Tim Horlick

Managing director, nCoTec

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I meet Tim Horlick at his South Kensington home. He has just come off an overnight flight from New York, and I am rather late. If he is irritated, he does an excellent job hiding it.
In fact, he is notably friendly and easy going, the perfect foil, one might think, for his famously forthright fund manager wife Nicola.
Those who know him say Horlick is indeed affable in most situations, however he is the first to admit that in the workplace he can be "very demanding". "He's a very punchy guy," says a former colleague. "His great strength is that he wants to do things quickly but he also has a tendency for hiring and firing that suggests 'If you're not for me you're against me.'"
At his former employer Salomon Smith Barney, Horlick wasted no time getting rid of people he considered not up to the task. But he was also clearly very good at getting business.

The industrial group that he set up in 1997 became the biggest contributor to Salomon's investment banking revenues in Europe within 18 months. He subsequently made a big success of running the technology group in Europe, originating two huge deals last year - the IPO of ATNS (now valued at over $1 billion) in June and the sale of Giga AS to Intel for $1.25 billion.
This track record alone would have been sufficient to win him a high reputation. But in Horlick's case the achievement was all the more impressive given that for much of 1997 and 1998 he was taking it in turns with his wife to spend nights sleeping on the floor of the hospital where their daughter Georgie was being treated for leukaemia.
Georgie died in December 1998. Horlick says that one effect of her death was to reduce his tolerance of "corporate bullshit". It wasn't long before he had decided, along with former Salomon colleagues Alasdair Warren and Lars Lindell, to go it alone. His new venture, nCoTec, is a private equity fund that will invest in communications infrastructure and the enabling technologies supporting wireless data and wireless-internet convergence across Europe. "Its focus makes it different from many of the recently launched dot com investment vehicles," he says. nCoTec has so far raised around e16 million to make direct investments in both start-up and later-stage companies requiring development capital. In addition, it expects to close its First investment fund of up to e150 million during the summer. When we met it was about to announce its First serious investment, in a company Horlick hopes will become the next ARM.
Tim Horlick was born in 1961 in Weymouth where his father was serving in the Royal Navy. His childhood included spells in Singapore, Malta and various naval bases all over the UK, before the family finally settled in Bath. He went to Wellington School in Somerset, where he was in the rugby XV and the tennis team. He later played for Bath rugby club's second team. After Exeter College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics, he was unclear what to do next, but opted for accountancy at Price Waterhouse.
Leaving as soon as he qualified three years later, he joined Flemings in the technology group that was then led by Strone McPherson, now deputy chairman of software company Mysys. "Strone had an excellent strategic sense," recalls Horlick. "He was ahead of his time in seeing that technology was a major opportunity."
After two years of doing M&A deals for buyers and sellers, Horlick moved to Kleinwort Benson for "more experience of doing more public market hostile takeovers". Before long he was one of those advising Boots on its infamous hostile bid for Ward White (Boots won the deal, but it cost a lot of money and the market didn't like it).
In 1990, he became a director in equity capital markets and over the next four years he and his colleagues built Kleinwort Benson into one of leading equity capital markets houses in Europe. Deals that Horlick worked on included the IPOs of Orange and Telewest, and the $6 billion secondary offering of National Power and PowerGen. From nowhere, the firm had risen to the top five in the league tables by the time he left in 1996.
Kleinwort had been taken over nine months previously by Dresdner Bank, and several of Horlick's colleagues had left to go to Salomon. They persuaded him to join them, and he was hired by Peter Middleton to become chief operating officer of investment banking.
After a year and a half he shifted back to the business side, responsible for overseeing all industry groups and most recently headed the new technology group in Europe.
"I like the fact that technology companies tend to be more receptive to new ideas and tend to be faster-moving businesses," he says. "You don't have to spend a lifetime developing a relationship. If you've got good ideas, then they're prepared to listen." He had also, he says, grown "bored of working for a large company which necessarily has to move more slowly than a smaller more entrepreneurial business. I also wanted to be a principal and at the same time I saw what I think is a huge opportunity in Europe for European venture capitalists to help build the wireless technology business."

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Tim Horlick

Managing director, nCoTec

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