My First Million: The techie who turned £4 into £4 million

An ingenuous technology led Stephen Streater to ditch his PhD and found software company Eidos. But the serious money came with the advent of the Playstation.

As a 24-year-old PhD student in the physics department of King's College London in 1990, Stephen Streater had developed a novel way of dealing with the problem of image recognition' the means by which a computer turns information into an image. "All standard applications didn't work, so I said: I know, I'll invent a new way'," he says. His new way involved an entirely different approach to the problem. He began applying the new approach to editing video on computers. Then, fortuitously, his brother met a video editor at an entrepreneurs' conference in Brighton.

The editor was impressed with the ingenuity of Streater's application, because, at the time, a computer was doing "all the tasks of traditional video-editing equipment, which cost up to £30,000 a unit". He convinced Streater to start a business and enlisted the help of a neighbour a venture capitalist to get him to do so. The venture capitalist offered to put up £1m to found the company that would become Eidos.

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Jody Clarke

Jody studied at the University of Limerick and was a senior writer for MoneyWeek. Jody is experienced in interviewing, for example digging into the lives of an ex-M15 agent and quirky business owners who have made millions. Jody’s other areas of expertise include advice on funds, stocks and house prices.