GETTING AHEAD


‘Leaders should not be afraid to live their own personality as opposed to living the personality they think a great leader should have. They should be honest above all else’


While most people would have considered this idle pub talk,


Mullen took them up on the offer and they were good to their word. “I think I was one of the few people on the plane full of students


going over that summer who really knew where he was heading.” The next bit of good fortune occurred soon after he had arrived over


in the States. “I was running pretty seriously at the time and I ended up in a race against John Treacy one day,” says Mullen. Treacy subse- quently introduced Mullen to his brother Ray, a coach at Providence College, with a view to him applying for a sports scholarship. However, because Providence College did not have an engineering programme and Mullen didn’t want to switch, Treacy brought him over to the coach at Brown University. “I got on very well with him and applied as a transfer student. A year later, in 1986, I was accept- ed to Brown and I finishedmy education there.” According to Mullen, Brown was too good to wrap up quickly, so


he extended his time there, doing a business degree in parallel with his engineering degree. When he graduated in 1989, he started at IT consulting firm Cambridge Technology Group. He then joined the company’s spin-out a year – Cambridge Technology Partners. “There were around 30 of us on day one and we ended up growing


Mullen mentions that there have been “moments of good fortune” along the way. Luckmay well have played its part, but from talking to Mullen it’s clear that focus, talent and a willingness to seize opportuni- ties have had a much more significant impact on his trajectory. The way he tells it, Mullen’s first bit of good fortune happened in


W


1984 when he was in his first year of electronic engineering at DIT in Dublin. His father, who worked in Guinness, had met a group of Americans in the brewery who wanted to go to a session. “I happened to be playing fiddle in a pub in Terenure that night.


They came along and, after having quite a bit to drink, invited me to come over and work for them in the States that summer. One guy was a scientist and the other was a professional musician. The scien- tist said: ‘You can come and work in my lab during the day’. The musician said he’d give me a job at night playing with the band.”


36 UCD BUSINESS CONNECTIONS


HEN asked to explain some the factors that have contributed to a very successful career to date – including being a member of the senior team that led Cambridge Technology from start-up to over US$600m in revenue and, most recently, heading up Highland Capital Partners in Europe – Fergal


to around 5,000 employees worldwide over the next eight years.We went from zero revenue to US$615m revenue in that timeframe.” After moving to Amsterdam to set up the company’s European business, he returned to the States to do an MBA at Harvard Business School from 1993 to 1995, during which time he met his wife, who was also Irish and also at Harvard. After completing his MBA, Mullen returned to Cambridge


Technology, initially based in the States in anM&Arole, before mov- ing to Geneva to run one of the businesses he had acquired. In 2001, he left Cambridge to spend a year with a corporate venture fund before joining Highland Capital Partners in 2002 and returning to theUS. In the middle of 2007, he went back to Geneva to launch the European business, which he’s been building up ever since.


Turning point Looking back at his education and his career, Mullen describes Brown as a massive turning point in his life. “It’s an absolutely fabu- lous place,” he says. “There were people from all over the world and it really opened up my eyes to all sorts of possibilities. At the time Ireland was in a pretty depressed state. We started as a class of 86 students at DIT. At the first-year exams, they failed around 75% of the people. By the time the second round of the exams was done later in the summer, only half the class came back. That was the approach in Ireland at the time, because there were no jobs. At the end of it all, all of the 30 or 40 who graduated left the country. To


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