Cambridge Business and Professional Club members enjoy Queens’ checklist on start-up success
Engineer and entrepreneur Phil O’Donovan spoke about the city’s unique economy at an event hosted by The Cambridge Business and Professional Club (CBPC) in the Old Hall at Queens’ College last week.
The networking group enjoyed lunch at the college, followed by Dr O’Donovan’s talk, which drew on his experience as a member of Cambridge Angels, through to his current stint as chairman of ForefrontRF, a fabless semiconductor company poised to simplify mobile radio front end designs.
Its Foretune technology is a breakthrough tunable duplexer allowing OEMs to reduce the component count in mobile devices. Foretune works by dynamically self-configuring according to available frequencies and/or services needed.
Dr O’Donovan said of the CBPC occasion: “I spoke about Cambridge as a business launchpad and how Cambridge is a great place to start companies and grow them into segment-leading winners.
“I mentioned Arm and CSR as examples. The bottom line is that doing this using the fabless semiconductor business model is not rocket science and all you need is a great product-market fit, a bunch of good staff and a pile of venture cash!”
The Cambridge Business and Professional Club is the original business club in Cambridge, meeting regularly since 1950. Events are organised by Rich Wainwright who brought the club back from a Covid-induced 18 month break in events and immediately returned membership and attendance to pre-covid numbers. Since then he spearheaded the Club's growth to levels unprecedented in its 74 year history - and believes there is much more to come.
Membership and attendance is growing with the club currently having 147 members and enjoying over 70 people at their monthly events at Queens’ College. The next event is on 11 October - with more than 100 expected at the upcoming annual dinner on 7 November, plus a Christmas Charity lunch on 6 December - details here.
Meanwhile Phil O’Donovan’s week continued at Cambridge Tech Week 2024 with a Thursday talk at Pembroke College on ‘The Next Chapter in Semiconductors’.
You can read a full report on Cambridge Tech Week in this week’s edition of the Cambridge Independent on sale Wednesday (18 September).