After Bancroft, he went on to Christs College in Cambridge where he initially read natural sciences. He worked during the summers at the telecoms company, Marconi. According to Lynch, those summers shaped his entrepreneurial spirit. "It was a very traditional structure and I remember thinking 'I don't want to do this for the rest of my life'."
He switched to a degree course in electrical engineering and went on to do a doctorate at Cambridge. He was a graduate student in 1991, with his PhD titled An Adaptive Approach to Connectionless Models, which was based on the 250-year-old theorems of Thomas Bayes.
Bayes, a Presbyterian minister and mathematician, had attempted to use probability to prove the existence of God, but the young Lynch took up his research, adapted it and set about finding commercial uses for the theorems.