Eben Upton spent his days deciding who got into Cambridge to study computer science. He was good at it, and it worried him.
Upton was director of studies in computer science at St John's College, the person who reads the applications. Year after year the pile was getting thinner, and the applicants who did arrive had less hands-on skill than the ones a decade earlier. The kids who once learned to program on the BBC Micro in their bedrooms now had laptops that were hard to tinker with.
The websites of the two launch distributors, Premier Farnell and RS Components, crashed.
He came to this problem from an odd angle. Born in Griffithstown, near Pontypool, he lived in Lae, Papua New Guinea, as a small child, then grew up in Leeds, Birmingham and Ilkley. His father, Clive Upton, is a linguist, and the two later wrote the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary together. Eben went to St John's himself, took physics and engineering, then a PhD in the Computer Laboratory. He met his future wife, Liz, at university. She would become a co-founder.
In 2008 a group around him set up a charity, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, to bring back the spirit of the BBC Micro. The "Model A" and "Model B" names were a homage to it. The first prototypes looked like USB sticks. By August 2011 they had fifty alpha boards, and early the next year ten of the beta boards were auctioned on eBay.
What almost nobody outside the project expected was the response. On 29 February 2012 the Model B went on sale at $35. The websites of the two launch distributors, Premier Farnell and RS Components, crashed. One reported over 100,000 pre-orders on the first day. A charity for Cambridge admissions had accidentally started a global hardware business.
Upton left the Foundation's board in December 2012 to run a new trading company that could build and sell the boards at scale. Production moved from China to a Sony plant in Pencoed, Wales. There was a quiet irony in it: the machine meant for classrooms was soon wanted by factories. About 70% of 2024 sales went to industrial customers.
The company listed on the London Stock Exchange in June 2024, and the Foundation's stake dropped from 77.31% to 49.08%. It reported 2025 revenue of US$323.2 million and net income of US$21.7 million. More than 75 million boards had sold by March 2026.
The lesson sits in the first paragraph. Upton did not set out to build a company. He had a worry that he could not stop seeing in his own inbox every admissions season, and he built the smallest thing that might fix it. The business came after the worry.