“I prefer living in the UK more than anywhere else. I like the history, I like the culture, I like the under-dog attitude,” he explains. “The UK is a good place to get things done.”
Mr Yassaie’s eyes light up as he waxes lyrical about Britain’s successes in technology and his commitment to building up Imagination’s research and development facilities in the UK – notably at its new headquarters in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire.
But there is one big problem standing in his way: those pesky overseas students who do just as Mr Yassaie planned to, by coming to Britain, getting their degrees and then taking their highly educated brains back home.
“It is very important that we are able to hire the workforce we need from within the UK and that really is a challenge. Partly because the universities don’t necessarily teach the right things, and partly because you don’t get enough home students,” he says.
“At British universities, 85pc or 90pc of the [postgraduate] students are from overseas. Only 10pc are British. That is a problem and it has to be fixed.
“We need those engineers in the UK to help create the future. If we don’t [start educating more UK citizens] we will be forced to set up offices elsewhere.”
Imagination, which is best known for Pure digital radios and its graphics technology, used in Apple’s iPhone, is on a mission to recruit 200 UK staff this year. Of those, about 100 will be new graduate positions.
However, the dearth of good candidates means the company has had to expand its research and development centres in India and Poland to help it keep up with demand, and is hitting the acquisitions trail as a way of simply buying up engineers.
Imagination has also launched a university and school outreach programme, headed by Mr Yassaie’s computer science graduate daughter, aimed at inspiring students early on.
“Britain is impacting the technology industry, big time, but it’s all under the hood,” he says, referring to companies like his own, or Cambridge’s ARM Holdings, which design the chips that power the mobiles, tablets and games consoles produced by the likes of Apple or Samsung.
“We are not consumer brands so a lot of people don’t understand that the gear they buy has a lot of British technology inside. Part of the challenge is about making it cool, making sure people understand what we do. What we need is a rock star for the industry,” he says.
“In the UK, people get excited by what they see – The X Factor or football. David Beckham is a big deal [in inspiring young people] but we don’t have an equivalent for British technology.”
What about Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, who last year managed to sell the British software company to Hewlett Packard for a whopping $10bn (£6.3bn)?
“But he sold out!” Mr Yassaie jokes.
In truth, Mr Yassaie thinks it is inspiring that companies like Autonomy can command those sums of money, and bridles at what he claims is a British habit of doing down our winners.
“You go to the US and they are maybe over the top about success, but in the UK success is not communicated as a positive thing. Even something positive has a sting in the tail,” he says.
“I think it comes from the understated attitude [of British people]. Changing that attitude needs everyone’s participation.”
In keeping with this, he thinks Instagram, the photo app company which Facebook snapped up last week for $1bn, is probably decent value at the price. Never mind that it only has 13 members of staff and virtually no revenues.
However, Mr Yassaie has been eager to fend off any takeover of Imagination. It looked likely a couple of years ago until Intel and Apple – two of its biggest customers – amassed sizable stakes. Today they control 14.5pc and 8.7pc of the business respectively.
“It’s a signal to everyone – don’t even try and bother. I think the best thing for us is to be independent,” he says.
But without the prospect of a sale in the offing, Mr Yassaie would like to find new ways of incentivising his staff – and for the UK as a whole to encourage the next wave of entrepreneurs.
He would like to see the reintroduction of “taper relief”, a scheme abolished by the last government, which ratchets the capital gains tax on shares downwards, according to how long an individual has owned them.
“At the moment, shares are so heavily taxed that their value as an incentive is not as strong as it should be. When people stay in a company for a longer number of years, they should get more out of it,” he says. “[Reintroducing the taper] would stop people leaving the UK and going elsewhere.”
