This week I’m opening with a request. If you’re an angel investor who backs female founders, or you’re actively interested in becoming an angel investor, or a female entrepreneur backed by angels, we have a unique opportunity for you to feed into the Government’s Invest in Women Taskforce, co-chaired by multi-exit entrepreneur Debbie Wosskow and Barclays’ Business CEO Hannah Bernard, and backed by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Over the next few weeks, we’re hosting roundtables with Barclays in Newcastle, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Belfast and London. This really is a chance to have your say on policy, get quoted in the report or feature as a case study (or input off-the-record if you prefer), as well as meet like-minded people in your area.
We want to share this opportunity far and wide so we get the very best and diverse insights. Therefore, before you read any further, sign up for an event or forward this email to anyone in your network who might be interested – the more the merrier. Additionally, you can reshare my LinkedIn post, our tweet, or get it out to the great and good through your channels.
We take this topic very seriously. We were the first organisation in Britain to reveal the equity funding gap; we helped launch the Rose Review; and alongside Barclays have been campaigning for policies to support female entrepreneurship through the Female Founders Forum for over a decade.
We’re also scoping out doing something in Wales (either in person or virtually), so if you’re interested in that or have any questions about these events, drop us an email.
Pepper Questions
Another week, another three big ideas landed on our Substack. While Eamonn wrote about the lessons of US overregulation of Sichuan Pepper and Anastasia opined on the UN’s AI governance efforts, I pointed people towards what might well be this year’s most influential essay on British politics: Foundations.
It’s worth amplifying the alarm raised in the essay that by making it so hard to build, Britain is sabotaging its leadership in the technologies of the new industrial revolution (sorry, despite claims to the contrary, this will be the second not fourth).
But it’s not just AI and biotech. As Foundations states: “Britain’s strongest industries are creative and intangible, and yet we blocked a £750 million film studio by a dual carriageway, right by the UK’s strongest film cluster. Britain is the most advanced country, per capita, in artificial intelligence, but we blocked a £2.5 billion ‘super hub’ data centre site by the M25. Top talent from around the world flocks to work in biotech in Cambridge, yet we have starved the sector of lab space – under one percent of Cambridge lab space is vacant. Prime city centre office space and labs there are renting for even more than residential property.”
RIO ROI
Adviser to the network Ben Greenstone has co-written an excellent report on how regulation is suffocating startups. Igniting Innovation makes for brutal reading. As Ben’s thread on X explains, the Food Standards Agency has approved just 14% of requests since 2021, the Financial Conduct Authority hit just two-thirds of its targets, while the Civil Aviation Authority has yet to authorise out-of-sight drone flights, even though the US and Japan did so two years ago.
There is a great deal of ruin in our regulatory state: Space Forge, the British aerospace manufacturing company headquartered in Cardiff, had to consult eleven different regulators to launch, while an AI legal startup must navigate at least six different regulators to get approval.
The new Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) might help with some of the regulatory burden. We’re certainly keeping an eye on it. The report recommends it should be given powers to compel regulators to coordinate on emerging technologies, which would certainly be a step in the right direction. I’d be minded to go a step further, and follow John Fingleton’s suggestion to create an N+1 regulator that could give licences to disruptive entrants across the entire economy.
Well Spent
Labour done. Just the Conservative Party conference to go. If you’re there on Monday, I’ll be on a panel with Karim Fatehi MBE (London Chamber of Commerce and Industry), Shuyeb Muquit (Fragomen), Jonathan Thomas (Social Market Foundation) and Heather Rolfe (British Future). We’ll be chatting about the UK’s current immigration system. I’ll be drawing on much of our recent work, including Eamonn’s latest article on the case for increasing youth mobility.