Episode #28 - Raspberry Pi's Just Desserts - How to be a $250 million category creator

Eben Upton, co-founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi, turned a Cambridge lab experiment into an intriguing scale-up stories. What began as a mission to create more programmers in the world by empowering kids to program, became a $250 million public company that has shipped over 70 million units worldwide and helped redefine accessible computing.
 
 At its heart, Raspberry Pi is a simple but revolutionary idea: a fully functional computer the size of a cigarette pack, priced under $35, and designed to spark curiosity with extensive hardware interfaces. Eben describes it as a modern-day Lego brick—the glue between software, peripherals, and imagination. The company’s first batch of 100,000 units sold out on launch day. 

Favorite Quotes

 • “We sold 100,000 Raspberry Pis on the first day—and none to target market, kids. We dropped the product in the market to see where the market was.” 
 • “Licensing gave us a global footprint from day one—but the unit economics were brutal.” 
 • “We build our products at Sony in South Wales—40,000 a day, right next to two handmade broadcast cameras.” 
 • “Never wait—if you can grow capability without risking the organization, do it now.” 
 
Key Themes

 1. From Education to Global Scale: Raspberry Pi started as an educational charity project but when hobbyists and engineers discovered it, the product jumped from classrooms to factories and embedded systems across the world.
 
 2. Product-Market Fit by Accident: The team didn’t find a market through focus groups—they discovered it by “accidentally dropping a product into blue ocean demand.” The first-year sales hit one million units.
 
 3. The ARM Model and Beyond: Inspired by Cambridge’s own ARM, Raspberry Pi began as a licensor of technology and brand IP. But to capture more value, the company evolved into direct production, partnering with Sony to manufacture at scale while maintaining the agility of a startup.
 
 4. Culture and Retention: Upton built an engineering-driven organization that balances autonomy with structure—“a startup’s flexibility with a corporation’s resources.” With nearly 100% retention, Raspberry Pi proves that culture can scale when people love what they build.