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The tech boss who lost more than a billion NewsColony Image copyright Miguel Soltero Image caption Andrew Rickman today runs Rockley Photonics, which specialises in designing and producing next-generation, optical computer chips The BBC’s weekly The Boss series profiles different business leaders from around the world. This week we speak to UK technology pioneer Andrew Rickman. How would you feel if you lost more than £1.4bn ($1.81bn) almost overnight? That was the situation faced by Andrew Rickman back at the end of 2000, when the dotcom bubble spectacularly burst, sending shares in his company Bookham Technology plummeting. “It was like a nuclear winter,” he says looking back. Andrew had set up Bookham in 1988 in the kitchen of his home in Wiltshire, when he was 28. It grew to become one of the world’s leading providers of optical components for the telecommunication and computer industries. In very simple terms, its technology allowed data to be transferred very quickly u...