Ken Olisa

Kenneth Olisa OBE, FRSA, FBCS (born 13 October 1951) is a British businessman and the first black Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London. He founded and led the technology merchant bank Interregnum. He is Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and has served and serves on several boards of philanthropic, educational and regulator organizations.

Born in 1951 of a Nigerian father and a British mother, and a native of Nottingham, Olisa's technology career commenced in the 1970s at IBM after he won a scholarship while an undergraduate at Cambridge University, where he studied Natural Sciences and then Social, Political and Management Sciences at Fitzwilliam College.

At IBM he held various posts before joining Wang Laboratories in 1981. Following a period as Marketing Director for Europe, VP of US Marketing and then of Worldwide Marketing based in Boston, he was appointed Senior VP and General Manager of Europe, Africa and the Middle East (EAME) located in Brussels. He led the team which restored the EAME operation to profitability, following which he launched an unsuccessful management buyout resulting in his departure in 1992.

Olisa then founded Interregnum, the technology merchant bank, leading it through its early growth, its entry into and exit from a joint venture with BDO Stoy Hayward, the AIM IPO in 2000, and the tricky years that followed the collapse of the dotcom boom. At Interregnum he worked at the forefront of the entrepreneur/technology growth cycle that began in the mid-1990s. He was also a principal advisor to, and director of, uDate.com, which became one of the UK's few large scale dotcom successes when it was sold to Barry Diller's USA Interactive in 2003. Olisa retired from Interregnum in 2006 and now runs Restoration Partners, an independent boutique technology merchant bank and architects of the Virtual Technology Cluster model.

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