Lynch was born in Ilford, a suburb town some 9 miles north-east of London, in the summer of 1965 as the UK had just created the Greater London Council. He was a real “London Boy” and one of the first: at the time the newly created London borough was a white-British working-class residential area. The future tech mogul did not spend his childhood as a Londoner though: he grew up near Chelmsford, a town in Essex, even more east. His mother worked a nurse while his father was a firefighter who immigrated from Cork, Ireland.  At 11, he won a scholarship to Bancroft's, a renowned institution which was a private, independent grammar school at the time. From there, he was admitted to Cambridge: he enrolled at the prestigious Christ's College, which hosted students such as John Milton, the greatest English poet; and biologist Charles Darwin, who discovered evolution. There he studied mathematics. After graduation, Lynch went on to read for a PhD in artificial neural networks (a pioneering way of machine learning) under the supervision of Peter Rayner: his filed PhD thesis studied adaptive pattern recognition.

Cambridge, the British tech hub of the country, renamed the Silicon Fen (from the Silicon Valley in California, while ‘fens’ refer to a broader region of low-lying, marshy land in eastern England), proved to be fertile soil for Lynch, too. The year is 1996: a young political leader, named Tony Blair, is warming up the engines to bring the Labour Party back to government after decades, with a historic victory; BritPop is dominating European charts, with Oasis and Blur fighting each other; every British teenage girl wants to be like one of the Spice Girls. Another young man, however, is less interested in music: at 31, Lynch founded a company called Autonomy, with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt. It’s a start-up born as an offshoot of Cambridge Neurodynamics, a company specialized in fingerprints electronic recognition. It was not his first venture, though: he had set up a company in the late 1980s, while reading for his PhD. Lynett Systems was financed with a £ 2,000 loan negotiated in a bar and produced designs and audio products for the Atari ST, a famous personal computer in that era.

Autonomy, which collects and processes data, an old precursor of Data Analytics, becomes one of the UK's top 100 public companies. Soon after it gets listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, the American share index of technology companies that was booming back in those years. Autonomy shares skyrocketed from a nominal value of £ 0.30 to a peak of £ 30 during the DotCom bubble. In 2008 the British tech guru was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.