Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Refugee Who Led a Software Revolution - with Ben Walter

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

Millionaire-making tech start-ups are most often associated with Silicon Valley. But this software revolution begins on a woman’s kitchen table in rural Britain in the 1960s. Steve Shirley faced extraordinary odds. After escaping Nazi Germany as a child, she later encountered workplace discrimination and endured deep personal tragedy. But she persevered to build a business decades ahead of its time, creating opportunities for hundreds of women. Tim Harford is joined by Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business and host of The Unshakeables podcast, to explore the life, legacy and lessons of an overlooked titan of tech.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Hello, Tim Harford here with a bonus episode of Cautionary Tales. Today, I've got a story about someone I think everyone should know about, a trailblazing entrepreneur who changed the way we think about tech, redefined roles for working women, made many members of staff, millionaires, and founded the first autism research charity in the UK. This episode is sponsored by Chase for Business. And joining me again is this.

their CEO, Ben Walter, who also hosts the very excellent podcast, The Unshakeables. Ben, welcome back to Cautionary Tales. How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me, Tim, although I'm very cold. I'm in New York City. It's about 9 degrees Fahrenheit, or for those of you across the pond, about minus 12. So it's a bit chilly outside. There's ice on the Hudson. 9 Fahrenheit. You know, Ben, I discovered just today that the, you know, the Celsius scale begins with the freezing point of water. I did not know that the Fahrenheit. height scale, zero is the freezing point of brine. You maybe knew that. I did not know that either. So it is at least based on something as opposed to haphazard, which is what it seems like for everything else

in the imperial system. It is based on something. But anyway, look, we're digressing already and we shouldn't. Last time we spoke, I told you about a 19th century champagne baroness. This time we're going to leap forward in history. This is a 20th century story. It's a very 20th century. century story, I have to say. How tech savvy are you, Ben? In absolute term, or is a relative to my kids? We're all well behind the curve relative to our kids. But you know, do you know, which way up is in a computer? For a 50-something gentleman, I think I do okay. I mean, we certainly, I work in a tech forward business, so I keep up with the latest on most things. I mean, I feel reasonably tech savvy. Actually, you compared yourself to your kids.

I compare myself to my parents. My mother was a computer hacker, and my dad worked in information technology his entire life. Wait, Tim, your mom was a hacker? You got to say a little more. You can't just let that hang there. I mean, I make it sound very dramatic. I mean, she was just one of these great computer enthusiasts in the 1980s.

We had lots of these kind of classic 1980s computers around the house, and she would take them apart and put them back together. And I think I can probably say this. I mean, she's long dead. No one's going to come for her. She would just strip off the copy protection on these computer games. She would say, well, I'm not paying all this money to buy you a computer game. If I get the computer game, take off the copy protection, make a copy of the computer game,

and then send the computer game back to the library or give it back to your friend or whoever you borrowed it from. So, yeah, she would just, I mean, it's, you know, she wasn't, like, cracking into the pen, or anything like that. But even they, I think, pale into insignificance with the tech savviness of the entrepreneur that I want to tell you about today. Steve Shirley, she really saw two huge gaps in the way people thought about the computer industry. And she, and you may be wondering, Steve, she, we'll get to that. She faced absolutely astonishing challenges during her life, right from the beginning of her life. And I think her story can teach us a lot about success

and about resilience in the face of failure. So you ready to go? Yeah, can't wait to hear about it. Before we get to her incredible story and your take on her experience, here is the theme music. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

Steve Shirley was born in 1933, and she wasn't called Steve Shirley. She was called Vera Bullittes. She was called Vera Bukthal. She was born in Germany in 1933, which, okay, instantly a problem. Tough time. Yeah. And she was Jewish.

So her father was a judge in Dortmund. So first, the Bukthal family moved to Vienna. And then shortly before the Second World War broke out, Vera's father decided they had to get their two daughters. out of the Nazi sphere of influence. So they were put on this train. This is one of the Kinder Transport trains. So you've got a couple of thousand children on this train,

which went all the way from Vienna to Britain. So this was Vera, so Steve Shirley, age five, her older sister, who was nine, and they were fostered in Shropshire in the northwest of England. Her parents actually survived the war, but the family didn't survive. the trauma of this experience. So Steve later said that she felt she had been completely rejected and abandoned by her parents. And of course, it was only later that she realized quite what they'd

gone through and what a difficult decision they had made. The most loving thing any parent could have done. But that is the first few years of Steve Shirley's life. I mean, what a start. Yeah, what a difficult way to start your life. The trauma that it must cause at that age to not understand what it's all about and just be starting your life over, I can't imagine. It does defy imagination. She did reflect on this later, and one of the things she said was that she had this survivor's guilt, and she felt that her life had been saved in this spectacular way, and that she then wanted to live a life that had been worth saving.

So she really felt this need to justify her existence and her survival, And as we'll see, I think she really did. She sounds like a fascinating woman already, and she hasn't done anything yet. Buckle up, because there's a lot to this story. So Steve, she was still Vera at the time. Steve grew up in Shropshire. She loved Shropshire. She found the town very welcoming of these immigrant children, refugee children.

She did well at school. She learned fluent English. She was really passionate about maths. And the problem was they didn't teach maths to girls. And so she had to fight for special permission to go to learn maths at the nearby boys school. And the reaction of the boys was, I think, a preparation for the rest of her life, in fact. What did they do? Catcalling, whistling, heckling, the boys were not kind.

But she wanted to learn maths. She powered through it. You'll see. She powers through a lot of things. she became a British citizen at the age of 18 and she took the name Stephanie Brooke and she decided not to go to university even though she was clearly very bright and do want to guess why she didn't go to university? She couldn't afford it.

I mean, sorry, I know that's a very American answer, but... That's a very American answer. I think she probably would have been fine on that count. The issue was she wanted to study science and there may have been some science courses available to women, but she could only find one. And do you want to guess what was the science that they let young women study? Any guesses? Nursing.

It was botany. So the girls could study the pretty flowers. Anyway, she didn't want to study botany. She wanted to study maths or physics or something, engineering. She didn't see any opportunity to do that. And so she just went straight to get a job. And she got a job at the post office research station in Dollis Hill. Where is Dollis Hill?

Good question. It's just part of northwest London. But the post office research station, this is the mail, but they're also plugged into telecommunication. So they're doing this cutting edge research in computing. And she is operating basically as an assistant. She's doing math. She's doing calculations. She also took a math degree in evening classes. And she got a promotion and she started working on electronic computers. This is in the fifth. This is in the late 50s, computers are, you know, these huge mechanical, very expensive constructions, but they're, you know, they are moving rapidly. They're clearly going to be very important. This is in the days of ENIAC and UNIVAC and all the big mainframes. Yeah, absolutely. And indeed, some of the, some of the people at Dollis Hill were involved with Colossus, one of the very first computers. Yeah, sure. Unfortunately, the computers were great. Her colleagues were not great. She recorded it being being bullied, being harassed, being groped, as a matter of course, obviously being paid less

than the men to do the same job. On the plus side, not only did she like the computers, she found love there. So she met a physicist called Derek Shirley. So this is 1959. She is now Stephanie Shirley. And so she leaves the post office research center. She gets a job at a company called CDL. I've never heard of CDL. If you Google it, I don't think, you know, you find anything relevant. Computer Developments Limited. As you can imagine, an awful lot of computer companies that existed in the 1950s no longer exist. Yeah. It's a fairly small place. She was the chief programmer there. She loved the work. She loved the colleagues. But she realized that there was a glass ceiling there. So she quit after two years because she said it was quite

clear to me that I couldn't progress far. Yeah. So she was frustrated. She realizes she's basically not going to win playing the game by their rules. So she's going to have to make up her own rules. And she's now 29 years old and she decides to start her own business. Probably also unusual for a woman at the time. Especially a business in computing, which is what she wanted to do. So I mean, you've worked with lots of entrepreneurs, support lots of businesses. What are the key ingredients for starting our business, would you say? Obviously, number one is an idea. So you haven't have an idea of what you want to do and why you think there'll be product market fit for it. You need access to capital for sure.

Yeah, she's got six pounds of capital. Okay, so short on that front. And then, you know, the third thing's connections, you know, leads to initial clients, initial employees, a network that can support the ecosystem you're trying to build. Well, she's got a new baby and a kitchen table. I don't know if that works as a substitute. You said you need an idea. She's got a very good idea.

So actually she's got two very good ideas. So idea number one, and this is really radical. So at the time, this is now about 1960, computers are big, but software is not really an industry. So software is a thing that you just get packaged along with your hardware. Sure, the hardware runs the software and that's all it is. Yeah, and it's a sort of a joint deal. But she realizes, well, hang on, there's a lot more

that you can do with these computers if you write your own programs. And so she realizes that standalone software to run on these huge computers, that's gonna be a thing. And so she basically sets up a software company. And think about it, this is now, it's about 20 years, roughly 20 years before Bill Gates sets up Microsoft and becomes for a time the richest man in the world. So she is well ahead of that particular curve.

I mean, it sounds like she's one of the mothers of the software industry, really. Absolutely she is. She has a second realization, which is that there are a lot of people like her. Well, there's nobody really like her. But there are a lot of smart women. A lot of those women are involved in the computer industry. It later became very male-dominated. But there are lots and lots of women who are kind of around who can code,

but are basically being pushed into intellectually demanding but organizationally subservient roles. So they're smart and they're being underpaid and they're being undervalued. And if her experience is anything to go by, they're also being harassed and groped in the office. And so why doesn't she, for this new company, why doesn't she tap into this underappreciated workforce

of women programmers? So that is what she did. She said, I had a gut feeling there was a programming industry of some kind weight, to be born, and I liked the idea of being in at its birth. Wow. I mean, that is something else. I mean, that's quite an intellectual leap.

It's easy to look back now and say it's obvious, but at the time, I can imagine it wasn't at all to most people. No, absolutely. So she's got this great idea for a product, which is software. She's got a great idea for how to make this product, which is to hire lots of frustrated women programmers. us. So there's a third leap that she takes, which is, Ben, you ever heard of working from home? Yes, I confess, I'm not much of a fan. I get nothing done at home. It's not for me. I know it's

great for some people, but it's just, it's not my bag. Well, Steve Shirley was a fan. Again, this is like 1959, 1960. So this is so far ahead of the curve. But she realizes that a lot of these women have the domestic responsibilities. So a lot of them are mothers like her. A lot of them are housewives. So they've got these domestic duties. But actually to be a programmer at the time, you don't actually need the computer. You need a pencil and paper because code is not that big. So a lot of these women are writing code on their kitchen table. So yeah, you just need a telephone, pen and paper and away you go. So she calls her company a free freelance programmers, and how do you reckon it goes in the first few months?

I mean, first of all, it sounds like it was the world's first gig job. First software company almost, first gig job. She really was ahead of her time. I mean, my guess is the hardest thing was probably selling. But maybe I'm wrong. No, you are not wrong. Selling was a huge problem. And you want to know why selling was a huge problem?

Because all of the customers were getting these letters. from this woman called Stephanie, trying to sell them software. And they were like, okay, first of all, software's not a thing. And second, we don't buy product from girls. Sure. And this is why we are calling her Steve Shirley, because her husband rather brilliantly said, why don't you just sign your letters, Steve, instead of Stephanie?

And that's what she did. And the way she recalled, she said, it seemed to me that things really picked up once I stopped signing myself, Stephanie, and started signing the letters, Steve. Yeah, I can look, it's, looking back, it seems, you know, horrific. But even today, you see when, when people look at names, when they look at resumes, when they look at pitches, everybody has their own unconscious or conscious bias. And back then, the very conscious bias was this was for the world of men. I mean, there are experiments run by economists and and another social scientists where they,

they send out resumes and they just, um, they swap the, the name on the top of the resume. So it's a, it's a distinctively male name or a distinctively female name or maybe a distinctively white name or, uh,

a name that's most commonly associated with people from, uh, from an ethnic minority, an immigrant name. Um, and, you know, depressingly enough,

it, it makes a huge difference. People are more likely to invite, uh, job applicants in for interviews if they appear to be, white guys. So she saw all that and she worked around it. I find myself

a bit torn because in today's world we would say, you know, oh, that's a shame. She had to hide who she really was to be successful and isn't that tragic. But back then, there was no other way. And so I actually deep down have a lot of respect for it. Yeah. Also, she didn't hide who she was

for that long because of course they'd invite her in from meetings and then she'd show up wearing a fur coat. She thought the fur coat was important to could have maintained this idea that the company was doing well. And she said, once you're through the door, there's a moment of surprise, but then, you know, she very often would make the sale. There was one other little piece of deception she adopted, which is that she would play. She had a tape recording of, you know, office sounds like, you know, typing and things like

that, phones ringing. And so if she was on the phone to a potential client, she'd just be playing this tape recorder. so that it drowned out the washing machine, the baby crying, and you had the typing and the telephone instead. That is clever. That's the modern version of that is the blurred out Zoom background. Absolutely, yes. So, yeah, she gets some clients and things go well.

They work for the company that designs the supersonic airplane Concord. So this company programmed their black box flight recorder. They provided software for Rolls-Royce for British Rail, for NATO. So she's got big institutional clients. She's got great clients. And that idea, you said, Ben, that having the idea is important. She has proved that the idea works. There are difficult moments.

So in the 1970s, the UK was hit by a pretty bad recession and really squeezed the company. And Steve was being squeezed on the home front as well. So her son had been born. And it quickly became apparent. that he was autistic and he needed an enormous amount of support. He has very complex needs and, yeah, he'd sometimes be violent. And meanwhile, Steve is trying to run this business, which is running into a cash flow crisis. Things got very, you know, very tough.

Steve had a bit of a breakdown. She needed a lot of support. But then she bounced back from that. And one of the things that she did was to set up a home for, young people with autism, with lots of support needs, that not only her son Giles could live there, but other young people who had similar needs could also live there. So she's starting to take steps into the world of philanthropy as well. The other thing that's working is this plan to recruit women. So of the first 300 employees, 297 are women. And she only has to change that in

1975, the UK government introduces the Sex Discrimination Act, generally designed to prevent hiring men in favor of women, but of course it applies equally. So at that point, she has to let the men in. But by then, the company is a huge success, the business model, this kind of hybrid working, the supplying of software, it's all going great. And yeah, so she takes that in her stride. Wow. I mean, she's resilient, if nothing else. But to be able to do all that, get through that tough time at home, that tough time at work, keep the company growing, keep it going, change the business model fundamentally because of the law. That's quite a journey. It's an incredible journey. Can I ask? I'm just curious, did she go by Steve socially as well?

Or did she go by Stephanie socially? She went by Steve. So my wife met her. Wow. A few years ago, in fact, this is, this is, I came to hear of her because my wife met her and was hugely impressed by her. So this is why we're having this conversation at all, Ben. So my wife's a portrait photographer. She makes these beautiful photographic portraits of the great and the good. And she heard about Steve Shirley at some photographic launch. And she contacted Steve and said,

I would love to come and meet you and make a portrait of you and hear your story. So this was about six or seven years ago. This time Steve was, I think, in her mid-80s. and she just said this woman is incredible incredible she was at the time dame stephanie shirley and yeah pretty much the first thing she said to my wife was call me steve wow so what became of the company so the company went public in 1993 oh wow yeah so at that point steve was worth at a couple hundred million dollars

70 of her workers became millionaires So all these early programmers who had been given equity, they all became millionaires. So this is all, this is the kind of story you hear a lot about, you know, after the, you know, in Silicon Valley. But this is not Silicon Valley. This is all happening in rural England in the 1960s, 1970s. So she creates all these female millionaires. And it is eventually bought by a larger software company. And she is left in the 1990s with a fortune.

and also with a lot of grief because her son Giles dies at the age of 35, leaving her and her husband absolutely bereft. So she's got this loss and she's got a lot of money. And that's then the next three decades of her life, which is trying to figure out how to give it away. So yeah, she spends 35 years making the money and then almost as much time giving it away. And she said she was determined not to leave some big foundation or trust fund.

She wanted to give the money away while she could. It was sort of like Act 3 of her life. I mean, Act 1 was the resettlement to the UK. Act 2 was her building this company and raising a son despite the adversity. And then Act 3 was finding a way to take all that success and give back to the society that, had supported her. Absolutely. She founded Oxford University's Internet Institute, for example. She gave the founding grant to that. But a lot of the money was given to autism charities, or rather

was used to set up autism charities that just didn't exist and needed to exist. So a school, priors court school, this residential home that I mentioned, she also set up autistica, which was a national autism research charity in the UK. And she also gave money to refugee charities reflecting her experience as a refugee and became the UK's ambassador for philanthropy and she wrote several books. So it's really an astonishing life. She had always said she wanted to live a life that had been worth saving and well, I mean, wow. And she died in August last year at the age of 91. Wow. So I don't know, looking back at all of those, all of those achievements and all those obstacles overcome.

I mean, what do your thoughts? I would say, first of all, the amount of grit. When we meet with entrepreneurs who have gotten through this type of adversity, and although this is potentially at a different level, Tim, than what we see typically, but still, we see a few common traits. And one is they are rarely driven fundamentally by money. Yeah, and she was never interested in money, I think. That doesn't surprise me.

The second is they have incredible passion for the underlying business that they're creating, whatever it is. And then third, they have a mental resilience that just exceeds the norm. And I think it takes all three of those to be one of these stories of someone who is able to overcome this much hardship,

this much adversity, and build something of real scale and value. I think that's absolutely right. And on the subject of money, she said, the money I have let go has brought me infinitely more joy than the money I've hung on to. There was another point that she made in interviews. She lived to the age of 91. We've just been talking about her for a few minutes. And you telescope everything into this short period of time.

And it seems as though everything's happening at once. But of course, at the time, it's not necessarily like. that. This overnight success that she had, in fact, took 30 years. And she said, I've learned that progress generally comes from making a series of small steps rather than a giant leap. I've also learned it's fine to make mistakes. The trick is to make them only once and learn from them, which is a very cautionary tales lesson. What a fascinating woman and a fascinating story. There's more we could say, but I think we're out of time. So Ben Walter, it's been great talking to Thank you so much for joining me on Cautionary Tales.

Thanks for having me, Tim, and thanks for sharing such a terrific story. This episode was sponsored by Chase for Business. I was joined by Ben Walter, the CEO of Chase for Business. His podcast is The Unshakeables. Season 3 has just gone live, and you can find it, of course, wherever you get your podcasts. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn. Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Ben Nadaf Haffrey

edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melanie Guthridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford, Maseaer Munro, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode,

and members-only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club? To sign up, head to Patreon.com slash cautionary club. That's Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash cautionary club.