.

And the uncertainty that swirled around the company while Nvidia attempted to acquire it - a move ultimately scuppered by regulatory hurdles - has been replaced by renewed confidence.

Kirsty said: “We are now a very different company from when we went public before and from the time at which we were looking at the Nvidia acquisition.

“Under Rene’s leadership, he’s really pivoted the organisation and looked at diversification.

“Previously, we were very much known for mobile and general purpose CPU. Now Rene has pivoted us to doing much more specific, purpose-built compute platforms for specific markets – cloud, auto and IoT as well as mobile.

“What the employees really get excited about is when they are engaged with that business strategy. They can see the future growth opportunities and that they are having an impact on the technology world.

“Although the IPO is a really important milestone, and the employees are enjoying the celebration, their engagement – that feeling of belonging and being connected to the organisation – is much more around the business strategy and I think Rene has done a fantastic job in engaging people around that.”

The company’s stock market return has been something of a rollercoaster. Its soared above its initial public offering (IPO) price of $51 a share on day one, reaching the heights of $69 on its second day of trading. But it dipped as low as $49.85 – below its IPO price – for a time on Thursday (September 21), although it rallied to end the day on $52.16, with investors debating how quickly it can deliver improved royalty rates, mulling over the competition it faces from open-source RISC-V semiconductor designs and mindful of Arm’s exposure to China.

But Arm believes its opportunities are greater than ever.

“Everything is becoming a computer nowadays and that means everything needs compute power,” noted Kirsty. “Arm has been the most pervasive CPU architecture in the world and so, as demand for compute increases, the demand for Arm increases. We have started in this era of AI and, as that grows, Arm grows.

“We are an engineering company and that’s what our employees love – the opportunity to innovate and solve hard problems and, with that, their opportunity to develop and grow, so we’re really positive about the future.”

We can continue to expect investment in Arm’s workforce in Cambridge, she added.

“We are currently hiring into Cambridge – and have consistently, under Rene’s leadership. It is one of our key engineering sites. It’s one of the places where we have all of our teams represented, so there is a lot of opportunity here.

“We are always looking to attract talent, from interns and graduates to more experienced individuals, to bring new capabilities and expertise into the organisation. Cambridge is a great opportunity and Arm is a growth company,” she said.

“The global talent market is an interesting animal. The demand for Arm engineers is always there. Our people are highly skilled and, as our architecture becomes more pervasive, then Arm people are in demand. As we look to grow, the talent market is global.

“We know we develop talent and provide it to the broader industry, so we know we have to focus a lot on our early careers programme.”

But Kirsty is keen for the company to avoid the experience of other tech giants.

“If you look at the last couple of years, there’s been a real boom and bust within the technology industry. What we’ve tried to do is have consistent leadership, so rather than hiring fast and stopping, what we want is a steady hiring curve and be able to provide long and meaningful careers for individuals. We’ve been on that curve, where for some others in the tech industry it has been fast-slow, fast-slow.”

A switch to Nvidia may well have altered the culture at Arm, but what impact might the IPO have on the company as a place to work?

“The culture has always been important from Arm, right from the founders saying what kind of company they wanted it to be,” replies Kirsty. “Right from the beginning, we’ve been very thoughtful about what environment we wanted to create so our people can meet the ambitions of the organisation.

“Our culture has always been driven through collaboration, which is a cornerstone of innovation, recognition that people are not resources, they are human beings, with interesting and dynamic lives.

“We’ve developed our culture over time, but we did refresh it when Rene became CEO.”

The culture includes the collaborative message of “we win together not alone”, while embracing people’s individuality.

“Part of our culture is ‘be your brilliant selves’,” noted Kirsty, who added that the cultural message they updated was a call on employees ‘do great things’.

“We want to be bold. We want to be on the global map. We want to be seen for our ambition and our impact across the markets. We want to find a way to solve the incredibly difficult technology challenges ahead, so ‘do great things’ is part of our culture as well,” she said.

Amid the protracted discussions over the Nvidia deal, there had been concern from parties – notably including Hermann Hauser – that Arm’s famous open business model, enabling it to licence its designs to any partners it wishes, could be at threat. But Kirsty said the IPO is designed to ensure those partnerships remain.

[Read more: Arm’s former COO says Nasdaq IPO ‘an opportunity to grow and replenish’]

“Ultimately the Arm ecosystem is huge – one of the biggest in the world when you look at the number of chips shipped, the number of developers we work with, the software ecosystem. The number of partners might be small, but the number of people touched by Arm technology is huge, so partnerships are really important across many dimensions and the IPO will only strengthen that.

“The business strategy is very much looking at how we can do more in the industry and provide compute platform solutions, and that is good for our employees.

“The more that we can make sure their work is the most power-efficient, the most performant, the best solution for our partners, so our partners can use our IP rapidly and get it to market and win in their space, then the better it is for Arm,” she said.