Prime Time

At 63, after a life of public service, Keir Starmer could be forgiven for opting for semi-retirement upon handing over the reins. However, as our new study on the age of some of Britain’s most successful founders shows, many of Britain’s most well-funded companies were started not by a sprightly teenager, but by those with a few miles on the clock.

In How Old Are Britain’s Top Founders? Dr Mann Virdee analysed 183 founders across 100 of Britain’s highest-raising companies, showing that entrepreneurship is far less age-restricted than the Silicon Valley myth would have you believe. Specifically, he found a median founding age of 37, a range from 18 to 67 years old at the time of founding, and, crucially, that almost as many founders were 50 or older (20%) as were under 30 (23%) when the company was founded.

Energy and climate founders were the oldest, with a median age of 53. Several had clocked up 25+ years in the industry first. Biotech and pharma came next at 46, reflecting the academic, clinical and regulatory grounding needed to bring a drug or device to market. Fintech founders skewed younger at 34 — old enough to have worked inside the systems they set out to disrupt, but not yet institutionalised by them. And AI and software founders were the youngest at 33: younger than their peers in other sectors, but still older than the stereotype suggests, with most having started after 30, often coming from research or established tech firms first.

This is the first pass. We want to expand this beyond fundraising data in future iterations. If this is the sort of thing you might want to partner on, drop Mann an email to find out how you can get involved.

Infinite Jest

Keir Starmer is a man who had, by every available measure, won — a glittering legal career, the leadership of his party, a landslide — and then watched all that winning curdle the moment he was in office. So what went wrong?

In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse separates games played to win, which end when someone does, from games played to keep the play going, in which the rules and even the boundaries shift to that end. As he puts it, the finite player plays within the boundaries; the infinite player plays with them.

Bernard Suits, in The Grasshopper, comes at the same idea from another angle: a game, he says, is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” — we accept the rules precisely because they make the play possible. A prosecution is a finite game: fixed rules, a judge, a verdict, and an end. So is a leadership ballot. Governing isn’t. It could be argued that Starmer was so used to winning at finite games, he didn’t know how to approach an infinite game.

Entrepreneurship is mostly an infinite game.

In the past, I’ve sometimes pushed back when entrepreneurs tell me the answer is to get more of them into the heart of government — people who have built things. But I’ve come around to thinking they’re right, because the evidence has started to stack up. The exceptional people who disprove my rule: Matt Clifford, Alex Depledge, Emma Jones, James Wise, Martha Lane Fox and Kate Bingham, to name a few. Bingham has called for an “entrepreneurial mindset” in government, and Emma has been telling me much the same for over a decade.

A note of caution. It’s possible — not least given how much we love to copy the US — for this thinking to lead to something like DOGE, which managed to break more things than it fixed. But that isn’t Britain’s problem — sclerosis is. We need more infinite players in government.

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Rumour Mill

Equalising capital gains tax with income tax and instituting an exit tax are being discussed again. I’ve written before about why it’s bad for the UK. When we get a new Prime Minister, one of the first things they should do is rule out the most damaging scenarios. These rumours are exactly the problem of recent decades.

Fractional Future

I’m delighted to welcome Liberti to the fold, and to introduce Alex Evans, who directs Liberti Club — a campaign making the case that fractional is the future.

Liberti Group is the UK’s leading home for fractional C-suite talent, bringing together The CFO Centre, People Puzzles, The Marketing Centre, YRH Finance Team and Kiss The Fish, alongside a network of more than 1,000 principals across finance, marketing, people and sales worldwide. Alex has spent twenty-five years building communities of just this kind. I’ve known him for at least a decade of that time and so I know he brings deep expertise in the practicalities of business to the Network. Connect with him here.

Some Might Say

Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election last night in one of Reform’s target seats, returning to Westminster and all but declaring a challenge to Keir Starmer’s leadership. For entrepreneurs, the question I’m being asked is: what could it mean for them and their businesses? There will be plenty to come over the coming weeks, but the best place to start is Manchesterism.

Burnham describes it as economic progress alongside social progress, delivered locally through devolution. After all, since the first devolution deal, the city region has averaged around 3% growth annually, with the highest productivity growth in the country. Oxford Economics called it the “star performer of the UK economy since 2008,” with central Manchester’s employment growth in the top five in Europe.

If you want Burnham’s own case, Politics UK published it in May. Politico has perhaps the most comprehensive account of what Manchesterism means in practice and whether it can scale, including the observation from Jim O’Neill that the story “pre-dates Andy” and rested on decades of political and policy stability. The Centre for Cities offers a sympathetic view of the devolution mechanics, while the New Statesman argues that Manchesterism is not socialism, and that Burnham has largely inherited rather than built the model.

The most rigorous empirical treatment is Michael Hill’s recent piece on our Adviser Sam Dumitriu’s Notes on Growth substack, asking whether Manchesterism is working. His conclusion is more nuanced than many: Greater Manchester is a genuinely strong performer among British city regions, though Edinburgh and Bristol have done better, and the growth has been concentrated in the centre, which Hill argues is a feature of agglomeration economics, not a flaw. If you want to be the smartest person in the room when this topic inevitably gets raised, this is the article for you.

It would be premature to judge Burnham. Events may yet conspire against his ambitions for the top job. Not that you’ll find many people to take the other side of that bet right now.

Sunset Boulevard

The British state is fast becoming a sizeable shareholder in startups and scaleups. Given the direction of travel, it’s worth revisiting Josh Lerner’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Lerner is the foremost expert on the economics of venture capital and how governments try (and mostly fail) to nurture it. He is no enemy of state support; he’s just a realist on its limits. There are, he argues, two ways to help venture capital: raise the demand for it, by making the country somewhere worth building in, or raise the supply, by writing cheques. Politicians reach for the cheques, because the money is the satisfying part.

The neglected half is what Lerner calls setting the table — the tax, regulatory and labour conditions that decide whether the capital has anywhere worth going. His starkest example is Japan, which funded a venture industry directly for years. The moment the money stopped, the industry went with it.

His other recurring complaint is the urge to be fair with the butter — to spread it so thinly across every region that it cannot be tasted anywhere, when venture is lumpy and rewards concentration. Geographic mandates have a poor record.

Then there is the picking itself. Take a stake in a company, the argument runs, and Whitehall gains a reason to clear its regulatory path. But if a barrier is worth removing for the firm the state owns a slice of, it is worth removing for all of them.

None of which is a case for doing nothing. The interventions that have worked share a shape. They match private money rather than allocate it directly, so the market signals where it should go. They keep ministers at arm’s length from the picking, behind the sort of moat New Zealand built around its fund of funds. And they carry sunset clauses and honest evaluation, so a scheme that isn’t working is allowed to end rather than harden into a permanent subsidy.

Backing British firms is the easy part. Setting the table is the hard part.

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Ink-redible

Congratulations to our Patron Chris Hulatt, co-founder of Octopus, who was made a CBE in the King’s Birthday Honours for services to entrepreneurship. In his own words:

“When we started Octopus, many people told us we were crazy and that our idea would never work — but entrepreneurship rewards the bold. From cold-calling 15,000 people from the Yellow Pages to raise our start-up capital, Octopus has grown into a group of businesses spanning energy, money and investments, education, death and divorce.”

As I argued in this week’s Three Big Ideas, honours for entrepreneurship remain far too rare. More of this, please – including a new order of chivalry for innovators.

Three Big Ideas #63

🎖️ Philip Salter, Founder

The King’s Birthday Honours landed last week, which gives me an excuse to return to ask the same question we’ve been asking since 2021: how many of these honours go to the people inventing and building things?

Five years ago, in our report Honours for Innovators, Ned Donovan and Anton Howes ran the numbers and found the answer was not many. We have now repeated the exercise across the last eight lists — every New Year and Birthday Honours since the end of 2022, more than 9,000 appointments to the Order of the British Empire — to see whether anything has shifted.

It hasn’t. Just one in ten citations mentions anything to do with innovation, science or industry, almost exactly where we found it in 2021. Strip out the broadest catch-alls of “industry” and “business” and it is lower still. Narrow it to the word “entrepreneurship” and it all but vanishes: 0.68% of honours. And these are generous counts — plenty of the citations we include are really for management or charitable work within a sector, rather than for invention in its own right.

As we argued in Honours for Innovators: “Given the current system, one would be forgiven for assuming that the surest way to an honour is to become a civil servant, politician, or philanthropist, or to achieve the fame that comes naturally to especially successful sports people, musicians, authors and actors.”

There are always honourable exceptions. In the latest list, our Patron Chris Hulatt, co-founder of Octopus, was made a CBE for services to entrepreneurship. More of this, please. Or, if the Government is feeling more ambitious, they might institute our dedicated order — what we called the Elizabethan Order — of genuinely equal standing to the OBE, with the same familiar four classes and a Sir or Dame at the top, awarded purely for invention and enterprise. It would cost around £66,000 a year: less than a single MP’s salary, for a payoff in status and aspiration many times larger.

This isn’t as radical as it might sound. Britain built its early reputation as the best place in the world to innovate partly by heaping status on inventors: the Society of Arts (now the RSA) struck medals to encourage them, monarchs granted them personal pensions, and there was even a chivalric order — the Royal Guelphic — that honoured the likes of Charles Babbage and William Herschel, the astronomer who discovered Uranus. It lapsed in 1837, not because the idea failed but because Queen Victoria could not inherit the crown of Hanover.

It’s time for a new chivalric order. This is the signal we need to give that Britain is serious about being the best place in the world to be a scientist, an inventor or a founder.

🔀 Mann Virdee, Head of Science and Technology

On Monday, the Government Office for Science published their updated five AI scenarios for 2030. It’s the first update to a set of scenarios originally developed in 2023 and first published last year — with the aim of helping policymakers plan for the future of AI.

Before getting into the details of the five scenarios, there’s an important methodological point. People often believe that scenarios are attempts to predict the future — but that’s not true. Scenarios are a rigorous and methodical way to consider several imagined future situations which could come to pass, but they don’t have to happen in order to be useful. They’re designed to be different from one another, and their value lies in helping policymakers identify trends and useful courses of action across a wide range of potential outcomes. That’s to say, we should avoid the temptation to focus on the scenario we think is most likely because that’s not the purpose of such exercises. At the same time, they should still reflect plausible outcomes, otherwise you end up with AI scenarios like this unhelpful graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

How not to do AI scenarios (Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)

The scenarios outlined in the GO-Science report range from a ‘slow burn’, to ‘augmented growth’, to ‘take off’ — and provide a more nuanced picture than the graph above. The report looks at six ‘critical uncertainties’ for each scenario: capability, model access, security, adoption, labour displacement and global cooperation.

Across most scenarios, AI drives significant productivity gains, helps to transform public services and make them more accessible, and accelerates scientific breakthroughs in fields such as health and energy — which will likely become key drivers of Britain’s productivity growth.

At the same time, across all scenarios, even in the slowest, the nature of cognitive work changes significantly, with routine, execution-oriented tasks being automated. There’s also a risk that workers become overly reliant on AI and have trouble operating if it fails. Another finding that holds true across all scenarios is the uneven adoption of AI and the compounding effect that will have, with a bifurcation where some realise the tremendous potential of AI while others are left behind.

It may not be the most groundbreaking report, but should serve as a good tool to help policymakers think more systematically about the future of AI and its adoption.

⚡Ian Ng, Researcher

The Trump administration placed Anthropic’s Fable 5 under export control last Friday, barring foreign nationals from accessing it. Anthropic responded by disabling the model for all customers. The ban came a day after the Europe 2031 essay imagined precisely a world in which Washington rations AI exports as a geopolitical lever. AI Minister Kanishka Narayan drew the obvious lesson: “access to AI capabilities is crucial.”

Europe’s dilemma is rooted in having no frontier model of its own. Adopt American models and you cede control of the access lever; adopt them slower than the US and the productivity gap only widens. If the past year has demonstrated anything, it’s the value of sovereignty and autonomy.

We live in an economy defined by chokepoints. Just as the Netherlands has ASML and Taiwan TSMC, Britain must think about the leverage we can build. We do have a seat at the table as a signatory of Pax Silica and the AI Security Institute being one of the few trusted to evaluate Mythos. However, it does not guarantee access to frontier AI models. The US has already floated a “trusted partner” scheme granting close allies privileged access. The tiers are being drawn now, and Britain cannot be sure if it will retain such access in future.

Leverage cannot be built overnight. The nature of a chokepoint is that once built, it cannot be easily replicated. ASML took four decades and an extraordinary accumulation of tacit knowledge across 5,000 suppliers. But that is precisely the argument for doubling down now. Britain, through our higher education sector, still holds an edge on talent. Our universities produced the researchers behind DeepMind and Arm. Without strategic chokepoints of our own, it matters all the more that we sharpen the edge that we still have and do everything to retain that talent.

Keeping talent is not solely about money because Britain will not win a bidding war with American labs. It is about whether there is anything here to work on. For frontier researchers that means compute, and the gap is stark: Isambard-AI, our most powerful machine, ranks eleventh in the world, while the top three are all American exascale systems.

We are not going to out-spend Washington. Government funding for British compute — £1 billion for AIRR, £750 million for Edinburgh — is barely a tenth of the £22 billion Microsoft alone is putting into the UK. Accepting American capital is unavoidable, and any honest plan builds most of its capacity that way. But some must sit on a sovereign core — publicly held compute backing British firms directly. AIRR is how Britain avoids having to 'rent its AI future from abroad’.

If the shelving of the Edinburgh supercomputer and the pausing of OpenAI’s Stargate UK were not wake-up calls enough, the export ban on Fable 5 should be. Certainty over the long term funding is crucial to attracting investment and retaining talent. That requires fiscal discipline from the government — both resisting borrowing for day-to-day spending as well as resisting the urge to axe capital projects when money is needed elsewhere.

None of this delivers leverage Britain can wield alone. But the fundamentals built at home are what give us something to bring to a table we cannot dominate.

Capital Gains

This week saw a bonanza of policy announcements during London Tech Week. So many that this morning we put out a Policy Update on the main things you need to know so I wouldn’t have to bombard you with them all now. Alongside the policy, we’ve also seen some major private sector investments announced, showing that our capital city still has the power to attract serious capital.

But are we telling the world the most compelling story we can about London — and the country more broadly? It’s the theme of our latest survey, which closes soon. Your views will be fed directly to those who matter. If you want to help us make the UK the best place to start and grow a business, ten minutes filling in our survey is one of the most efficient ways to do it. (The most efficient way is to share it with a group of like-minded founders so they can amplify your ideas.)

It’s your insights that inspire our reports, events and campaigns. Here’s how it happens.

First, conversations with entrepreneurs have driven our case across numerous reports for cutting the cost of visas. As detailed in our write-up, the Government has now launched a Visa Fees Reimbursement Scheme for Scale-Ups. Qualifying firms in clean energy, life sciences, and digital and technology can claim back up to £5,000 per employee — dependants included — and £25,000 a year per business in visa application fees for specialist hires recruited through the Skilled Worker, Global Talent or Scale-up routes. While these reforms are too restrictive, the message has clearly landed.

Second, as reported in our Policy Update:

“The AI Minister announced a new partnership between the Regulatory Innovation Office and the Health and Safety Executive to produce the first guidance on advanced robotics in the workplace. They will work with industry to deliver regulatory clarity for collaborative robots. This follows our roundtable with the Regulatory Innovation Office in May, in which founders said that pre-market guidance from the Health and Safety Executive would be valuable.”

Relatedly, the Regulatory Innovation Office, working with the Office for Product Safety and Standards, is convening a small, invite-only roundtable later this summer for companies working on consumer robotics — domestic appliances through to humanoids. The session will bring together innovators and senior UK regulators to discuss real-world regulatory and standards challenges, and how regulation can better support innovation. Drop Mann an email if you’re keen.

And third, a few weeks ago, after we reported that G-Cloud’s financial tests are blocking innovative scaleups, a number of politicians who read Perennial Gale got in touch to be connected to the founders affected. This week, we heard that officials are softening their position and the founders’ G-Cloud rejections have been overturned. Credit where it’s due. To its credit, the government has acted swiftly.

It’s not just robots, and it’s not just tech. We exist to be the bridge between all entrepreneurs and policymakers. Help us help you by telling us what you need.

Head Start

Education policy is largely impenetrable. Even when the government announces the right ideas, nothing much changes in practice for many schools, colleges and universities.

But just because the state lacks capacity, it doesn’t mean we need to fail the next generation. There is a lot of great work being done by self-driven educators as well as charities and private companies with limited input from Whitehall. We’ve worked with many of them.

To that end, we’re building a small group made up of people already helping the next generation become more innovative, entrepreneurial and enterprising. There will, of course, be a policy angle to the discussions, but as much as anything it will be about connecting those who are already building the future. Email me if you want to get involved.

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New Signing

I’m delighted to share that Ian Ng has joined us as a Researcher. He comes from Parliament, where he focused on innovation and technology policy. His work so far has covered AI regulation, emerging technology, the energy use of AI, and innovation funding. Connect with and follow him here.

Tender Spot

Our friends at Startup Coalition are currently researching a report into the barriers startups and scaleups face selling to government and are looking for case studies of different challenges startups have encountered. If you’re keen to be involved, drop Edd Elliott an email.

What’s Up

Our WhatsApp community has grown organically to over 750 people — yet only 5% of you are in it. So what are you missing? Perhaps the most useful thing is our occasional media opportunities. Just yesterday we posted this from a journalist writing for a national newspaper and we got some great replies from a few incredible founders:

“A journalist is looking for entrepreneurs whose disability has become a genuine edge in their business — something specific to the work itself. The story that sparked it is of a blind yoga teacher who finds she can describe poses, and how they should feel, far better than any sighted teacher could. (NB. They’ve covered ADHD and dyslexia separately, so they’re after something different this time.) If someone springs to mind — or it’s you — drop a line to press@tenentrepreneurs.org and we’ll forward it on.”

Join the group here. Any journalists reading this are welcome to send me their requests.

London Tech Week 2026

Our roundup of policy announcements across the AI Adoption Summit, London Tech Week and the AI Hardware Plan.

Grow on Trees

This week, the Maple Review published its final report. Spearheaded by Small Business Britain, its aim is to identify and dismantle the barriers to entrepreneurship caused by economic deprivation.

The problem it identifies is one that resonates with us and many in our network. As Blair McDougall, the Minister for Small Business, puts it in his foreword, “talent and determination are spread evenly across society, but opportunity is not.” Or, to misquote Ratatouille’s Anton Ego: “Not everyone can become a great entrepreneur, but a great entrepreneur can come from anywhere.”

We aren’t just about high-growth companies. For a great many people, starting a business is a survival strategy — a way to take charge when the labour market isn’t delivering for them.

Back in January, I wrote here about the Financial Confidence Taskforce I chaired for Xero, whose report was written expressly to feed into this Review. I’m pleased to say it has. Financial confidence — the ability to read your own cash flow, price your work and stay on the right side of HMRC — is one of the Review’s eight recommendations. So is the case the Taskforce made for teaching business and enterprise in schools, not merely personal finance, which our own work with Young Enterprise had argued for too.

Elsewhere, the Review notes that the government’s Growth Guarantee Scheme only backs term loans above £25,000. For a kitchen-table business, £25,000 is an intimidating sum to borrow. The founders the Review studied tend to need somewhere between £500 and £5,000 — enough for a laptop, a van, some stock, the first few months’ rent — the range that commercial lenders find least worth their while, since a small loan costs almost as much to administer as a large one. The state fills part of it: Start Up Loans covers £500 to £25,000, but it lends only to businesses in their first few years, and its affordability checks screen out the thin-credit, no-savings founders.

The Review’s answer is a national micro-capital system, paired with light-touch support. There is even a precedent: the old Enterprise Finance Guarantee backed loans as small as £1,000.

The other barrier worth dwelling on is the welfare cliff-edge, because it is a clear case of the state tripping up the very people it is trying to help. Move from Universal Credit into self-employment and you get a twelve-month grace period; after that, the Minimum Income Floor kicks in. From that point, the system can treat you as if you are earning the equivalent of a full-time minimum wage job, even when your actual income is much lower. The result is that a founder can lose support because of uneven cash flow, which, as everyone reading this knows only too well, almost every early-stage business experiences.

The Taskforce’s own research found that more than a third of small business owners don’t know whether they made a profit last month, and Xero’s data shows that 94% of small firms have at least one loss-making month a year, with four or five being typical. A rule designed around predictable monthly wages is a poor fit for the messy reality of building a business.

The lesson running through the Maple Review is that entrepreneurship policy cannot just be about the next unicorn. As regular readers will know, we aren’t afraid of championing Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs, but we also need to recognise the millions of people for whom entrepreneurship is a route to independence, resilience and a better life. If talent really is everywhere, our job is to make sure the opportunity to turn it into a business is too.

Xero Hour

Relatedly, I’m delighted to share that Xero’s Laura Burley has joined us as an Adviser. My favourite section of all our Advisers’ profiles is when they give their take on the UK. Laura nails it:

“The UK has genuine, structural strengths as a place to build a business — and it’s important to say that clearly, because the story is sometimes told with more pessimism than the evidence warrants.

“Britain has world-class universities, a deep pool of financial and professional services talent, and one of the most dynamic startup ecosystems in the world. The fact that over half of our fastest-growing companies are co-founded by people who chose to come here and build their businesses on British soil says something powerful about our underlying appeal.

“We now just need to work a little bit harder to remove some of the barriers, listen to founders and unleash that growth!”

Insider Trading

We appreciate the time many of you put into filling in our surveys. That’s why we want to honour it with the new role of Insider.

As long as you’re a business owner, you become an Insider by filling in our Entrepreneurs Survey and opting to leave your email address when asked, or filling it out anonymously and signing up here as a Member and ticking the Become an Insider box.

In exchange for filling in our 10-minute quarterly survey — so, 40 minutes or so of your time every year — we’ll give you priority access to our events. In particular, our No Agenda Breakfasts. We’ll build this community over time as we have with others, but fundamentally we are looking for entrepreneurs who share our mission to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business.

Seeds of Greatness

Over at The Generalist, Mario Gabriele has spent the past couple of months studying the childhoods of 260 exceptional entrepreneurs. The thing that unites them isn’t wealth, or the lack of it, but their experience of economic flux. While this is the beginning of a deeper study, early indications show that the founders he looked at grew up in families where their fortunes were rising or falling — scrambling towards a fortune, or watching one slip away: “Being moved by an economic vector is a more common pattern than belonging to a specific class.”

Saplings is the opener to a longer series, built from 260 founders, more than 560 books and 430 variables encoded for each one — everything from a father’s occupation to the number of times the family moved house. Most of that reading wasn’t done by a team of multilingual researchers but by AI agents working in parallel, one per book, with Claude doing the heavy lifting and a fair chunk of the source material in languages Gabriele doesn’t speak. I’ll be watching this closely.

Three Big Ideas #62

🏗️ Philip Salter, Founder

Since 1970, productivity across most of the American economy has roughly doubled. In construction, it has fallen by around 40%. A new VoxEU column by Dongkeun Choi and Munseob Lee unpacks why.

The fall in the price of equipment — computers, machines, instruments — has been one of the great engines of the post-war economy, adding around 1.3 percentage points a year to growth in output per person. But structures have moved the other way. The relative price of buildings in the US is now 80% higher than in 1970, and that rise claws back almost two-fifths of the gain from cheaper machines. The net contribution of falling capital-goods prices is therefore closer to 0.8 points than 1.3.

“About three-quarters of the drag runs through standard capital deepening. When structures are expensive, firms accumulate less of them, and production slows accordingly. The remainder operates through innovation. Laboratories, offices, and pilot plants are themselves structures. Stagnant productivity in construction raises the cost of doing science.”

This is not an American curiosity. Choi and Lee examine thirteen advanced economies, and all but Belgium sit in the same troubling quadrant: construction prices up, construction productivity down. Across the entire sample, the UK records both the largest fall in construction productivity and the steepest rise in the relative price of building.

Why has construction forgotten how to build? The leading suspect is regulation. Hilber and Vermeulen show that the restrictiveness of the UK’s planning system, more than any physical shortage of land, drives the long-run rise in house prices; D’Amico and co-authors tie America’s construction-productivity stagnation directly to land-use rules. A planning regime that makes every project bespoke, contested and slow has meant construction is one of the few industries that never industrialised — it never achieved the scale economies and standardisation that lifted output almost everywhere else.

This resembles Baumol’s cost disease. When productivity stalls in one sector but the rest of the economy still needs its output, the relative price rises and everyone else pays for it. What makes construction unusual is that there is no way to route around it: the economy cannot make do with fewer hospitals, fewer fabs or — increasingly — fewer data centres. The cost of standing still in construction shows up everywhere.

As is often argued, restrictive planning acts as a tax on housebuilding. But it has also held back innovation in the construction industry. Alongside planning reform, we need to look deeper at what’s made us less efficient at building.

🏹 Mann Virdee, Head of Science and Technology

When I was invited to give evidence before the Business and Trade Select Committee on industrial strategy, I emphasised three main points. First, a few outliers skew the statistics on British science. Once they’re removed, British science isn’t quite so ‘world-leading’. Second, the state can play an important role in procurement, such as through Advanced Market Commitments, and in de-risking the journey to market for entrepreneurs. Third, I offered some historical background on how Silicon Valley came to be the world’s pre-eminent hub for innovation and entrepreneurship.

But one question from the committee stumped me slightly: how effective is the Catapult Network? It’s a part of the UK’s R&D ecosystem I hadn’t really looked into in detail, although my overwhelming sense was that the Catapults were usually an afterthought in conversations about innovation and commercialisation I’d been part of. I thought it best to say nothing rather than pretending I had a more considered response.

The Catapult Network was created in 2011 after a report by Hermann Hauser that proposed an elite network of centres to help translate breakthrough scientific discoveries into commercial industries. It was modelled on 12 international comparators, including Germany’s Fraunhofer institutes.

There have been a series of reviews with mixed findings. A 2014 review called for doubling down on the approach, saying that it was mirroring international comparators, and recommended expansion. A 2017 review by Ernst & Young found that the centres were not being properly managed and that they had no common purpose statement. A 2021 government review recommended reviewing the Catapults less often, but it also found that the High Value Manufacturing Catapult alone had generated 75% of all the Catapults’ income the previous year, showing a highly uneven impact.

Against this background, there are reports that ministers are lining up another review of the Catapults to assess their value and impact after concerns that some have failed to support regional growth and help build national champions. It’s rumoured that streamlining and job cuts may be on the cards.

I recently wrote about an OECD report on the ‘valley of death’ between Britain’s strong support for research up to prototype and its thin support for demonstration, customer validation and early market entry. That report’s proposed solution was to expand the commercialisation role of the Catapults.

So the function clearly matters. The gap the Catapults were built to fill is, if anything, widening. The question remains whether these particular institutions are still the right vehicle for the job.

One approach is to keep tinkering and topping up funding, hoping that some future permutation works. The other is to know when to call it a day and build something new with a sharper remit, explicitly tied to growth and closing the demonstration-to-market gap. Founders I’ve spoken to lean towards the latter. But before we can choose well between these, we need an honest diagnosis of why the Catapults are underperforming — and what, concretely, we would do differently.

📈 Rafi Pollack-Joyce, Policy Analyst, Public First

Tony Blair’s intervention last week has put AI in the public sector at the heart of the fledgling Labour leadership debate. But is he right that governments can harness the technology to deliver more with less?

Earlier this year, Public First surveyed 3,335 public sector workers across ten countries. The headline finding is striking. AI is everywhere. Around three-quarters of public servants now use it, and most started in the past year. That probably makes AI the fastest-adopted technology the public sector has ever seen. But there’s a big difference between using a tool and changing how the government works.

The countries doing best aren’t simply the ones with the biggest AI sectors. They’re the ones that have made AI feel usable inside government. That means clear permission, decent training, approved tools, and a way for good experiments to become normal practice.

Singapore is the clearest example. Its advantage isn’t magic technology. It’s that public servants have more of the scaffolding around them: guidance, tools, training and institutional support. For example, Singapore is twice as likely as the UK or US to conduct mandatory training for employees. The results are clear: compared with the UK and US, Singaporean public sector workers are more than twice as likely to use AI daily, to be using it for complex tasks, and to think the public sector in their country overall is using it effectively.

The UK and US have a more awkward problem. Both are AI leaders in the obvious sense, with companies, researchers and policy attention. But inside government, use is patchier. People are interested, and often already experimenting, but many still don’t have clear guidance on what they’re allowed to do or how to move beyond low-risk tasks. While just over half of public servants in the UK and US feel confident using AI tools, that rises to 85% in Singapore.

That matters because unclear permission doesn’t necessarily stop AI use. It just makes it messier. People experiment on personal accounts, stick to shallow use cases, or run pilots that never really scale.

Ultimately, this is fixable. The hard part isn’t persuading public servants that AI matters, it’s building the basic machinery around it: procurement, guidance, training, data access and routes to scale.

Blair is right that AI could change the state. But the first test is more mundane: whether the government can manage the adoption that’s already happening

Order, Order!

It won’t have escaped many of you that this week Tony Blair published an essay of close to 6,000 words on what he thinks is going wrong in the Government. Within hours it was leading the news. Whatever you make of him or the essay, he still has the power to lead the conversation even though he’s not leading the country.

I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about what to make of it. It covers welfare, energy, defence, immigration, Europe and the shape of the state. It is worth noting, though, that he mentions, in passing, the idea of equalising capital gains with income tax as “something rejected by successive governments for good reason”. We covered those reasons in detail last week.

The headlines have focused on the political implications and the rebuttals, but the part worth the most attention is his theory of politics. Blair’s argument is that British politics keeps getting the order wrong: it does the politics first and the policy second. For example, Labour is asking how to see off Reform before working out what the right thing to do actually is. His answer, which he calls the “radical centre,” is to flip that around. It’s an unhelpfully named term, but the idea underneath is clear enough:

“The centre – properly defined – is where you put policy first and politics last. So, you begin with the question: what is the right answer? And only once you have that do you engage in the political task of persuading people of it.”

Later he adds:

“You work out the correct analysis, then the correct answer, and shape your political strategy around it. Where, therefore, the correct answer requires radical change, the centre should be the radical changemaker.”

(“Changemaker” — another dreadful term.)

This is how Blair has thought about government for thirty years. It’s why, as Prime Minister, he ran delivery units and chased a “what works” pragmatism that often annoyed his own side. His foreword for our essay collection The Way of the Future from a few years ago captures this.

It’s why, when asked recently by the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel what advice he would have given Lee Kuan Yew in the 1960s, he waved the question away as the wrong way round. He had gone to see Lee in Singapore in the 1990s, when he was still Labour leader. Lee’s first words, by Blair’s account, were: “Why are you seeing me? Your party’s always hated me.” Blair’s answer was that he had watched what Lee had done in government and wanted to learn from it. As he wrote when Lee died, Lee “was the first to understand that modern politics was about effective government, not old-fashioned ideology.”

“Britain’s problem,” Blair writes, “isn’t with a ‘Westminster’ bubble. It is with a ‘politics’ bubble.” He thinks, correctly I think, that “the politics of the future may be better understood by those presently outside politics.” It’s certainly true of the people reading this.

Think of the founders navigating the tax system, integrating AI into their businesses, dealing with planning rules and on the front line of energy costs. Entrepreneurs understand what’s coming and what’s needed better than almost anyone inside the politics bubble. I would say the same of those who work closely with founders, as it’s their job to know what’s keeping them up at night.

Closing that gap is the whole point of what we do, which is why I’ll ask you once more to fill in our Entrepreneurs Survey if you haven’t already. It takes about ten minutes. We use it to build the kind of evidence Blair is gesturing at: namely, what founders really think about tax, talent, regulation and Britain’s place in the world, and we take it straight to government and the media. The last wave made the news in Sifted, The Telegraph and City A.M., and fed into our submission to the Treasury. The more founders who respond, the harder our findings are to ignore.

Given Blair’s central message, it’s perhaps ironic that most of the attention has fallen on the political implications of his essay. The bit worth taking from it isn’t about Labour at all. It’s his theory of politics: one that many of the most effective leaders follow. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the great Peter Drucker gave executives the same advice 60 years ago:

“One has to start out with what is right rather than what is acceptable (let alone who is right) precisely because one always has to compromise in the end.”

Pocket Money

We’re delighted to welcome Zara Ransley as an Adviser to The Entrepreneurs Network. Zara is co-founder of MyPocketSkill, an award-winning platform that helps 13- to 25-year-olds earn, save, invest and learn about money. It has a quarter-of-a-million-strong community in the UK and partners including Lloyds Banking Group and the BBC. Find out more, including why she supports The Entrepreneurs Network and backs the UK, here.

Self-Raising

We’re also pleased to welcome Geeta Sidhu-Robb as an Adviser. A multi-award-winning serial entrepreneur, Geeta is now launching The Bootstrappers’ Breakfasts, a national breakfast series and podcast for female founders building their first £1 million, with lessons from women who bootstrapped to £20 million and beyond. It opens in London on 7 July, the first of five UK cities in the series, and is free to attend. She’s also on the lookout for partners to help bring it to life. Do get in touch with her if that’s of interest — you can scroll down here to connect.

Tinker Taxer Founders Fly

First, if you’ve not yet completed our latest Entrepreneurs Survey, what better way to spend this sunny Bank Holiday? It only takes around 10 minutes, but its insights and impact — as you’ll read below — go much further. Politicians can’t make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business if they don’t know what entrepreneurs need. Tell them.

Some policy areas are neglected. Others are tinkered with to death. Capital gains tax sits firmly in the second camp. In the last fifteen years, the headline CGT rate has been raised, cut, raised again, and split into multiple sub-rates. And now equalising it with income tax is being seriously discussed in Westminster again.

Entrepreneurs’ Relief was introduced with a £1 million lifetime cap, expanded to £2 million, then £5 million, then £10 million, then cut back to £1 million, then rebranded as Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR), then ratcheted from 10% to 14%, to 18%. The last clean settlement was Lawson in 1988. Every Chancellor since has felt obliged to fiddle.

BADR is now capped at a level low enough to be irrelevant for serious scaling, and has been continuously revised in ways that signal political instability to anyone considering where to base their business. We have, in effect, the worst of both worlds.

The behaviour the Treasury actually wants — or should — is reinvestment. Capital gains are taxed differently from labour income to attract entrepreneurs from abroad, keep the ones we have, and incentivise them to do it again. In our recent Entrepreneurs Survey, 72% of founders told us they would invest the proceeds of a more generous BADR in someone else’s startup, while 70% said they would launch a new venture. The reinvestment instinct is overwhelming, and it is the thing the UK tax system most needs to protect.

The case for equalising CGT with income tax comes dressed in sophisticated economics: get the base design right — exempt a “normal” return on capital through a rate-of-return allowance, make losses more generously offsettable — and the headline rate stops mattering. It is a serious argument. It is also, as the tax policy expert Tom Clougherty argued in The Times yesterday, one that does not survive contact with how entrepreneurship actually works.

On losses, Clougherty notes the basic asymmetry: “an entrepreneur’s potential losses are uncapped; their upside is highly uncertain. If you tax the gains without subsidising the losses (and you should definitely not subsidise losses) you are skewing incentives around risk-taking.” On the rate-of-return allowance, his point is even sharper: it “assumes that any returns above a ‘risk-free’ rate are ‘unearned rents’ — unrelated to skill, effort, or the risks taken. This assumption does not hold up in the real world. High returns on capital are not random strokes of luck — often they are a manifestation of precisely the qualities that drive economic progress.”

That is the substantive case. Then there is the practical one. The most carefully designed CGT regime in the world is useless if founders can’t plan around it. A founder building a company is making a ten- to fifteen-year bet. The UK tax system has been resetting every year.

CGT does more than raise revenue. It tells founders what the country thinks long-term, illiquid, risk-bearing capital is worth. A regime that keeps changing tells them something else: that the tax treatment of their decade-long bet will turn on a single Budget, election or leadership race.

The behavioural evidence is visible. Pre-Budget realisation spikes are now a standard feature of UK tax data, as founders rush to crystallise gains ahead of expected changes. The 2024 spike was the largest on record. Our own polling found that 62% of founders personally know an entrepreneur who sold up or left the UK after the 2024 Budget. Seven in ten know one planning to leave because of the current or expected tax regime. None of this is hypothetical — which is why over a thousand of Britain’s most ambitious founders, including those behind Synthesia, OakNorth, Zopa and CMR Surgical, signed our letter to the Chancellor when this was last being seriously considered.

Clougherty puts the pattern starkly: “If you look at the blended marginal tax rate on capital income — combining the effects of corporation tax, CGT and dividend tax — since 2000, you see two big spikes: one immediately after the financial crisis, and another after the pandemic. Why do we keep responding to economic crises by hiking taxes on investment? Could this possibly have anything to do with our failure to bounce back from these downturns?”

A tax system can be defensible at every point in time and still be impossible to plan around, because founders are not pricing today’s rate — they are pricing the range of rates they expect to face over the next decade. Britain has spent 15 years teaching them to expect the worst.

Sweden faced the same question in 2003: how to tax founder gains without choking off new ventures. It didn’t cut the rate. It changed when the rate applied. Corporate tax on capital gains from selling shares in unlisted companies was deferred indefinitely, provided the proceeds went back into other unlisted companies. Founders who exit and consume pay tax. Founders who exit and reinvest defer it.

As Luis Garicano and Per Strömberg set out, Sweden — a country of 10 million — has produced more unicorns per capita than almost anywhere in the world. Alumni of the first wave of Swedish tech successes have founded and funded the second because the 2003 reform let them recycle exit proceeds at scale. It worked because it targeted people who already had deal flow, judgement and operating experience — and because, crucially, it has been left largely alone for over two decades. Reward reinvestment, then get out of the way.

This isn’t a left-right argument. One of Mark Carney’s first acts as Canadian Prime Minister, in March 2025, was to cancel his predecessor’s planned increase to the capital gains inclusion rate. The centre-left Carney framed it as catalysing investment and rewarding the people who take risks to build things.

The Treasury will point out that income reclassification through closely held companies is a real problem. They are right. Owner-managers can dress up labour income as capital gains to lower their tax bill, and the rate gap creates the opportunity. But the answer is not a blunt rate hike on every capital gain. It is to fix the specific structures that allow the reclassification in the first place. Punishing genuine entrepreneurship to close a definitional loophole is a category error.

Any reform has to pass two tests: does it keep founders building and reinvesting, and can they plan around it for a decade? Everything else is just tinkering.

YEF @SXSW

On Tuesday, we’ll be inviting a small number of our Young Entrepreneurs Forum to an event at SXSW London. It comes with a free pass to the entire festival, which normally costs over £1,000. If you’re not a member of the group, sign up for free today. Spaces are very limited for this one, but there will be plenty more events on the horizon.

Intelligent Design

In our latest interview for our UK AI Fieldbook series, Mann Virdee speaks to Jarek Rzepecki about how AI can help design complex hardware as a single, unified system.

Three Big Ideas #61

🧑‍💼 Philip Salter, Founder

AI adoption is usually discussed in terms of cost and compute. In More Than Just Plug and Play, a working paper published this month, Diane Coyle and colleagues at the Bennett School use the ONS Management and Expectations Survey to show that UK firms with stronger management practices in 2020 were significantly more likely to go on to adopt AI by 2023.

Digging a bit deeper, it turns out different technologies call for different organisational capabilities. The same management practices that predict AI adoption show no relationship with the adoption of robotics, specialised software or specialised equipment.

We already know the UK has a management problem. Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen’s seminal 2007 paper introduced a structured way of measuring management practices across firms and countries, and the body of work that followed has consistently shown UK firms lagging US counterparts — with a particularly long tail of badly managed firms dragging down the productivity distribution. The policy response has tended to bundle this into general management improvement — training, peer learning and leadership development — rather than targeting the specific practices.

The new evidence narrows the target. As the paper notes, “it is specifically monitoring practices, such as use of KPIs and target-tracking, along with decentralised product development, that predict adoption.” Practices around continuous improvement and employment had weaker or insignificant effects.

Among multi-site firms, those where product development decisions sit closer to the frontline were more likely to adopt AI. The authors suggest “AI applications are more likely to be context-specific and require domain or technical knowledge to identify valuable use cases.” The combination of autonomy and measurement is the specific organisational structure that predicts AI adoption.

The policy implication is that management training interventions may be better targeted on capability-building around performance measurement and data architecture, combined with organisational design that empowers technical teams.

Policy aside, there’s a lesson here for founders bullish on AI. You don’t need a government programme to adopt the organisational shape this research describes. Building KPI infrastructure and pushing product decisions closer to the people who understand the work is something firms can do on their own. The companies that get this right won’t be waiting for policy to catch up. (Mann picks up the structural side of this problem below.)

💻 Mann Virdee, Head of Science and Technology

The OECD, in collaboration with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, recently released a report on technology adoption in the UK.

On the one hand, their findings indicate that British firms do well on mature digital technologies. The UK’s adoption of cloud computing, data analytics and basic process tools sits above EU and OECD averages, and SMEs have largely closed the gap with larger firms in using these foundational tools. On the other hand, for more advanced technologies, such as AI, robotics and automation, uptake is more limited than one would expect for a country with the UK’s income level (see Philip’s article above).

Take robotics, for example. The UK has a strong manufacturing legacy, particularly in the Midlands — yet adoption of robotics among manufacturing firms trails the EU average. The OECD attributes this to a mix of factors that compound in smaller manufacturers: high upfront costs, the average age of business owners, distrust of technology vendors, and a ‘wait-and-see’ approach whereby firms only adopt after peer validation. Each barrier is manageable in isolation, but together they create a structural drag on uptake in the sector in which the productivity dividend should be largest.

Geography compounds this problem. The OECD’s data on regional adoption finds that between 2018 and 2022, average SME adoption of AI and robotics technologies stood at around 15% in London and the South-East, but just 1.9% in the North-East. The concentration in the Golden Triangle is well-documented, but the within-region picture is just as stark. In the West Midlands, the Black Country trails most innovation indicators despite sitting next to one of the UK’s strongest industrial clusters.

The OECD’s overarching diagnosis is that Britain supports research well through to prototype (Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6–7), but that support thins out at the stage of demonstration at scale, customer validation and early market entry (TRL 8–9). It’s at the later stage that firms package innovations into off-the-shelf products with the reliability and support that allow non-frontier SMEs to adopt them. Without that later stage of support, brilliant science struggles to become widely diffused technology.

The report’s proposed solution is to expand the commercialisation role of the Catapults, paired with the British Business Bank to crowd in private co-investment. For our part at The Entrepreneurs Network, we’ve been bringing together robotics founders with the Regulatory Innovation Office and the Health and Safety Executive to try to make their scaling journey smoother — exactly the kind of intermediary work the TRL 8–9 gap demands at scale.

🛡️ Harry Pitts, University of Exeter

Britain’s drive towards defence reindustrialisation and rearmament will depend on whether smaller, more agile firms can be integrated into the defence supply chain. In a new report for Babcock, The Next Line of Defence: Unlocking SME Potential in UK Defence from Policy to Practice, our team at the University of Exeter’s Defence, Security & Resilience Network found that the primary barriers relate to culture and process.

We interviewed 20 cutting-edge defence SMEs, both those well-established in the supply chain and those pivoting in from civilian sectors. The picture that emerged is of significant capability waiting to be unlocked, set against procurement systems that struggle to engage with it.

Ukraine’s high-tech resistance to Russia’s invasion has demonstrated what agile, software-led innovation can do on the modern battlefield. The UK has firms capable of producing similar capabilities at pace, but defence procurement, administrative systems and financing frameworks remain designed around large, established suppliers operating on multi-year cycles.

SMEs need credible demand signals to justify the investment and recruitment that scaling for defence requires. The forthcoming Defence Investment Plan is the obvious vehicle, and its credibility with the SME community will depend on how concretely it signals where money will flow and over what timeframe.

There is also a vital role for primes — the large, established contractors that sit between government and the SME base. Our interviews suggest that the most productive prime–SME relationships invert the usual power dynamic, with primes acting as supporting partners that help smaller companies articulate the value of their products to government, navigate procurement processes and bridge the gap between SME agility and government risk aversion. This is a markedly different role from the traditional one of subcontracting work down a tiered supply chain.

Babcock’s SME Engagement Charter, informed by our evidence, is an attempt to formalise this. Against a backdrop of rapid geopolitical change, primes have the power to realise in practice the promise of government policy in this domain.

Batteries Not Included

At our roundtable hosted by the chair of the Regulatory Innovation Office, Lord Willetts, robotics founders warn that outdated regulation, structural conservatism and an absent insurance market are holding back one of the UK’s most promising technology sectors

Poll Position

Westminster has spent much of this week focused on political survival. Moments like these tend to sharpen political attention around groups, voters and constituencies that parties believe they cannot afford to ignore. A core aim of ours is to ensure founders command more of that attention.

Entrepreneurs are economically important but politically diffuse. They’re often too busy building companies to organise as a bloc, despite the fact that the decisions made in Westminster often shape whether businesses start, scale or stay in the UK.

But founders have power — not least because they create jobs and wealth, but also because they’re often unusually mobile. A company can be incorporated in one country, funded in another and built across several more. Countries increasingly compete for them not just through tax rates or regulation, but through narrative and ambition. The question is whether the UK can convincingly present itself as a good place to build.

The new wave of our Entrepreneurs Survey is focused on exactly that question. We are asking you how the UK compares with rival hubs such as New York, Paris, Dubai and the Bay Area; whether Britain still communicates a compelling offer internationally; and what story you would tell someone deciding whether to build in the UK.

Previous waves have garnered serious media attention and shaped conversations in Westminster and beyond. We showed, for example, that seven in ten founders knew another entrepreneur considering leaving the UK over tax policy, and that employment taxes were viewed as a greater barrier to hiring than skills shortages or regulation. That’s the kind of evidence we can only produce when founders tell us.

Whether you have completed previous waves or this is your first time taking part, we would value your perspective. It takes around ten minutes to complete and you can do so anonymously or opt in so your comments feed into a short paper we’ll write on this topic.

Whoever is sitting in Number 10, completing this survey gives us the evidence to push for the changes entrepreneurs need.

Breakfast Club

No policy agenda; no panels; and definitely no pitches. Just coffee, pastries and a dozen or so entrepreneurs talking openly about what’s on their minds. That’s the idea behind our No Agenda Breakfasts.

This new format is inspired by the fact that some of the most useful things we hear come from unstructured conversation rather than formal research. It’s also a way for us to meet the growing demand from you, ensuring more entrepreneurs are able to attend an event during the year.

The first one takes place on Tuesday, 2 June at Forsters’ Baker Street offices, from 8.45am to 10am. Spaces are deliberately limited — request a place here.

We’ll be looking for four partners to host one breakfast a month over the course of a year. If your organisation works with founders and you’d like to support the series, get in touch.

Of Bourse

Our Adviser Juliet Gouldman has shared an opportunity for female founders considering public markets. The Aquis IPO Academy — created through a partnership between Aquis Stock Exchange and Barclays Eagle Labs — is a free, six-month programme starting in September to help UK growth companies get public-market ready. If you’re a female founder or co-founder running a business with £1 million+ turnover, applications are open until the end of May. Find out more here.

Source Material

We’re delighted to welcome Geeta Sidhu-Robb as an Adviser. Geeta is the founder and CEO of WCorp, which works with companies globally to improve workplace culture, leadership and retention for women. She founded her first business, Nosh Detox, in 2008 from a £2,000 overdraft, and since retraining as a coach has advised founders and CEOs through IPOs and exits — most recently, Mia Drennan of GLAS Agencies, through a private equity exit valued at over £1 billion.

On why she’s joined us, Geeta says: “The best policy comes from people who’ve actually built something. The Entrepreneurs Network takes entrepreneurial experience seriously — not as a backdrop, but as the source of real insight.” Welcome, Geeta.

Find out how you can join us as an Adviser here.

The King’s Speech 2026

What the Government’s legislative agenda means for Britain’s entrepreneurs.

Cloud Nein

As the local election results come in, it’s worth remembering what councils actually do once the campaigning stops: they spend money — a lot of it on technology, and a chunk of that through G-Cloud, the framework designed to give innovative British suppliers a clearer route into the public sector. That is the theory. The practice looks rather different.

Just this week, and not for the first time, I heard from the founder of a genuinely innovative British technology company that has been blocked from the next iteration of G-Cloud. The reason was not poor delivery, a weak product or lack of relevance to public-sector buyers. It was negative EBITDA and a lightly capitalised balance sheet, both of which are completely normal for growth-stage tech companies.

It goes without saying that the government should not be cavalier about supplier risk. But there is a difference between a company that is structurally insolvent and one that is investing in product, people and expansion. There is a difference between a supplier whose failure would bring down a critical public service and one offering a substitutable software or data product. This is precisely the kind of domestic scaleup ministers claim to want in the public-sector supply chain.

This ‘computer says no’ approach needs to be replaced with something smarter. If procurement rules cannot distinguish between those cases, they will select for the wrong things: incumbency, corporate backing and the ability to satisfy a bureaucratic risk model. They will not select for innovation, and competition will suffer.

This matters because public procurement is one of the largest levers government has. If the state wants more British scaleups, it needs to be a better customer to them. If it wants more competition in public services, it cannot design frameworks that only large incumbents can comfortably navigate. If it wants domestic technology companies to grow, it should not tolerate blunt financial tests that keep them out of public-sector markets.

Get in touch if you have experienced similar issues with procurement frameworks, financial viability assessments or public-sector buying processes. If there is enough feedback, we’ll launch an evidence session through the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Entrepreneurship.

Three of a Kind

A final call for applications for our JVF Female Founder Ambition Series, run in partnership with the Jessica Vollman Foundation.

The series brings together ambitious female founders for three small virtual roundtables. The first session, High Potential, takes place 20 May, 5pm–6pm, for earlier-stage founders with early traction who are working out how to scale. The second, High Growth, takes place 27 May, 5pm–6pm, for founders already growing quickly and navigating the pressures of expansion. The third, Going Transatlantic, takes place 3 June, 5pm–6pm, for founders operating, or seriously planning to operate, in both the UK and the US.

Insights from the series will feed into a briefing paper shared with our network and media contacts. We’ll also be undertaking interviews with some founders for Network Effects.

Crowning Achievement

Recipients of The King’s Awards for Enterprise have been announced. Congratulations to all the entrepreneurs in our network who received the award. You can already apply for the next round here. As mentioned here previously, there is a new Young Founder category that will spotlight founders aged 18–30 who are actively leading their businesses and building success with impact.

Three Big Ideas #60

🧠 Mann Virdee, Head of Science and Technology

Google DeepMind is perhaps the most transformative startup Britain has produced. It’s now synonymous in the minds of many, myself included, with its protein structure prediction system, AlphaFold, and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

But did you know that to secure early funding, DeepMind’s CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis once had to pitch investor David Gammon at his home — during which he was also required to win approval from Gammon’s wife and three teenage sons? It seems strange now that such a successful company could have been set back or derailed if just one of them hadn’t been convinced by his pitch.

It’s one of many stories in Sebastian Mallaby’s new book The Infinity Machine, which follows DeepMind’s rise from a startup in a Russell Square townhouse to the heart of Google’s operations. It’s well worth a read for those who want to understand what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, as well as to explore broader questions about the future of scientific research, the nature of consciousness and the potential of artificial intelligence.

The family-veto story is important. In 2010, no British venture capitalist was set up to fund a company whose stated mission was to ‘solve intelligence’. That meant that Hassabis had to piece together funding from Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and others. By the start of 2014, the money had run out and the only viable option was to sell to Google.

Some mistakenly draw the conclusion DeepMind should not have sold to Google. But Google’s compute and resources were necessary for DeepMind to thrive. The lesson is a broader one. Britain still struggles to fund moonshots at the scale and time horizon they need.

It’s been said time and time again that our universities are world class. So too are our founders. But the patient, multi-billion-pound bets that turn blue-sky research into world-leading companies remain largely an American endowment. Closing that gap is partly about R&D and tax design, and partly about cultivating high-conviction angels and family offices willing to back unproven founders with audacious ideas.

That makes the recent news from David Silver, Hassabis’s old Cambridge friend and the man behind AlphaGo, feel like a test. Silver’s London startup Ineffable Intelligence has raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation, which is the largest seed round in European history, with the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund investing alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed, Nvidia and Google. The capital is still mostly from the US, but the company is British. It remains to be seen whether we can keep it that way as Ineffable scales — and whether we can grow and support more companies like it.

🐝 Philip Salter, Founder

Britain’s productivity problem is, in part, a problem of its big cities outside London underperforming. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow — in most comparable countries, second-tier cities punch above the national average. In ours, they don’t. Closing that gap matters not just for the people who live there but for national prosperity.

A new CEP paper from Aadya Bahl and Henry Overman, Hive of Talent, uses Greater Manchester as a case study to ask what it would actually take to close one component of that gap: skills. The numbers are sobering. Manchester’s productivity sits 35% below London’s, against a 20% gap between, for example, Paris and Lyon. Even partly closing it would require — among other things — an additional 180,000 workers with degree or sub-degree qualifications.

The paper considers three pathways through which Manchester adds graduates: people who grow up there, people who move there to study, and people who move there for work. On the local cohort, even matching London on both attainment and retention, the GCSE pathway would generate only an extra 4,285 graduates a year. The local cohort is “just too small relative to the size of the workforce for even quite sizeable improvements in attainment or retention to generate the scale of changes needed.”

Manchester’s universities attract and retain around 11,400 graduates from outside the city region each year, but a meaningful slice of that depends on international students. The Government’s Immigration White Paper may dampen this significantly. And on non-education migration, the picture is similarly fragile. Manchester currently gains around 2,606 graduates a year through net international migration but loses 1,219 to the rest of the UK, for a net gain of about 1,387. Halve net international migration and the net gain shrinks to just 84 a year — a fall of roughly 1,300 graduates through this channel alone.

As the paper acknowledges, keeping more skilled workers in Manchester only helps if there are skilled jobs there for them to do:

“London benefits from a unique concentration of universities, high-skilled employment opportunities, and strong graduate labour markets that attract and retain graduates from across the UK and internationally… replicating these conditions in [Greater Manchester] would require changes that go well beyond skills policy alone, as factors such as labour market opportunities, wages, and supporting infrastructure all shape graduate location choices.”

The wider lesson is that no single lever moves the dial, and the supply-side levers don’t move it at all if the demand-side jobs aren’t there to absorb the workers. For founders and policymakers tempted by simple stories about either just fixing schools or visas — important as both are — this is a useful corrective. Manchester’s skills problem is a coordination problem, and one the rest of Britain’s big cities, with smaller cohorts and weaker universities, will face in even less forgiving forms.

💼 David Bharier, British Chambers of Commerce

By the late 1990s, most businesses had a website. While many firms simply replicated their brochures online, a smaller group — from Amazon to early digital-native retailers — built their operations around the technology entirely. It was that depth of adoption, not the speed of uptake, that ultimately separated the winners from the rest.

We may be seeing a similar pattern emerge with AI. Much of the current debate focuses on how quickly firms are adopting the technology. On that measure, the UK appears to be moving at pace. Analysis conducted with the University of Essex, using British Chambers of Commerce survey data from early 2026, finds that over half of SMEs are now using AI in some form, up sharply from around a third last year.

But this headline figure masks a more important reality: not all AI adoption is equal. For most firms, AI is not yet translating into meaningful workforce change. Around 95% of users report no impact on headcount, while 86% say job roles remain unchanged. This reflects the fact that most businesses are still using relatively light-touch, off-the-shelf tools — such as ChatGPT or Copilot — to support existing tasks rather than fundamentally redesign them.

The picture looks very different among the smaller group of firms embedding AI more deeply into their operations. Among these businesses, around one in five report staffing reductions attributable to AI, and they are more likely to have reorganised job roles. So it is not adoption itself that is driving change in the labour market, but the intensity of it. This distinction matters. Workforce restructuring may be concentrated among a relatively small but potentially growing segment of firms with adoption.

The key question now is whether this group remains niche or begins to grow. If it does, the lesson from the early internet era is clear: it will not be the firms that simply “use AI” that shape the future, but those that reorganise themselves around it.

In a labour market where wage floors have risen sharply and new firms are taking on fewer staff, the challenge for policymakers and businesses alike will be to ensure that this transition delivers productivity gains while bringing the workforce with it.

Dinner Table Policy

At several events over the past few weeks, I’ve heard a familiar complaint: the media does not represent entrepreneurs well. There is clearly a perception problem. Our Out of Focus briefing paper found that for every founder who thinks coverage is good, five think the opposite. By more than seven to one, respondents said the issues that matter to them are not given sufficient attention in the media. As a former journalist, I am well aware of the constraints and want to be constructive. It is still a bit half-baked, but here’s my pitch.

It begins with a 2018 post by Robin Hanson. Firm productivity depends heavily on management quality; yet even after controlling for intelligence and conscientiousness, substantial variation remains. Hanson thinks most MBA programmes do little to close this gap. Their primary function is selection and network formation. The missing ingredient, he suggests, is direct exposure — having lived through the realities of management or observed them closely.

Empirical evidence supports this. In Norway, economists Hans Hvide and Paul Oyer found that a majority of male entrepreneurs start firms in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers. Those who do tend to outperform peers whose fathers did not work in the same industry. They term this “dinner table human capital”. The effect persists even for founders whose fathers died before they entered the workforce. This is not about introductions. It is about sustained exposure.

Hanson proposes extending this logic to management education:

“If one can learn much from just watching the inside story of real firms over several years, that suggests a big win: record the full lives of many rising managers over several years, and show a mildly compressed and annotated selection of such recordings to aspiring managers. Such recordings could be compressed by deleting sleep and non-social periods. They could be annotated to identify key decisions and ask viewers to make their own choices, before they see actual choices. Recordings might be selected two-thirds from the most successful, and one-third from a sampling of others.”

A lighter version of this idea could plausibly reach a wider audience. Imagine a documentary series that follows a handful of founders over a year or two — cameras in the room for the co-founder disagreements, the hiring calls, the moments a deal nearly falls apart. The good, the bad, and the genuinely difficult. The format exists — Boiling Point, Inside the Factory, Twenty-Four Hours in A&E — just pointed at the people building Britain’s next generation of companies.

The alternative is two more decades of The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den, which have shaped the public perception of entrepreneurship. Matt Clifford’s argument from 2019 still stands:

“Perhaps the cardinal sin is [The Apprentice’s] perpetuation of the crude stereotype of the ruthless, selfish entrepreneur who sees money as the only marker of success. The reality is very different. Teams, not solo heroic figures, are responsible for the biggest entrepreneurial success — there’s huge value in having a co-founder. Also, the desire to create new companies is more often tied to wanting to maximise impact in the world, not just trying to increase their bank balance.”

Dinner table human capital is real, and the country’s media is one of the few mechanisms we have for setting more places at the table. I can’t help thinking that we might be surprised by the public’s appetite if we were a bit more ambitious about what’s being served.

Frank King

Alex Chalmers is consistently worth reading. In his latest Chalmermagne Substack article, he argues that British technology policy has cycled through a series of half-theories without settling on a coherent account of how technology drives growth.

His opening example is instructive. Barnsley was recently designated Britain’s first ‘Tech Town’, receiving £500,000 over eighteen months to support AI skills and adoption — roughly £2 per resident. The accompanying announcement claimed the status would “position Barnsley as the UK’s trailblazer.”

Even if you disagree with parts, the central point should be taken seriously: the binding constraints on growth — energy, planning, employment law, and the broader regulatory environment — largely sit outside technology policy itself.

Opt Into the Loop

Much of what we do at The Entrepreneurs Network depends on partners — organisations that host, sponsor, fund research or otherwise help us serve founders better. To make it easier to share what’s coming up, I’m starting a brief fortnightly email setting out current opportunities to get involved: events to sponsor, research to partner on, roundtables to host, and the like.

If you would like to receive it, just let me know, and I’ll add you to the list.

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Its Name is RIO

Britain’s capacity to invent has never been the problem. But getting new technologies from the lab to the market depends on capital, talent and a regulatory environment willing to make room for things that didn’t exist yesterday.

The asymmetry at the heart of regulation makes this harder than it sounds. When a regulator permits something that subsequently causes harm, the costs are visible, attributable and potentially career-ending. When a regulator blocks something that would have worked — a drug that never reached patients, a technology that never scaled or a business model that never got off the ground — the costs are invisible and diffuse. Nobody is held to account for the cures that weren’t approved or the growth that didn’t happen. That asymmetry shapes behaviour in predictable ways: caution is rewarded, boldness is punished and the default is delay.

That’s a problem in any era. It is a particularly acute one now. Fast-emerging technologies are all hitting regulatory frameworks built for a different world at the same time. The question is whether the UK’s institutional environment can adapt quickly enough to build and capture the value here.

This week, we hosted Lord Willetts and the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) alongside a room of robotics founders at Mishcon de Reya. The discussion was under the Chatham House Rule, but sign up to Network Effects for an overview of themes that emerged from the room. The conversation was proof – not that any was needed – that tapping into the experiences of entrepreneurs is absolutely critical for understanding policy reform.

RIO sits within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, where it was established in October 2024, with a straightforward but ambitious remit: to update regulation, speed up approvals and ensure regulatory bodies work together effectively.

RIO has just launched the second phase of its Front Door pilot, now open to science and technology businesses across all sectors — not just RIO’s current priorities. The exercise is simple: tell them the regulatory barriers holding your business back. The results will shape how the Front Door service develops.

RIO’s door is open.

(I appreciate not everyone reading this is in science and technology, which is why we, and others, need to look at whether there are lessons we can apply to other domains.)

Shareholder Value

The European Commission is reviewing the rules governing how shareholders receive information, vote and engage with listed companies across borders — and is looking for practical evidence from those whose voices tend to be underrepresented in these debates: minority shareholders, private investors, smaller banks and others with direct experience of cross-border investment or general meetings. If that’s you, contact Martha Wiesenbart at Europe Economics.

Plain English

Language proficiency is one of the strongest predictors of economic integration — and of how far people progress once they’re here. Workers who gain functional English move into better-paid roles and progress within organisations. It also opens up entrepreneurship as an option.

The Department for Education is reviewing the qualifications and content that support this — ESOL provision for adults who don’t speak English as a first language — and wants to hear from employers of all sizes who recruit or support staff in that position. The survey takes 10–15 minutes and closes on 8 May. Complete it here.

Ives Had the Time

Our Research Director Eamonn Ives is off to pastures new. Over the last three years and eight months, Eamonn has proven to be a first-rate researcher, meticulous editor and stand-up guy. He has also been instrumental in our evolution, as he shared:

“While I still think there’s a role for the traditional in-depth think tank report, effective policy influence is increasingly being wielded through shorter, sharper outputs, of the sort we’ve pivoted to of late. Often those outputs — whether interviews, briefing notes, or off-the-record roundtables — have been dependent on the network of founders, investors, ecosystem builders and other policy experts that [we have] painstakingly assembled over the past decade and more.”

Connect with Eamonn on LinkedIn to follow his journey. For those of you who attend our events, I’m sure you’ll still see him around.

Three Big Ideas #59

🔬 Mann Virdee, Head of Science and Technology

It’s not new or insightful to note that Europe struggles when it comes to converting bright ideas and cutting-edge science into unicorns.

What is new, however, is a recently published comparative study in the Journal of European and International IP Law which seeks to explain why. The researchers looked at the legal frameworks of the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy and found a structural difference in how these countries deal with technology transfer (TT). In particular, they claim that the strictness of regulation is less important than the clarity of the regulation.

On one side you have the US model, rooted in the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act. This Act transformed TT by allowing universities, small businesses and non-profits to retain IP for inventions developed from federally funded research, as well as to license discoveries from that research to private-sector partners. That provided a big incentive for universities and researchers to turn discoveries into viable consumer products.

The authors of this study argue that the US model has succeeded because it has created a predictable and coherent regime which gave universities clear ownership of IP, and which also gave investors confidence to invest. The UK has tried to mirror the US model and has been moderately successful, resulting in what the authors call a ‘relatively mature environment’. Both the US and UK models benefit from having clear institutional ownership and Technology Transfer Offices (TTO).

On the other side, there’s Italy’s fragmented model. Italy produces lots of spin-outs but no unicorns (with the notable exception of Bending Spoons, a Milan-based tech conglomerate whose focus is on acquiring and managing products such as Evernote). In Italy, the lack of clear, universal legislation creates a network of ‘autonomous rules’ that leaves founders and investors in a state of constant uncertainty.

So while the US and UK have stricter regulations around academic-entrepreneurial roles than Italy, the authors of this research contend that the ‘coherence, accessibility, and institutional robustness of TT regulation are decisive factors for the emergence of university-born scale-ups’.

Or, to put it another way, clear regulations — even if stricter — are better than vague ones. When a founder knows exactly how many days they can consult (for example, around 13 days at Stanford) and who owns the IP, they can get on with the business of scaling.

Although the UK is in a strong position, there’s more work to be done to streamline TTO processes. Scientific excellence is only half the battle. The other half is ensuring our legal and institutional frameworks are configured to let that excellence evolve into global success.

📚Philip Salter, Founder

In 2008, Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class was published, arguing that schools were on the verge of being disrupted. Built around a factory model of standardised content, uniform pacing and batch processing of children, he argued that they were structurally incapable of personalising learning to individual needs. Technology, he contended, offered a way out — not by improving the existing model, but by routing around it entirely.

Christensen predicted that 50% of high school courses would be delivered online by 2019. They weren’t. Billions had been spent putting computers into schools, yet the technology has simply been co-opted into the existing model of instruction.

Last week’s government announcement, which invites EdTech companies to build AI tutoring tools for disadvantaged pupils in the UK, is encouraging. As the press release acknowledges, private tutoring can accelerate learning by up to five months, but it remains the preserve of those whose parents can afford it.

The ambition is right, but Christensen’s insights call into question the design: “Plugging a disruptive innovation into an existing business model never results in transformation of the model; instead, the existing model co-opts the innovation to sustain how it operates.” The Pioneer Group — eight companies, curriculum-aligned, teacher co-designed and DfE safety-approved — is structurally set up to do exactly that. Given the constraints any government programme operates under, it’s perhaps inevitable.

The Pioneer Group will co-design, pilot, evaluate and report, with national rollout targeted for 2027. While this is a relatively ambitious timeline for government, the technology is moving at breakneck speed. There is a real risk this programme institutionalises a version of AI the market has already moved two generations beyond.

In truth, the disruption Christensen predicted is already happening. A motivated 14-year-old with a capable AI can already access something closer to a genuine Socratic dialogue on any subject than most classrooms offer — without a Pioneer Group, without curriculum alignment and without waiting until 2027.

🎓Ayushma Maharjan, Centre for Policy Studies

The UK is one of the best places in the world to produce ideas. But few of those ideas are turned into commercial strength at home. Britain’s academic strength is hard to dispute. Ten of the world’s top 50 research universities are British. However, that scientific excellence has failed to proportionally translate into a dense network of R&D-active firms and the scale-up ecosystem needed to translate research into economic output.

The gap is clear in the data. Cambridge and Oxford rank only 69th and 77th globally as innovation clusters, a striking contrast to their top five standing in university rankings. A country can be brilliant at science and still underperform if little R&D happens inside businesses.

Analysis done by the Centre for Policy Studies suggests that the UK higher education sector performs a relatively high share of national R&D, at around 24%, compared with 11% in the United States. The UK business sector, by contrast, performs about 70% of total R&D, below the roughly 80% share seen in the United States. In leading innovation economies, every dollar invested in higher education R&D is matched by $7 to $9 in business R&D. In the UK, that ratio is less than $3.

One plausible explanation for the UK’s position is that Britain’s wider business environment is not attractive enough for firms to build, test and scale. This is clear from companies like AstraZeneca and OpenAI, which have chosen to halt investment or move activity elsewhere citing tax burden, regulatory complexity and high energy costs.

If Britain does not address this problem, the economic returns on British science will continue to be captured elsewhere. Evidence suggests 80% of UK university spin-out IPOs have taken place overseas since 2012. Likewise, despite ranking highly in AI research, the UK retains only 48% of its talent.

No amount of tax credits or industrial strategies can compensate for a hostile business environment. The UK needs a more innovation-friendly economy. For entrepreneurs, that means a simpler and predictable business environment, competitive taxation, and stronger incentives to stay and scale in Britain.

Cancel Culture

There is a lazy explanation for why Britain has fewer billion-dollar companies per head than the United States, why our founders sell up earlier, and why some are leaving. That explanation is culture. All too often, I hear that Britain lags the US on entrepreneurial culture, with many arguing, by the same logic, that Europe lags behind the UK.

As Alex Nowrasteh argues this week, culture is too often a placeholder where an explanation ought to be. His target is the social scientists’ habit of invoking culture whenever a real mechanism proves elusive: fertility rates, corruption, train punctuality, economic development — all attributed to culture when a better answer may lie in the incentive structure:

“Someone observes a behavioral difference between groups or countries. They can’t immediately identify the mechanism. So, they invoke ‘culture’ as an explanation or, even worse, ‘the culture.’ The word lands with a satisfying thud that sounds like an explanation but isn’t one. It is the terminus of inquiry, not the beginning.”

As Nobel Prize winners George Stigler and Gary Becker cautioned in 1977 in De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum, we should not explain behavioural differences by assuming people in different places have different preferences. Instead, we should treat preferences as broadly stable and look harder for differences in prices, constraints and incentives. Douglass North made a similar point in 1990 in Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance: culture is a partial solution to problems repeatedly encountered in the past. It is an output, not a cause — the behavioural residue of incentive structures that have been in place long enough to harden into norms.

Perhaps the cleanest test of this argument comes from Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose work on institutions and prosperity won the Nobel Prize in 2024. Their signature example is North and South Korea. Same language, same ethnicity, same history, and the same culture up to 1945. One is now among the richest countries on earth, the other among the poorest. The culture was identical on both sides of the border. The institutions, and the incentives they created, were not.

Many of you reading this will share our world view. The good news is that, unlike with the hand-wavy explanation of culture, this gives us something to work with. We can change the rules. After all, Britain has done exactly this, repeatedly.

Right to Buy, introduced in 1980, helped turn Britain into a nation of homeowners. What followed was an asset-conscious, equity-minded electorate, attuned to property prices in ways that still shape politics today. Millions of people were handed a significant financial asset and, rationally, began to behave like people who owned one. Our property-owning culture is, in large part, the product of a policy choice made four decades ago.

The privatisations did something similar. The “Tell Sid” campaign for British Gas shares was not a cultural exercise. It was an attempt to create a class of retail shareholders, and it worked. Popular capitalism was not latent in the national character, waiting to be unlocked. It was downstream of a set of decisions about who could own what.

Introduced in 1994, the Enterprise Investment Scheme created tax advantages for investing in early-stage companies. Before it, angel investing in Britain was extremely niche. After it, a new pattern of investor behaviour emerged, scaled up and eventually became normal enough to attract the label of culture. What looks like cultural change is often just tax policy.

The point is not to defend each of these policies. It is simply to note that, in each case, behaviour followed the rules. Culture was the lagging indicator, not the force leading the charge.

The most common claim I hear is that the US has a culture in which failure is more accepted — even celebrated — than in the UK. But this is often asserted without reference to the fact that the institutional treatment of failure differs substantially too. US Chapter 11 bankruptcy law is explicitly designed to let businesses reorganise and continue. Britain’s insolvency law remains more creditor-oriented, with personal liability attaching more readily to directors. The founder walking away from a failed company in Delaware does so in a different legal environment from the one in Doncaster. Whatever attitudinal differences exist are at least partly downstream of that.

Nowrasteh is careful not to dismiss culture entirely, and rightly so. Values and norms are real. His argument is methodological: look first for the institutional and incentive-based explanation. If you exhaust those and culture is still standing, then perhaps you have found something. But more often, you probably just have not looked hard enough.

Treasury officials reading this will be pleased to know that incentives don’t just mean more money. For instance, despite flaws, patents and the legal system in Britain encouraged innovation to flourish, creating a market for inventions. And as we argued in Honours for Innovators:

“Raising invention’s status and prestige was crucial to how Britain first got its reputation during the Industrial Revolution as the best place to innovate. Invention came to be seen as a viable and attractive career path, not just financially but in terms of the social standing that could result from it – something that was purposefully cultivated by those seeking to improve the country’s technological prospects.”

The Enterprise Investment Scheme didn’t exist in 1993. Right to Buy didn’t exist in 1979. The entrepreneur who couldn’t find an angel in 1992, or couldn’t spin out of a university in 1998, wasn’t held back by culture. They were held back by the absence of policies that came later.

The culture isn’t the problem. The rules are.

A Working Theory

Over on Network Effects, this week we published a cracking interview with Alfie Pearce-Higgins, co-founder of Rodeo on the impact of AI on job markets. Alfie makes a great point about the unintended consequences of making it costlier and riskier to employ people:

“[T]he question everyone is asking — “will AI destroy jobs?” — is less important than the question almost nobody is asking — “will AI change how work is contracted?” If even a moderate fraction of employment shifts to self-employment, the consequences for tax revenues, pension saving, the welfare safety net, and the entire social contract that has been built around the employee-employer relationship are extremely significant. And that shift may well happen not because of any deliberate decision or policy, but as the accidental byproduct of three trends that nobody has bothered to join up.”

Read it in full here.

блакитне озеро

Our good friends at Blue Lake VC have just announced the launch of this year’s UK–Ukraine TechBridge Investment Accelerator, delivered with support from the UK Government and Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation.

The programme will support 20 high-growth Ukrainian startups at Late Seed to Series A stage, helping them get investment-ready and build connections with UK investors ahead of a pitch showcase at London Tech Week in June.

Over five weeks, participating founders will receive hands-on mentorship from UK venture capitalists, investor office hours and practical support on pitching, UK market entry and scaling. The programme is equity-free and designed to help Ukrainian startups overcome one of the biggest barriers to expansion: building a fundraising network in a new market.

Applications are open until 27 April 2026. More information here.