Ken Olisa

Who is Ken Olisa?

Kenneth Olisa, OBE FRSA FBCS is a British businessman born of a Nigerian father and a British mother.

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 located in Brussels. He led the team which restored the EAME operation to profitability, following which he launched an unsuccessful MBO 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.