Robert Rickman

After taking MA and MSc degrees in agriculture and forestry at Oxford, Robert worked as an economist in the Caribbean. He then spent 20 years building market-leading forest industry, investment management businesses in the UK and New Zealand, which he successfully sold out of in 1999 and 2001 respectively.

For much of this period, he was also a director of Bookham Technology PLC, an innovative business making components for optical telecoms and datacoms networks, which went from start-up in 1990 to the FTSE 100 in 2000. The company became a global industry consolidator and re-domiciled to the USA in 2004, when he left the company. 

As a founding partner of the Rockley Group, Robert has made a series of investments in early-stage businesses and he manages a growth capital fund in China. Independent of Rockley, he is also a non-executive director of a number of listed companies and funds.

In the 1990s Robert lectured on forest business to the now discontinued Oxford Forestry MSc course, and he looks forward to working again with motivated graduate students and aspiring entrepreneurs. 

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