Good morning.
In late 2012, I got a call from an advisor to Autonomy cofounder Mike Lynch, who had sold his U.K. software company to HP for $11.7 billion a year earlier and now found himself fired and accused of fraud. Lynch was eager to prove his innocence, of course, and spoke with me at length about his business model and accounting methods. Lynch died on Monday when his yacht sank off Sicily, just weeks after emerging triumphant from his 12-year battle to be cleared of a crime.
I never did become an expert in the “Bayesian inference” method or the adaptive pattern recognition at the heart of his pioneering analytics software. But I knew that you shouldn’t book sales of low-margin hardware as high-margin software or future sales as current revenue, which were among the allegations against him and co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain, who also died this week after being hit by a car while jogging.
