Raspberry Pi operated for seven years before it even thought about setting up a sales department to market the microcomputers it makes.
Its small, low-cost devices — about the size of a credit card — were launched through a UK educational charity to promote computing among young people. It was only after the products attracted interest from the first corporate clients, often through parents who had bought one to teach their children about coding and then seen the potential for a commercial use, that the business started hiring people to sell them to new customers.
The company, spun out of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, had been focused on creating the best product for the price rather than “being greedy”, says its co-founder and chief executive, Eben Upton. “Up until 2019 we didn’t have a single person you would recognise as a sales person. We then started to see there were limits with that stance.”