Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
This week, Eamonn Ives asks whether Waymo can inspire an uptick in innovation, Bella Rhodes explains how to turbocharge EMI, and Ed Hezlet makes the environmental case for reducing taxes on electricity.
In our latest interview for our UK AI Fieldbook series, Anastasia Bektimirova speaks to Paul Patras on how AI is transforming mobile networks to prevent communications blackouts and optimise energy consumption.
This year’s winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences are a win for entrepreneurship, with Joel Mokyr awarded it for showing how the Industrial Enlightenment made growth possible through ideas and openness, and Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt recognised for their explanation of how creative destruction keeps economies advancing.
On Mokyr, Dr Anton Howes, author of many of our reports, wrote the definitive reaction post following his win. As Anton notes, Mokyr put entrepreneurs and innovation at the heart of the story of how our species went from near-universal poverty to relative prosperity:
“Whereas most of the public, and even many historians, think of the causes of modern economic growth – the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution – as being rooted in material factors, like conquest, colonialism, or coal, Mokyr tirelessly argued that it was rooted in ideas, in the intellectual entrepreneurship of figures like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and in the uniquely precocious accumulation in eighteenth-century Britain of useful, often mechanically actionable knowledge. Britain, he argued, through its scientific and literary societies, and its penchant for publications and sharing ideas, was the site of a world-changing Industrial Enlightenment – the place where progress was thought possible, and then became real.”
This worldview aligns with one of our core tenets: to elevate the status and champion the role of entrepreneurs across society. From our reports, it shows itself most clearly in Anton’s Blueprint for a New Great Exhibition, which makes the case for why we need to recreate the Great Exhibition of 1851, to both inspire innovation and foster a culture of improvement among frontier entrepreneurs and the general population. More broadly, it’s the reason behind every meeting and every event we host.
Turning to Aghion and Howitt, the name of this very Substack, Perennial Gale, isn’t a reference to Britain’s inclement weather, but a quote from Joseph Schumpeter’s description of capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction.” His observation in 1942 was that our economic system is neither stable nor static, but constantly shaped by innovation, entrepreneurship and change. Entrepreneurs are central to this, driving forward economic progress by disrupting existing systems.
Aghion and Howitt put some numbers on the theory. As the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated in its press release:
“In an article from 1992, they constructed a mathematical model for what is called creative destruction: when a new and better product enters the market, the companies selling the older products lose out. The innovation represents something new and is thus creative. However, it is also destructive, as the company whose technology becomes passé is outcompeted. In different ways, the laureates show how creative destruction creates conflicts that must be managed in a constructive manner. Otherwise, innovation will be blocked by established companies and interest groups that risk being put at a disadvantage.”
As backers of upstarts over incumbents, you can see why we’re so keen on the winners.
Aghion and Howitt’s work also highlights an emerging challenge: the growing productivity gap between frontier firms and laggards. The best business models and innovations aren’t diffusing as rapidly as they once did. This raises familiar, but no less urgent, questions like: What barriers prevent promising startups from scaling? Why aren’t successful innovations spreading to more firms? How can policy accelerate knowledge transfer while preserving the competitive dynamics that reward innovation?
We exist to answer these questions, but we also need insights from the frontline of entrepreneurship. Answers on a postcard (or email).
Table Matters
On Wednesday, we will host a roundtable lunch with Alex Depledge MBE, Entrepreneurship Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
This one will be focused on scaling businesses with either £10 million in annual revenue or that have raised over £10 million in venture capital funding. If that’s you, we might still be able to squeeze you in – please request a place here.
I know Alex has been tirelessly hosting roundtables like this with businesses at various sizes and stages up and down the country, but if you haven’t had the chance to chat with her, please get in touch with me before Wednesday with what you think the Chancellor needs to know going into the Budget, and I’ll pass it on directly to her.
Oxford Come ’ere
Since our very first Ecosystem Builders event, the positive feedback has been supplemented with a fair critique: what about the rest of the country? Well, we’ve listened, so I’m delighted to announce that we’re going to Oxford, courtesy of our co-hosts Dr Fabio Bianchi (Oxentia) and Meric Sevgi Eren.
Oxford Edge has a workspace you’ll be able to work from, so we’re encouraging people to make a day of it. Find out more here.
Our sights are also set on Birmingham, Leeds, Cardiff, Manchester, Cambridge and Edinburgh, so watch this space for more information. And get in touch if you’re happy to host a bunch of energetic ecosystem builders in your city.
The Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) are the backbone of Britain’s innovation economy, fuelling thousands of startups up and down the country. Yet the annual and lifetime investment limits for these schemes have been frozen for nearly a decade. In that time, inflation has eroded their real value, meaning their impact is now roughly three-quarters of what it once was, and could soon fall to half of their 2016 strength if nothing changes.
That’s why we’re backing Growth Beyond Limits, a new campaign calling on the Chancellor to raise the lifetime company investment limit to £30 million, or £40 million for Knowledge-Intensive Companies (KICs), and the annual limit to £15 million, or £25 million for KICs, alongside a commitment to review them every three years. If you believe Britain should back its most innovative businesses with funding that keeps pace with the times, you can read the letter here and sign it alongside me and many others here.
State of AI
Yesterday, Nathan Benaich released his annual State of AI Report 2025. While coming in at over 300 slides, as always, Air Street Capital’s General Partner delivers. There is a lot to unpack, but I’ll focus on one aspect that matters to everyone reading this.
The report covers OpenAI’s new GDPval benchmark, an evaluation launched in September that measures model performance on economically valuable, real-world tasks across 44 occupations. The results are clear: models now rival human experts across many professions.
As many of you will know first-hand, general-purpose models are proving effective as professional assistants, and companies like Lufthansa are forecasting thousands of administrative job cuts by 2030 on the back of AI.
Entry-level jobs are being hit hardest. Hiring for junior software and support roles has stagnated since 2022, even as overall employment rises. Law school applications are up 21% as graduates hedge their bets, while seasoned professionals appear more insulated – for now, at least.
Not everyone agrees this signals an imminent crisis. A Yale–Brookings study suggests AI’s long-term disruption may take decades. Yet both OpenAI and Anthropic report growing use of their models for workplace tasks.
This is largely a good thing – after all, this is what increasing productivity and growth looks like. But if this is the way of the future, entrepreneurial skills will be at a premium. It’s a strange world where being an entrepreneur is a safer bet than some established professions, but that may be where we’re heading.
(I recommend reading it in full. For the futurism-enjoyers, flip to the predictions on slide 11 and then to slide 305. The deck starts with a scorecard on last year’s calls, such as an open-source alternative surpassing OpenAI’s o1 (“YES,” with DeepSeek-R1), and challengers failing to dent NVIDIA’s dominance (“YES”), then lays out ten bold bets for the next 12 months. Highlights include the prediction that a major retailer will get over 5% of online sales from agentic checkout as agent-ad spend hits $5 billion.)
Still Stock-Still?
Last Friday, I discussed Britain’s downturn in listings. What a difference a week makes. Since then, the Manchester-based The Beauty Tech Group listed on the London Stock Exchange with an initial market cap of £300 million, while the pipeline for the first half of 2026 looks promising.
A lot of my job revolves around pointing out how things could be better. But that shouldn’t be mistaken for thinking Britain is the basket case that some seem to think it is. We have cracked, or inherited, many of the hard things that make a country a great place to be an entrepreneur – from world-class universities and a strong rule of law to a global financial centre, a global language, and a culture that prizes creativity and fairness.
Too often, we make the easy things harder than they need to be – through complex taxes, clunky regulation, and slow-moving policymaking. But I like to think these are problems to be fixed, rather than insurmountable barriers to crash up against.
This is why, at The Entrepreneurs Network, we’re optimistic.
Message from our Partner
Zestic AI has announced a new partnership with Proteus, the UK’s leader in strategic change management, to help organisations move from AI pilots to measurable performance. By combining Proteus’ $100 billion transformation dataset and change-management expertise with Zestic AI’s AI-first architecture, the partnership enables companies to embed AI directly into live and new transformation programmes – without disruption. Together, the two firms aim to help Boards and C-suites turn AI from experiment into enterprise capability, accelerating productivity, innovation, and growth. Read the full announcement to learn how the partnership is redefining what intelligent transformation looks like in practice.
Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
This week, Philip Salter hails the work of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, Eamonn Ives looks at why startups are taking longer to go public, and Anastasia Bektimirova discusses whether agentic AI could spell the end of the line for transaction costs.
⏳ Philip Salter, Founder
Back in 1999, a small group of British and American academics launched what would become one of the most enduring studies of its kind: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). A quarter of a century on, its 150,000-plus interviews each year across more than 120 economies give us a rare window into trends driving entrepreneurship across the world.
A couple of weeks ago, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor UK National Report 2024/25 was launched. Despite the many challenges over the years, the UK is a far more entrepreneurial country than it was at the turn of the millennium. At last count, 36% of working-age adults are either running a new business or intend to start one within the next three years – the highest level since 1999. There has also been remarkable progress in who is starting businesses. Early-stage entrepreneurial activity by women has more than tripled since 2002, rising from just over 3.5% to 10% in 2024, while immigrants and ethnic minorities remain consistently among the most entrepreneurial groups in the UK.
It’s worth adding a note of caution. Entrepreneurship isn’t – or at least shouldn’t – be an end in itself. What matters is whether it leads to better outcomes – for founders and for society at large. Still, for policymakers (and for “policy recommenders” like us), it’s vital to have a firm grasp of the facts. Longitudinal studies like GEM are gold dust.
That’s why it was encouraging to see last month’s announcement that the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will fund the Generation New Era study — a landmark project that will follow the lives of more than 30,000 babies born in 2026 through their early years, and potentially well beyond.
Britain’s landmark 1946, 1958 and 1970 cohort studies show how early life conditions shape later health and attainment, and how childhood poverty leaves lasting marks. They also reveal that intergenerational income mobility declined for those born in 1970 compared with 1958.
Internationally, landmark longitudinal studies have transformed our understanding of health and human development. The Framingham Heart Study, launched in 1948, was the first to show that heart disease isn’t an inevitable part of ageing but is driven by modifiable risk factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and obesity – insights that revolutionised preventive medicine. Likewise, Harvard’s Nurses’ Health Studies, which have followed more than 230,000 women across several cohorts since 1976, have demonstrated how lifestyle and diet shape long-term wellbeing.
If there’s a lesson for entrepreneurship policy, it’s that we still lack this kind of long-term evidence about the people who start businesses – who they are, what shapes their choices, and how their ventures affect both their lives and the wider economy. Perhaps it’s time to invest in longitudinal research that tracks entrepreneurs from the very start of their journeys – capturing not just whether they start businesses, but how those ventures evolve, what drives success or failure, and what lasting impact entrepreneurship has on individuals and communities.
🗓️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Across much of the world, the age at which companies decide to go public is trending steadily upwards. Few have done more to catalogue this than University of Florida’s Jay F. Ritter, whose carefully organised data on American IPOs over recent decades show that in the 1980s the median age of a company listing was just eight years old, while last year it had grown to 14. A similar trend can be seen in the United Kingdom, which partly explains why it now boasts one of the ‘oldest’ exchanges in the world – with centenarian companies responsible for a sizeable portion of the London Stock Exchange’s combined market cap.
Much ink has been spilled about the reasons for this increase. Fingers are quick to be pointed at the challenges involved in the process of listing, and then existing as a public company. The dulling effect of the Stamp Duty Reserve Tax, which levies a 0.5% tax on the purchase of shares, has also been singled out for criticism. Certainly, there is merit in these accusations, and the Government would do well to ease these burdens – as reports suggest they might be.
A more positive potential explanation, however, is that privately-held companies nowadays have a wider range of options for raising capital. From family offices, to more established VC firms, to sovereign wealth funds and private equity, promising startups are finding that they don’t necessarily have to turn to public markets to get the capital they need to grow. This will have other consequences for the economy that warrant consideration, but from the perspective of the individual entrepreneur, greater choice can only be a good thing.
In the past week, Beauty Tech Group joined the LSE with a £300 million IPO, while Princes Group and Shawbrook also announced plans to list there. This was enough for Bloomberg to declare that London had broken its ‘IPO drought’. While one swallow does not make a summer, three in quick succession should give ground for optimism that sunnier days are ahead. Whether that will be enough to reverse long-term trends, and help determined founders realise their IPO ambitions sooner rather than later remains to be seen; after all, Princes Group was originally founded all the way back in 1880.
♟️ Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
Here’s a claim I keep coming back to: discovery is among the most important phases of any complex project. It’s also the one we struggle to give the right shape to, often ritualising it into paperwork that turns discovery into something defensive rather than inquisitive. By discovery I mean the process of figuring out what problem we’re actually solving, who is affected, which constraints are real, what trade-offs people will accept in practice, and what failure modes we should avoid. In policymaking, discovery is how you turn unknowns into choices. It’s also how you avoid designing for a world that doesn’t exist.
You’ll be familiar with how this often plays out in infrastructure projects. Dan Davies offers a good illustration of how our quasi-judicial system invites “the problem factory”: since a project can be derailed late on a narrow point, teams try to pre-empt every hypothetical, amplifying every perceived hazard, which can narrow options to solutions shaped by imagined vetoes. This looks more like optimising for surviving scrutiny rather than uncovering a workable bargain. Pre-emptive risk-aversion is discovery done backwards, which is also why it can underdeliver.
Here’s a thought experiment on what discovery might look like instead. Seb Krier’s new essay imagines that competent, personally aligned AI agents could lower the transaction costs that make early-stage bargaining so hard, such as finding affected parties, eliciting preferences, drafting options, stress-testing trade-offs and tracking commitments. It’s hard for people to reveal what they actually want and what they’d trade for it, so we end up with one-size-fits-all rules.
If agentic AI could lower those costs, more problems could be handled through bottom-up bargains rather than top-down approximations. Take a high-street resurfacing. What if instead of running a generic consultation, every household and shop would get a civic agent to express bounded choices (night works versus weekend closures, access windows, tolerable noise levels). The contractor would publish several concrete schedules with mitigations, agents would then aggregate responses and negotiate towards a feasible package – for example, trading later start times for guaranteed delivery windows. The few obligations that actually change behaviour, such as quiet machinery, acoustic screening or automatic compensation if access is breached would be escrowed, and a public compliance log would make monitoring straightforward. Instead of pre-emptiveness, we’d get early evidence about what people are happy to accept before decisions are made.
The essay is clear-eyed about the boundaries: default rights still matter, bad alignments would do harm, and none of this makes politics vanish. But the core claim that better, cheaper discovery through faster and broader participation could expand and improve the feasible set of options is worth noting. If tools like this can reliably lower the cost of discovery, we might spend less time defending paper universes and more time building in the real one.
First, the good news. This is the last time I’m going to harass you (at least via the newsletter) to fill in our latest survey. We’re on the cusp of our target number of responses, so if you’re an entrepreneur, you could be the one to make our day. If you’re part of any other network of founders, sharing it would be incredibly helpful.
Now, the bad news. London has dropped to twenty-third place globally for IPOs. Twenty-third. Behind Oman, Mexico and Croatia. According to Bloomberg, volume this year dropped 69% to $248 million, the weakest haul in more than 35 years. In 2013, UK IPOs accounted for more than half of the European fundraising total – this year it’s just 3%. Ouch!
No wonder the Treasury is reported to be considering giving a stamp duty holiday to new London Stock Exchange (LSE) listings. The measure would exempt investors from the 0.5% tax on buying the shares of newly listed companies in the UK, applying for a period of two to three years after the company’s stock market flotation.
While the current state of public finances might not allow it in November’s budget, the Government should really scrap stamp duty entirely. As we argued in Backing Breakthrough Businesses through our Private Business Commission:
“Stamp Duty Reserve Tax (SDRT) is highly distortive, affecting decisions about share turnover, suppressing share prices, and biasing investors against UK-listed equities at a moment when we need the exact opposite – something that also biases entrepreneurs against listing in, or indeed setting up in the UK. It disproportionately punishes marginal investments too. Whereas Corporation Tax taxes the return on investments and relieves the cost of investing through allowances, SDRT has no such allowances and effectively taxes both the investment itself and the return on it, even when those returns are negative.”
It’s not just a matter of tax, though. The exchange remains more highly regulated than many of its competitors. Victor Riparbelli, founder of UK-based $2 billion AI unicorn Synthesia, recently tore into the LSE, describing it as “more like a hospice than a stock exchange,” lamenting the City’s preference for rent-seeking over innovation. Riparbelli isn’t threatening to leave, but he is articulating what many founders quietly think but often won’t say – at least, not publicly.
To be fair, there are pockets of understanding in the current Government (as there were in the previous one) about the scope of the challenge. As the Science Minister Lord Vallance said only yesterday:
“We are streamlining listing and prospectus rules, removing outdated restrictions on follow-on capital, and have launched PISCES – a new stock-exchange model to help private companies scale and provide a stepping-stone to public markets”...“We are pushing better regulation, including through the work of the Regulatory Innovation Office which has cleared away barriers in four technology areas and will expand its work over the next year.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Britain excels at creating startups – we raised over £8 billion in the first half of 2025, more than France and Germany combined. But we’re losing companies at the scale-up stage. If we want to remain a globally significant economy of the future, we need to fix that – pronto.
Now, I’m afraid, the ugly – and it’s connected.
In the same week London slumped in the IPO rankings, a debate erupted about the economic contribution immigrants make to the UK. On Sunday, Hannah Prevett, Associate Business Editor of The Sunday Times, made the business case for immigration and shared her personal story on LinkedIn, which is worth reading if you missed it.
But here’s why it matters for our capital markets crisis: you can’t fix the IPO drought without securing the fundamental building blocks of growth, which include, among other things, having the talent pipeline to create IPO-ready companies in the first place.
According to The Economist, Synthesia only exists in London because Victor Riparbelli wanted to move to California but the US denied him a visa. Our latest Job Creators data makes this concrete. Hannah shared the numbers in her column:
“Analysis of Britain’s fastest-growing companies from The Entrepreneurs Network in 2024 showed that 39% have at least one foreign-born founder or co-founder. That is far out of proportion to the roughly 14.5% of the general population born overseas, and early indications suggest the figure will be higher still for 2025.”
Somehow it looks like I managed to end on a positive note. Let’s double down on this. And if you need another dose of optimism, watch Jensen Huang talk up Britain in an interview with Faisal Islam.
Blick 101
Our Corporate Partner Blick Rothenberg is hosting a breakfast roundtable with the esteemed Centre for the Analysis of Taxation on how our tax system should evolve to meet the needs of a modern, competitive economy. Our Patron, Chris Hulatt, co-founder of Octopus Group, will be on the panel. It would be great to see you there. Find out more here.
Connect 10
Our friends at Enterprise Nation reached out following the launch of Supply Connect, a free national programme supported by JPMorgan Chase. It provides practical support for small and micro businesses to get them fit to supply and win public sector contracts.
I hope it’s useful. Relatedly, on the back of a chat with Number 10, I’m collating a list of all the useful, free resources that are out there which support entrepreneurs. I know not all the best things in life are free, but it’s a good place to start. Drop me a message if you have anything to recommend.
Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
This week, Eamonn Ives suggests raising the cost caps that incentivise spurious legal claims against infrastructure projects, Philip Salter argues that hikes to H-1B visa fees present an opportunity for Britain to attract priced-out talent, and Anastasia Bektimirova reflects on an evening of technology vibes.
🧑⚖️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
As our Adviser Sam Dumitriu details in his most recent report, legal obstacles represent a serious impediment to the development of new nuclear reactors in Britain. Anti-nuclear activists have weaponised lawsuits as a means to delay building, not only slowing down construction timelines, but also raising the risk premium nuclear developers face. Both of these facts increase overall costs – leaving consumers and businesses on the hook for higher electricity prices.
Of course, few would argue that developers should have carte blanche to steamroll through whichever projects they like. In a liberal democracy, it’s only right that there are opportunities for stakeholders to have their say. The operative question, therefore, is how to strike the right balance.
Since 1998, Britain has been a signatory to the Aarhus Convention – an international agreement which seeks to mediate disputes concerning environmental matters, such as those that may arise from the construction of new infrastructure. Article 9, Paragraph 4 of the Convention asserts that access to justice cannot be “prohibitively expensive,” though it does not explicitly state how signatories should enforce this. In Britain, we use cost caps, which limit the amount litigants have to pay if their challenge fails (contrary to the standard ‘loser pays’ rule in court, whereby successful defendants can claim their legal costs back from claimants). Since 2013, these cost caps have been set at £5,000 for individuals, and £10,000 for organisations (such as environmental groups).
Sam argues that we should raise the limits of these cost caps, or remove them altogether for repeatedly unsuccessful litigants. I’m minded to agree. While some grievances are doubtlessly valid, the trend of well-funded, organised groups lodging spurious objections to new developments simply to throw sand in the gears – safe in the knowledge that there’s a fixed upper limit on the cost of doing so – warrants a reappraisal of the current situation.
Where then should new cost caps be set? Well, linking them to inflation seems to me like a reasonable minimum starting point. This would bring individual caps up to just over £7,000, and organisation cost caps up to just over £14,000. Alternatively, a more common sense approach might be to follow the lead of almost all other signatories and simply afford judges the discretion to take each case as they come.
As we and many, many others have explained before, building more stuff is a quickfire way to grow the economy. But whether it’s new homes, new roads, new railways or new power stations, all kinds of infrastructure in Britain comes in over budget and over schedule – if it even gets built at all. There are plenty of levers the Government could pull on to help rectify this situation – and rethinking how it meets its Aarhus obligations ought to be one of them.
🎟️ Philip Salter, Founder
Donald Trump’s recent announcement on H-1B visas caused chaos in Silicon Valley. If his proposed $100,000 H-1B visa fee actually sticks, this will be just the beginning.
As David J. Bier argues, this hike would be prohibitively expensive for many companies hiring skilled foreign workers, driving tech out of the US, reducing innovation, lowering demand for American workers, and harming the broader economy by shrinking the supply of goods and services across many sectors. Lauren Gilbert agrees, highlighting the important point that universities and non-profits, which are exempt from the cap but operate on tight budgets, would be hit particularly hard.
Even if it gets struck down, the uncertainty presents an opportunity for the UK to capture some talent. That’s why it’s great to see our friends at Startup Coalition have published a letter calling on the government to seize the moment. It quotes our research, stating:
“Data from the Entrepreneurs Network shows that 39% of the UK’s 100 fastest-growing companies have foreign-born founders or co-founders. Companies like Wayve and Synthesia, which recently received recognition from NVIDIA’s founder Jensen Huang during his visit to London, demonstrate the transformative impact of international talent on our ecosystem.”
The letter calls for an immediate expansion of the Global Talent Fund, expedited processing for H-1B holders, one-on-one casework support from the Home Office, and updates to the Enterprise Management Incentive (EMI) scheme, all of which we back.
I would add another policy idea for public debate. As we set out in our report Passport to Progress, Canada offers work visas for migrants with H-1B visas in the US, piggybacking on American bureaucracy by interpreting their approval as a good enough indicator of talent. Like Canada, if we brought this in, the Government would want to cap it (to maintain control), but also bear in mind that not everyone accepted will move, which was the case for Canada.
Given that we know that high-skilled immigrants are drivers of innovation, and that H-1B holders consistently pay more in taxes than they receive in public benefits, if we can draw just a few thousand to the UK, it will be worth it.
💽 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
After the UK-US Tech Prosperity Deal was signed last Thursday, part of the innovation ecosystem gathered at the NVIDIA UK AI Celebration. The lights were bright and the numbers were big. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had an Oprah Winfrey moment, announcing a £2 billion investment into AI startups by pointing to specific founders in the room, by name, and declaring he was investing in their next funding rounds.
You’ll be familiar with the sentiment that nights like this are all theatre. It’s true that you don’t build capacity with vibes alone, but you also can’t build it without them. The NVIDIA evening understood that and used theatre to do something policy can struggle to do on paper: place researchers, entrepreneurs and officials inside the same narrative and shift what feels possible. The Prime Minister and two Secretaries of State joining Huang on stage felt less like government “loving startups” in some generic sense, and more like a re-understanding of the strategic importance of having the capacity to build technologies, companies and innovation, with builders being placed inside the national story. This kind of theatre recruits talent, attracts capital and inspires confidence.
There was, inevitably, a degree of scepticism in the audience chatter after the speeches. Questions about economic stability and tax changes, about whether policy across departments will join up quickly enough to convert headlines into action, about energy costs, grid connections and skills on the ground, about who, exactly, will use all this compute infrastructure. It’s also true that some of what was said from that and other stages last week will materialise faster than other things. Those are fair points. In large part, domestic benefit will depend on adoption.
Against that backdrop, the Tony Blair Institute’s new report with Ipsos on public attitudes towards AI finds that while over half of the surveyed Britons report having used generative AI in the past year, 38% cite a lack of trust in AI-generated content as the biggest barrier to wider use. People are also more likely to see AI as a risk to the economy (39%) than an opportunity (20%).
Among other things, the report recommends government focus on demonstrating real-world benefits of AI and building public engagement. I agree with the thrust, and I’d add that government communications teams are already doing it reasonably well: most ministerial speeches and press releases frame AI through benefits people can feel – appointments booked faster, public services accessed easier, the planning system transformed to build more homes quicker – rather than technical capability metrics.
What the report perhaps underplays is that not every challenge requires a government intervention. While it’s fantastic that the Prime Minister is personally engaging with this agenda, the ecosystem itself needs to step up. When innovators can effectively articulate what their work delivers, they create the conditions for their own success. The theatre matters too – vibes are also part of the enabling infrastructure for everything else that follows.
Before I share my thoughts on policy, I want to hear yours!
Specifically, if you’re an entrepreneur and you haven’t completed our latest survey, now’s the time. This really is one of the best ways to get your voice heard. Last time around we secured strong press coverage, and all the main parties reached out to find out what they can do to appeal to founders.
If you’re not a founder or have already filled it in, I’d encourage you to share it with your network. A quick post in a WhatsApp or Slack group really does help.
On the Cards
The big news today is that the Government will be bringing in digital IDs. Like Tony Blair, the last Prime Minister to try to bring a version of them in, Keir Starmer is framing the policy around illegal migration, which given the political climate isn’t surprising, but overlooks its wider benefits.
First things first, digital IDs would not plunge Britain into a totalitarian state. There has been much talk about Estonia in the announcement, whose experience has shown to many liberals (with a small “l”) across the political spectrum, including Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, that this isn’t to be feared.
In fact, a digital identity could offer greater liberty than the current system, where data sits across numerous databases with varying degrees of security and can be accessed without record. In advanced digital states, by contrast, you can see exactly who has accessed your data and why. (Even so, I don’t think it’s absolutely required that they’re mandatory for them to be a success in the UK.)
It would also make life easier. As I argued back in 2020:
“The relationship between the state and business owners in the UK and Estonia is starkly different. For example, in the UK the National Audit Office (NAO) has found that there are more than 20 ways of identifying individuals and businesses across 10 departments and agencies, with no standard format for recording data such as name, address and date of birth. This wastes business owners’ time, and leads to delays and errors. It also means that the government doesn’t understand the UK business population as well as it could.”
In Estonia, digital reforms built on digital ID save business owners around 12 million hours every year. Matching this in the UK would equate to about 430 million hours annually. And it’s not just about bureaucracy. Digital states also allow efficiencies and innovation in healthcare, welfare, justice, education, and civic engagement more effectively. The lessons of how digital states coped with lockdowns compared with others shouldn’t be forgotten.
But things get really exciting when you consider what’s around the corner. As the newly minted Special Adviser for Britain’s Science Department Kirsty Innes and I argued years ago, we could soon see a proactive, one-stop-shop for government services that anticipate citizens’ needs – whether renewing a passport, filing taxes, or receiving tailored healthcare – rather than forcing people to navigate dozens of disconnected systems.
We wrote that in an essay collection that included a foreword from Tony Blair, who, of course, failed to bring in ID cards (for both technical and messaging reasons). While most discussion today in Westminster has focused on the negative case for not bringing them in, we shouldn’t forget the positive argument: this is the first step to ending bureaucracy.
Way to Make a Living
In case you missed it, we’re hiring a new Researcher or Senior Researcher to join the team. The deadline is this Sunday. Find out more here.
Wise Words
On Thursday we hosted a small roundtable with our Adviser Iain Butler, Head of Innovation Incentives at Buzzacott, to dissect the R&D Tax Credits. We’re going to produce a short briefing off the back of the roundtable, with lessons for policymakers. If you’re keen to share your experiences and insights with us anonymously – whether good, bad or somewhere in between – drop me an email with your thoughts.
Subscribers to our Policy Updates newsletter will receive the briefing in their inboxes. If you’d like to host a similar deep dive on a policy area relevant to entrepreneurs, just let me know.
Message from our Partner
Corporate Partners Blick Rothenberg and the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation (CenTax) are hosting a high-impact breakfast debate bringing together successful entrepreneurs, ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and heads of tax and finance to have a discussion around how our tax system should evolve to meet the needs of a modern, competitive economy. Taking place on Wednesday 15 October, this will be a unique opportunity to help shape the conversation and contribute to meaningful reform. Please note, places are limited.
It’s been a miserable week for commuters in the capital, and even though strikes on the London Underground are now winding down, the disruption is forecast to have cost the UK economy £230 million in lost productivity.
Whether or not the actual figure hits almost a quarter of a billion pounds, one thing is certain, the final amount will have been markedly reduced by an unlikely saviour from Silicon Valley: Neutron Holdings, Inc – or, Lime.
During the strikes, the number of Lime bike trips rocketed by 74%, with a 40% increase in trip duration and a 35% increase in distance covered. While by no means a perfect substitute for the Tube, it’s proof that choice and competition are an unalloyed good for consumers.
Whether the next disruption comes from strikes or something else, we know that e-bikes make transport systems more robust – antifragile, even. This also points towards the benefits of the UK becoming a testbed nation for more technologies from around the world. As we argued in The Way of the Future:
“[F]or the UK to become the most attractive place for innovative investments, it needs to do all it can to support domestic demand. This means making the political decisions that enable the adoption of new technologies.”
At this point, I’m acutely aware that readers based outside the M25 may only have so much sympathy for Londoners’ week of transport woe. Leodensians, (in)famously, go without a mass-transit system 365 days a year. Indeed, perhaps the biggest lesson for policymakers is therefore that the temporary hit to productivity from reduced agglomeration facing Londoners this week is anything but for those in our nation’s other cities. As Tom Forth wrote back in 2019, the lack of public transport effectively makes Birmingham an economically small city.
This doesn’t necessarily need to come at a huge cost to the public purse. Through an innovative programme of finance, funding and value capture, London’s businesses and future passenger revenues contributed around two-thirds of the cost of building the Elizabeth Line. The Government is already exploring a privately funded Birmingham-Manchester rail link. Full steam ahead, please!
For more food for thought, check out The Economist’s Mike Bird’s discussion of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) rail and property model for building transport infrastructure by capturing land value.
(New)sletter
This week, Callum Anderson, the Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, launched a newsletter on LinkedIn. Commons & Capital will offer a regular look at the overlap of markets, policy and politics – through a centre-left Labour lens, which is exactly what we’ll be discussing with him and a room full of entrepreneurs and investors on Tuesday.
It got me thinking about other Members of Parliament who produce policy-rich newsletters. The Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal and Development, Neil O’Brien’s Substack, immediately springs to mind. But so too do Liam Byrne’s Fixing Inequality and Jeevun Sandher’s Winning Formulas.
If we zoom out to the Lords, at opposite ends of the economic spectrum, we also have Robert Skidelsky’s Substack and Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist.
Who did I miss?
Good Graces
I’m delighted to share that Grace Almendras-Castillo – Founder and CEO of Gifftid – has joined us as an Adviser. She is building an AI intelligence and analytics platform that mobilises capital, data, and partnerships to scale underserved SMEs and impact-driven enterprises, which aligns perfectly with our mission.
Grace has been recognised as one of Canada’s Top 50 Women in STEM, a Springboard Enterprises Alum, an EY Entrepreneur of the Year nominee, and a fellow of JLabs and MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.
Grace praises the UK for its highly educated, intelligent community: “Overall, it fits the environment where I can participate in innovation, creation and make a contribution to society.”
Why don’t you join us as an Adviser? Drop me an email if you have any questions.
Message from our Partner
On 8 October, leaders from across finance, defence, technology, and government will gather in the City of London for the Fifth Anniversary of The City Quantum & AI Summit. With its rule of “plain English only”, the Summit is designed to cut through the noise and focus on what matters: the practical business outcomes driven by frontier technologies.
The event will bring together decision-makers shaping the future of finance, security, and technology adoption, to listen to discussions with CEOs from the likes of AWS, Palantir, and Multiverse Computing. Panels will be chaired by senior figures such as Sir Edward Braham (M&G and NED to the UK Treasury), Ian Stuart (CEO of HSBC UK), and General Sir Patrick Sanders (former Chief of the General Staff).
For entrepreneurs and the wider ecosystem, this is a chance to hear directly from board-level leaders on how Quantum and AI are already reshaping industries – and where opportunities lie.
Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
This week, Eamonn Ives examines the new Defence Industrial Strategy, Anastasia Bektimirova mulls over a new book contrasting China and the United States, and Philip Salter discusses navigating the politics of immigration.
🌐 Philip Salter, Founder
As I write this, we are taking part in our annual trawl through Beauhurst’s proprietary data to work out the percentage of the UK’s fastest-growing companies that have a foreign-born founder, as part of our multi-year Job Creators project.
This year we’re teaming up with Kinglsey Napley, our longtime partners on immigration policy advocacy, and building out a set of policy recommendations to ensure that we have the visa routes to capture more of this small but incredible cohort of founders.
It’s no exaggeration to state that Britain’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has been built on the backs of these individuals who have actively chosen to make the UK their home. Foreign-born founders have been instrumental in innovating in everything from artificial intelligence (Synthesia) to avocados (Oddbox).
While immigration is an increasingly controversial issue, this sort of immigration isn’t. It’s why everyone from Prime Ministers downwards loves to cite our 2019 finding that half the fastest-growing companies in the UK have a foreign-born founder. I wouldn’t even be surprised to see Reform back it.
But as important as this tiny section of immigrants is, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that Britain’s economy just needs entrepreneurs. Writing about the US – but with application here too – Jerusalem Demsas digs into this on her Substack, arguing that immigrants are also needed to build houses and infrastructure, which are critical for delivering economic growth.
To make this happen politically, Demsas makes the case for transfers to communities absorbing immigrants, building greater state capacity around immigration administration and funding assimilation projects. Whatever you think of her specific policy ideas, she is asking an important question: “will liberals confine ourselves to merely defending the Katalin Karikós of the world?”
⚙️ Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
You know when a book suddenly becomes the conversation? That’s Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future right now. In my circle at least, it seems like every third person is reading it. To get a taste, there is a good Works in Progress interview with the author.
Wang’s central image of China as an “engineering state” that builds faster and bigger and the US as a “lawyerly society” mired in litigation and caution is an interesting framing. The contrast between Chinese and American infrastructure delivery is unquestionable, and his broader point that the US needs to rebuild industrial capability is right. Wang also doesn’t shy away from showing the costs of authoritarian control and bureaucratic paralysis. The book is well worth a read, especially for those less familiar with China’s modern history.
But the framing also risks flattening things. In his review of the book, Jonathon Sine notes the slipperiness of defining “engineering”. Many top Chinese leaders aren’t technical hands-on engineers but part of a “Leninist developmental state” class trained in ideology and party management, with all its features of centralised control, campaign-style governance and ideology-driven mobilisation. Michael Hill also argues that this better explains many of the policies Wang uses to typify the “engineering mindset,” such as the One Child Policy and Zero COVID. In fact, the share of Politburo members with undergraduate engineering degrees has fluctuated significantly: peaking at 70% in 2002, falling to 20% in 2017, and rising again to 33% by 2022. Ironically, as Sine points out, Xi Jinping’s PhD is actually in law. Similarly, the notion of a lawyer‑driven US may headline well, but doesn’t capture the democratic and institutional contexts where rights are the point, rather than procedure.
I also don’t buy that lawyers are quite the bottlenecks Wang makes them out to be. I know lawyers who are imaginative futurists or deeply involved in building with amazing foresight and contagious ambition. I doubt it’s really about credentials. Sometimes slowing things down to pressure-test risk and ask “What could go wrong here, and how hard is it to unwind?“ is what keeps a state governable. And to be clear, it’s not just lawyers who are qualified to do that.
The “engineers versus lawyers” frame prompts a broader question of how to build a government that combines capacity and expertise with pluralism. The challenge as I see it is how to regain our ability to build without opening the door to over‑engineered social control. This is less a matter of getting a specific quota of engineers or lawyers into government and more about the kinds of institutions that allow different strands of expertise to combine into action while enabling governing with care.
🛡️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
If there’s one thing we’ve all had to learn – or perhaps re-learn – over the last few years, it’s that the first duty of a government is to protect its citizens. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, virtually all European countries have doubled down on bolstering their nations’ defences – in rhetoric, spending, and other reforms. This week, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) published its new Defence Industrial Strategy, which sets out a series of changes to improve the relationship between the Armed Forces and Britain’s defence sector, and put us on a surer military footing.
As the Strategy notes, one area holding back innovation in the defence sector is our “Cold War-era procurement cycles,” which are characterised by “a ‘feast and famine’ approach to investment” that conspires against smaller and potentially more technologically innovative players. Aside from simply increasing the overall spending envelope that will be afforded to defence contractors – which will doubtlessly help plug gaps – the Strategy also notes how the recently established UK Defence Innovation (UKDI) will be empowered to accelerate cutting-edge capabilities.
If the language used to describe the new unit is anything to go by, defence tech entrepreneurs should be heartened. UKDI will be granted operational autonomy from the MoD, be encouraged to take risks and not be afraid of failing fast, and be headed up by a strong figurehead with the ability to coordinate with a range of Whitehall departments where necessary. Alongside this, the MoD itself will commit to “targeted regulatory sprints” in priority areas, to review where red tape is suffocating startups that are pioneering promising technologies. While, of course, the results remain to be seen, it’s hard to fault any of these pledges.
Entrepreneurs outside of the defence tech space would be forgiven for thinking that they are, at best, an indirect beneficiary of the new Strategy. But a theme running through the 112-page blueprint is the importance of developing dual-use technologies – and specifically, how more will be done to leverage military innovation for civilian applications. Many of us will be familiar with how the Internet, GPS, jet engines, drones – even canned food – can trace their origins back to times of warfare. Should all go to plan with the new Defence Industrial Strategy, we might just be adding to that list of useful everyday inventions.
With the Deputy Prime Minister’s demise precipitating a full Cabinet reshuffle, it would be easy to focus on the negatives. But this is also an opportunity for the Government to strike out in a new direction. As every founder learns through experience: never let a good crisis go to waste.
Tony Blair articulated this opportunity well with his famous “kaleidoscope speech” in Chicago on 22 April 1999:
"This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us."
The Prime Minister must already get this. After all, it’s all too easy to forget that he inherited a Labour Party in crisis. When Jeremy Corbyn was their leader, Labour was polling only in the 20s. Keir Starmer rebranded the party, purged the antisemitism, rebuilt its credibility with business, and decisively won the 2024 election.
While the last 14 months haven’t gone swimmingly, all is not lost. Now’s the time to ditch what isn’t working and lean into what we know will – specifically when it comes to spurring economic growth.
First things first: do no (or at least less) harm. With Angela Rayner gone, it’s time to ditch the worst parts of her Employment Rights Bill. As I wrote back in February, the Government’s own analysis projects its annual cost to businesses to be in the billions. Founders have told us repeatedly that they’re really concerned about the mooted changes. Of course, workers need protection; but they also need jobs in the first place. (Next month, Lord Leigh is chairing a virtual roundtable to discuss the implications of the Government’s Employment Rights Bill on businesses – sign up here.)
Second, we need to get more of the basics right. As we argued in Building Blocks, even marginal policy improvements in a few large areas – such as simplifying our country’s planning rules, rationalising the tax code, or modernising the visa system – would do more to ensure we are genuinely offering the best possible platform from which to unleash the full potential of entrepreneurship and innovation in Britain.
These aren’t only things that the Government could (or should) do, but if I were Starmer I would apply the advice of Steve Jobs to the rest of his term: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
In truth, you can count the real and lasting achievements of even our most radical Prime Ministers on one hand.
Clement Attlee created the NHS, built the welfare state, co-founded NATO, initiated Britain’s nuclear deterrent and granted independence to India.
Margaret Thatcher privatised major industries, curbed trade union power, deregulated the City and introduced Right to Buy.
Tony Blair secured the Good Friday Agreement, gave the Bank of England independence, introduced the National Minimum Wage and devolved power to the nations.
Starmer’s second phase of this Government should be unapologetically focused on the big things.
To that end, I would point people towards the latest newsletter from the APPG for Entrepreneurship. Penned by my colleague Eamonn Ives, it flags what will definitely be one of the less discussed job moves this week, but that doesn’t make it any less important. John van Reenen, the Chair of the Chancellor’s Council of Economic Advisers will now report directly to Rachel Reeves as an expert adviser. As Eamonn writes:
“One piece of research that has stuck with me over the years is his 2019 paper A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation. Written with the equally distinguished Nicholas Bloom and Heidi Williams, this paper quickly yet comprehensively makes the case for why governments should support endeavours to promote innovation, before evaluating some of the most common ways they try to do so. Specifically, they examine tax policies to favour research and development, government research grants, policies aimed at increasing the supply of human capital focused on innovation, intellectual property policies, and pro-competitive policies.”
Research the Role
We are looking to hire either a new Researcher or Senior Researcher, depending on experience. The successful candidate will be a core member of the team – primarily producing original policy reports and other written outputs, but also contributing on other fronts, such as supporting our events programme and expanding our presence in the policymaking ecosystem.
The ideal candidate will be highly self-motivated with a strong interest in public policy. They will not simply wait to be assigned tasks, but proactively identify new opportunities to drive the policy agenda. We expect applicants to be recent graduates, or to be working in a similar role, or to have already demonstrated the core competencies we’re looking for in another role.
Strong applicants will have shown an active interest in policies and issues that impact entrepreneurs. Most importantly, their values will be in strong alignment with those of The Entrepreneurs Network.
On 18 April 1930, BBC Radio’s 6.30pm news bulletin announced: “Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news,” which was then followed by piano music to fill the remaining time.
As the News and Views section below shows, while the headlines never truly stop, they do have a tendency to slow down over the summer months. In this rare respite from the torrent of politics and policy, I hope you’ll forgive me for turning inwards – not least because we’ve picked up hundreds of new subscribers in recent weeks who might value a bit of a pointer to what we’re all about.
In short, we are the voice of Britain’s most ambitious entrepreneurs. A decade ago, I would never have been so presumptuous to describe ourselves as the voice of anyone but myself; however, over that time we’ve built a network of thousands of entrepreneurs and we’re now pretty confident that we know what keeps entrepreneurs up at night, and what they need from government to succeed.
Just to be one hundred percent sure, we’ve recently teamed up with Public First to conduct quarterly surveys of our network, the latest of which is currently open for responses. If you haven’t done so already, please complete it and consider sharing the opportunity with your networks and on social media.
Demanding supply
One of the challenges that has come with having built such a large and open network is that demand for our events is now outstripping supply. There are three ways that we’re solving this without closing the network or charging for events.
First, we’re being more selective about inviting the right people to the right events. Just this week we hosted a dinner with Ian Sollom MP, the Liberal Democrats’ Spokesperson for Universities and Skills, which had the perfect mix of entrepreneurs, investors, and Tech Transfer Office leaders. Compiling the guest list was made all the easier thanks to attendees having proactively told us which issues they’re interested in. If you haven’t let us know what topics you’re curious about, you can do so by filling out our recently updated and extended Join Us form.
Second, we’re planning more meetups. These are much more open than our more policy-focused events. Watch this space for an ambitious plan to undertake regular events outside of London, as we’re keen to travel the length and breadth of the country. We’re looking for more hosts and partners for our events, so if you’re keen to host us, get in touch.
Finally, for those who are able, becoming a Supporter, Adviser, Patron or Corporate Partner both opens up more events for you, but also supports us to do more for the wider ecosystem. It’s a win-win for everyone. Join us here.
Supplying more
Before signing up, you may want to know a bit more about the scope of what we do. If that’s the case, we have a deck which distils it into a few slides.
While this should give you an overview of what we currently do, I want to also take this opportunity to find out what you think we should be doing more of. We may be more than ten years old, but we’re just as nimble today as on day one. Everything we’ve done, and everything we’re doing now, all started with a simple conversation. As such, the time to share any ideas you have for partnering with us is now. Get in touch.
🚇 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Fans of Monopoly will know that Old Kent Road is the cheapest square on the board. But under new proposals from the think tank Labour Together and campaign group YIMBY Alliance, its real-world value could change dramatically.
In a joint paper, the two groups argue for a new approach that would allow London to fund more of its own infrastructure rather than constantly going cap in hand to the Treasury. They use the extension of the Bakerloo line from Elephant and Castle down through the Old Kent Road and beyond as a case study, but the principles could apply equally well elsewhere across the capital – and to other big city regions such as Greater Manchester or Birmingham.
As their paper notes:
“When the public sector builds infrastructure or grants planning permission, it can lead to huge windfalls for existing landowners. Allowing a landowner to build housing on agricultural land in the South East can increase the value of the land by 100 times. But it is also businesses and homeowners. Commercial rents and house prices close to Crossrail stations rose faster than the London average after the project was announced. These windfall gains have nothing to do with entrepreneurship or risk-taking. They are the result of decisions and hard work by the public sector, and the public sector should retain much more of the value uplift to pay for infrastructure.”
There are plenty of models for making that happen. Paris has used a small payroll tax and a levy on tourism to fund upgrades to its Metro, which could be replicated here. The Mayor could also be given powers to require outer boroughs to build more homes along new routes, in exchange for a faster commute into central London.
With public finances under strain – and growing pressure on the government to splash cash outside the capital – it’s increasingly difficult for London to make the case for more handouts. But as I wrote last week, strong agglomerative effects represent one of the best ways to escape our economic doomspiral. To amplify agglomeration, we need to explore every option for funding the transport upgrades to keep the city moving. Proposals like those set out in Labour Together and YIMBY Alliance’s paper deserve to be taken seriously.
💳 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
Imagine everyone set aside a small monthly budget for articles, podcasts and videos. But instead of locking it into subscriptions, we put it in a programmable wallet, tell an AI agent what and whose taste we trust, and let it give tiny payments to what we read, watch and listen to. As content arrives, the agent evaluates it against our preferences and context: what we’ve recently consumed, what our network has paid attention to, what is timely or under-reported. When something resonates, the agent sends a micro‑tip to the creator, leaving a receipt that can validate and, if we choose, publicise our attention.
Daisy Alioto, co-founder and CEO of Dirt, an independent media outlet, sketched out this vision in a piece arguing that “the future of media is a bank”: spontaneous payments replacing set-rate subscriptions, autonomous agents trained on taste and empowered to tip, attention recorded not in clicks but in stablecoin transactions.
Speculative as it sounds, it could be a return to something magazines once did well. A recent wave of Condé Nast’s reminiscence reminds us that the miracle was not in the glossy paper, but rather in the system around it: editors serving as gatekeepers and readers as members of a scene. That era industrialised curation as a social technology and made status convertible into money through almost ritualised purchase.
Today, distribution is effectively infinite. Alioto’s proposal tries to rebuild the social architecture that magazines once provided but with the tools we now have and with less gatekeeping. The mechanism would let payment travel with attention and count as proof of support. Micro-tips become a record of taste, which is private by default, but shareable when you want. Agents learn what you like, how you value it, and distribute spending accordingly. Creators get small, frequent income streams instead of fixed subscriptions or volatile advertisement revenues. Since wallets are programmable, agents can also follow agents of others, so discovery flows through people you trust rather than a platform feed. In that world, attention is both a budget and a public signal.
🌎 Jessie May Green, Events and APPG for Entrepreneurship Coordinator
The COP30 Presidency recently announced the daily themes for this year’s global climate conference, which will take place in the Amazonian city of Belém, Brazil in November. To my joy, one of the themes is ‘Small and medium entrepreneurs’.
It makes sense – small and medium-sized enterprises represent a whopping 90% of businesses worldwide, make up half of the global economy, and produce half of global emissions. If we are to get a grip on rising temperatures, we can’t afford to leave SMEs out of the conversation. Not only in the sense that their emissions will have to fall, but also because many will be invaluable in providing innovative solutions to the challenge at hand.
On this front, the UNFCCC – the body responsible for organising the COP climate summits – has issued a call to action to accelerate its ‘Climate-Proofing SMEs’ campaign. Their aims are to: increase green finance from the full spectrum of financial institutions; ensure at least 30,000 SMEs have resources available to support them tackling emissions, from carbon footprinting tools to region-specific training; and – by COP30 – to see at least 150 large businesses actively engaging SMEs in their supply chain via long-term net zero programmes.
It is great to see SMEs coming to the forefront of climate conversations, and to see this supported by institutions in the UK. For example, the Centre for Climate Engagement at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, which is building a network of academic experts on SMEs and climate change. Hopefully, these efforts will combine to catalyse greater business participation at COP30 – participation that is so vital to climate adaptation and resilience.
Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
This week, Eamonn Ives writes about novel ideas for funding new infrastructure, Anastasia Bektimirova wonders whether ‘micro-tipping’ will replace subscriptions, and Jessie May Green welcomes the inclusion of small businesses as a focus for COP30.
Today’s newsletter comes from our Research Director, Eamonn Ives. Normal service with Philip will resume next week!
Veteran Westminster watchers will know that the long summer months when Parliament is in recess are a breeding ground for less credulous stories to find their way into national newspapers. During ‘Silly Season’, as it’s affectionately known, journalists feed on scraps – with even speculative rumours standing a chance of being written up as if they’re iron-clad facts. So it was with more than a little apprehension when I read in The Guardian that the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is mulling over a new tax grab on high-value properties to raise revenue at the forthcoming Autumn Budget.
According to leaked proposals, the Treasury is considering charging Capital Gains Tax on the sale of homes worth over £1.5 million. Currently, an exemption which shields most main residences from being liable for CGT sees a whopping £31 billion a year slip through the Chancellor’s fingers as taxes forgone – earning it the title of being Britain’s single biggest tax relief. No wonder our cash-strapped Treasury is looking enviously at shaking things up, and that should be reason enough for us to take seriously the fact these ideas are surfacing – Silly Season or not.
What’s all this got to do with entrepreneurship though, I hear you ask? Well, regular readers should be acutely aware that strong agglomeration effects form the basis of just about all fertile startup ecosystems (for the uninitiated, go straight to Building Blocks after reading this newsletter). When people can live in close proximity to one another, the ease with which founders can exchange ideas, attract talented employees, find willing investors, share physical and social infrastructure and so on only increases. Density doesn’t just correlate with economic success, it actively enables it. There’s a reason why London alone routinely receives over two thirds of all venture capital invested in Britain, is a magnet for both domestic and international talent, and is the nation’s foundry bar none for producing cutting-edge startups.
Anything, therefore, that impedes agglomerative forces from taking hold thus also prevents entrepreneurial sparks from flying. And there are few better (or worse?) ways to do that than by putting homeowners on the hook for potentially tens of thousands of extra tax should they wish to move house. As a consequence, people liable for paying the new tax will hang onto property for longer than they otherwise would in an efficient market. Evidence suggests that the construction of new homes may well slow down too, as demand for housing dampens. Altogether, prospective entrepreneurs will find it harder and more expensive to move into economic hotspots, and any well-heeled international talent would be forgiven for thinking twice about relocating to Britain.
We don’t need to rely purely on economic theory here either. Anyone who has had to grapple with the pain of Stamp Duty will be well acquainted with the damaging effects of transaction taxes on property. Empirical evidence from the Office for Budget Responsibility shows that a one percent increase in Stamp Duty causes transactions to fall by between 4.5-7%, depending on the value of the property. Some economists have even argued that property transaction taxes are so harmful that they may even destroy more value than they raise. Static markets serve nobody.
As Philip mentioned a fortnight ago, the reason we’re debating tax rises in the first place is because of the daunting fiscal black hole we’re facing. The Government has shown itself incapable of meaningfully trimming back public spending, has limited room for extra borrowing, and can’t rely on economic growth to save the day. That leaves tax hikes as the only way to try to balance the books – and with a prior promise to not touch VAT, Income Tax or National Insurance Contributions, officials are understandably searching for other routes to bring in extra cash.
By definition, anyone fortunate enough to have profited from the meteoric rise in house prices in Britain over recent decades – even if only on paper – has the proverbial broad shoulders needed to bear further tax hikes. But while such lucky homeowners may be viewed as a politically easy target, we must consider whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Whatever happens at the Autumn Budget, here’s to hoping the Chancellor properly evaluates the second-order effects that taxes like this might have. If the Government is as serious as it says it is about growing the economy, it will ensure idle ideas like this remain exactly that.
(P.S. Speaking of the Autumn Budget, we’ve just opened the next round of our Entrepreneurs Survey for responses. If you’re a founder and want to make your voice heard on the issues that matter to you most, please consider taking ten minutes or less to fill it out.)
What’s your spin?
We’re gathering evidence for our next Female Founders Forum report, which will investigate how university spinouts are created in the UK today, and what policy fixes are needed to support their growth.
If you have spun out a company from a UK university within the last three years (or are in the process of doing so), or are someone who supports spinouts (e.g. through a TTO, university, funder, or advisory organisation), please consider filling in our survey and sharing it with others. And if you’d like to be interviewed for this research or know someone who should, just drop Anastasia a line.
Calling all entrepreneurs! Today, we’re asking for 10 minutes (or less) of your time to fill in our quarterly Entrepreneurs Survey. (For those who haven’t started a business, the ask is that you share it with your networks.)
Our inaugural survey was picked up by many media outlets and led to all the political parties chasing us for more insights. No wonder. Entrepreneurs play a disproportionately important role in our economy, but too often their voices go unheard by the politicians who are designing policies that impact their businesses.
This will be an important one, as it will inform our campaigning ahead of the Budget. This is your best chance to tell those in power what you really think.
Another Year Wiser
We’re beginning the research process for our annual Female Founders Forum report with Barclays. This time, we’re investigating how university spinouts happen today and how to make translating academic ideas into real world companies work better for everyone in the UK.
The 2023 Independent Review of University Spin-out Companies promised faster, fairer, more founder-friendly journeys. We want to see where that promise has landed: where progress is being felt on the ground, where challenges remain, and where further steps are needed. We also want to understand how much founder experiences differ by gender, region and sector.
We’re building on important work already done in this space, adding a UK-wide, gender-aware lens and combining survey data with in-depth interviews to produce practical policy recommendations.
If you’ve spun a company out of a British university (or are in the process of doing so), or if you work with those who do, please consider filling out our survey or drop Anastasia a line for a chat. LinkedIn aficionados may also want to tag close contacts into this post, which is proving a useful way of getting the word out.
And Spend
Another week, another mention of tax. I’ll keep it short though. I just want to direct you to our Adviser Derin Kocer’s Big Idea this week. Derin thinks I didn’t make a big enough decision in last week’s Perennial Gale about the need to cut spending.
Unlike him, I’ve never been an official political strategist, so I’ll leave it to others to decide on feasibility and extent of cuts, but, either way, it’s always worth reminding the Government about which taxes are the least damaging.
Up to Date
Our Policy Updates are well and truly back. This week, we informed subscribers about the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill with more than a little help from Spark Legal and Policy Consulting. These updates are intended to be timely, bitesize overviews on policies that will impact the thousands of ambitious entrepreneurs in our network. If you’re an expert on an area of policy get in touch to see how you can partner on future updates.
Ta-da, Tata
Our friends at the Centre for Entrepreneurs have just announced that they’re teaming up once again with Tata for their Varsity Pitch Competition. It is the longest-running inter-university business pitching competition in the UK, with a £25,000 prize pot, as well as mentoring opportunities and connections to Tata Group for category winners and alumni.
One reason I like to promote this competition is that you don’t need a fully-formed idea to enter – or, indeed, win. Find out more here.
🕳️ Derin Kocer, Adviser
Since Labour returned to office, every fiscal event has focused on “filling the fiscal black hole.” As Philip wrote last week, the next one will be no different – except, if anything, the black hole only seems to be getting bigger. One obvious way to fill the gap is to raise the rate of VAT, or, more creatively, to broaden the base to which it applies. However, neither approach offers a sustainable long-term strategy to shore up Britain’s public finances.
The Treasury’s real problem isn’t a newly formed deficit — it is an enduring one. Spending has failed to normalise post‑pandemic. According to official estimates, public spending as a share of GDP for 2024-2025 will be at around 44.4%. Although this represents a significant fall from 2020, when the pandemic caused it to spike to 50%, it’s still well above the pre-pandemic levels. The IMF estimates that between 2015 and 2019, government spending averaged 39% of GDP annually. Meanwhile, our debt has also increased dramatically to over 100% of GDP and there is no plan to pay it down quickly. Under Tony Blair, Britain’s debt burden was under 40%.
Our fiscal situation stands in stark contrast to many of our European peers, whose finances returned to pre-pandemic norms more quickly. In Britain, meanwhile, numerous practices designed for the pandemic era were kept in place, which continue to contribute to the unusual and consistent rise in welfare spending. The stealth tax rises Reeves introduced since taking office have paid for these but have also made inflation and high interest rates stickier than elsewhere. We need to get back to normal if economic growth is the core mission.
Rachel Reeves cannot continue to rely on tax grabs to balance the books. She must also stand up to members of her own party and cut spending back to normal levels. It’s worth adding that the Conservatives should give them the ‘political headroom’ to do so, if they too are serious about sustainably fixing the ‘fiscal headroom’ problem every Chancellor has faced in the past decade.
🔭 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
I recently took part in two different foresight exercises. One was a simulation game that tasked participants, who role-played as governments, tech companies and scientists, to make constrained choices under uncertainty. Another one was a rapid scenario sprint that asked participants to judge how various shocks would shift the UK’s position across several AI-related strategic fronts. Both were valuable for surfacing trade-offs quickly, exposing coordination gaps and clarifying sequencing. They also shared a familiar limitation of strategic foresight work: generating narratives about the future, but not decision-grade evidence about how people are likely to behave inside it.
In many ways, policymaking, especially in emerging science and technology domains, is the disciplined management of uncertainty – turning incomplete information into choices that aim to protect and create public value. Governments often have to set rules before the behavioural and second-order effects of a technology are observable at scale. On their own, horizon scans and lists of risks and hopes don’t show how people will act within those futures. That requires a different kind of foresight.
A piece published in Nature last week calls this shift “science-fiction science.” The idea is to simulate plausible near-term futures and run controlled experiments inside them to measure attitudes and behaviours before norms and markets harden. Done well, this could offer evidence on how big the effect is, who it helps or harms and which mitigations work. Where this was attempted – most notably around autonomous vehicle ethics – research such as the Moral Machine project helped structure policy debates and, in places, legislation. Where this wasn’t the case – for example, genetically modified foods – public attitudes hardened before behavioural research caught up.
New tools make this approach ripe for experimentation. Take Google DeepMind’s Genie 3, released last week. It’s an example of world-model tooling that can generate interactive 3D environments from simple prompts that can be navigated in real time, with conditions adjustable on the go via a prompt. In theory, this could generate interactive, policy-relevant micro-worlds, lowering the cost of turning priority questions into experiments. That could make it feasible to prototype, for example, a busy high street to examine how delivery robots affect pedestrian behaviour, or a drone delivery corridor to assess noise tolerance and complaint behaviour. The standard of proof would still come from the protocol with clear hypotheses, representative samples, randomisation, incentives and transparent reporting.
Here’s a thought experiment on what an institutionalised version of this could look like. Create a small, cross-government experimental foresight lab that runs or commissions simulations for priority questions and curates the best results as shared benchmarks. Its mandate would be to pre-register hypotheses with policy teams, recruit representative cohorts, and publish effect sizes with uncertainty and distributional impact. It could then endorse high-quality studies as benchmarks, signalling national priorities so departments, regulators and procurement could optimise for them. This would keep foresight close to strategy and delivery, and let evidence travel across portfolios and survive political cycles.
🚀 George Patin, Intern
Over on The Generalist, their team have put together the 2025 edition of The Future 50: the most promising startups valued at or below $200M, as selected by over 200 investors, from all across the world.
One of the most striking things about this grouping is just how lean the teams are. The median team is only 26 people, with many at 15, 10 or even 4 core members. While most are very young companies, many nevertheless boast very impressive multiples of revenue per employee. This broadly tracks with Carta’s earlier report on startup hiring – founding teams are getting very lean indeed.
It is no coincidence that this is happening alongside the rise of vibe coding and better AI in general. Prototyping, early brand design, pitch decks, research — all speed up initial validation and let companies scale faster right away. We’ve already seen Lovable break every speed record to cross $100 million ARR in 8 months. The trend, it seems, is towards companies being spun up practically out of thin air, possibly as fast as a single day.
Policy, too, is gradually adapting to the new speed of startup scaling. The EU’s proposed 28th regime, a harmonised business framework across the entire Union, has now moved into consultation. A project of this magnitude is bound to be challenging, but the goal itself is simple: make company formation faster, compliance easier, and the overall flow smoother.
There is a lot to be said for reducing barriers to innovation. One need only look at Estonia, which Anastasia wrote about here last week, with its recent digital reforms and 10 unicorns to show for it. It isn’t merely removing legislation, either, but making it responsive and closely attuned to the needs of entrepreneurs. If policy is able to match the new pace enabled by emerging tech, we may very well see more Lovable-style stories in the near future.
