“There is an extraordinary stat. Something like half of all our fastest-growing innovation businesses have a foreign-born founder, so that tells you you need a visa system that attracts the best and brightest to the UK.”

This is a quote from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the opening of London Tech Week, which took place this week. We revealed this “extraordinary stat” – that nearly half the fastest-growing businesses in the UK have a foreign-born founder – in our Job Creators report. Such facts have helped make the case for the High Potential Individual (HPI) visa and are helping us make the case for its extension and further reforms.

That statistic came from Beauhurst’s data via a Syndicate Room report, while the writing of the report was sponsored by Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia, a successful immigrant founder who came to the UK as a refugee having fled the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. This data needs updating as it’s from 2019. If you’re an individual or company and believe in the importance of keeping the door open to foreign-born talent, drop me a message to see how we could work together on this project.

Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer spoke this week about how London is a centre for tech. Their positivity was confirmed a few days later in Startup Genome’s GSER 2023 report – a comprehensive analysis of the current state of startup ecosystems worldwide – which ranks London joint-second with New York City, with only Silicon Valley ahead.

The numbers speak for themselves. While the likes of Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Stockholm are impressive, the economic value of London’s ecosystem is more than Paris (second), Berlin (third) and Stockholm’s (fourth) combined: £364 billion versus £326 billion. It’s also worth more than their combined early stage funding: £18 billion versus £16.7 billion, and exits in London are valued more than all four combined too: £100 billion versus £95 billion. In other words, it’s not even close.

As the report states: “London remains Europe’s leading tech startup ecosystem. The region has seen an upswing in exits over $50 million, with several high-value exits over $1 billion, including fintech Wise ($12.2 billion), Deliveroo ($10.5 billion), and Oxford Nanopore Technologies ($4.6 billion). In addition, Europe’s largest Fintech unicorn, Revolut, is based in London, boasting a valuation of $33 billion, while SumUp and Rapyd are valued at $9 billion and $8.7 billion respectively.”

We all know there’s room for improvement, but we do this from a position of strength: as the UK’s unequivocal leading entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s why a16z (perhaps still better known as Andreessen Horowitz) has just chosen to base its first office outside of the United States in the capital.

London isn’t an island though. For example, a16z is adamant that the value it sees in its bet on blockchain will involve it working with universities up and down the UK. And the Startup Genome report ranks the Manchester-Liverpool region sixth as an emerging ecosystem, with Bristol, Edinburgh-Glasgow, Birmingham, Durham, and Belfast also getting very honourable mentions.

The government has a role to play in supporting these other ecosystems, most critically through infrastructure. As Marc Andreessen (the “a” in a16z) persuasively argued back in 2020: It’s time to build. There remains much to do though. As our Adviser Sam Dumitriu recently showed, it’s too hard to build new homes, factories, labs, roads, railways, airports, and energy infrastructure like wind farms, grid connections, and nuclear power stations. While Mustafa Latif-Aramesh and Angus Walker detail in The Telegraph (paywall) the ways in which large infrastructure projects are increasingly being held up in the UK. Just read the Wikipedia article on Northern Powerhouse Rail for a textbook case of political mismanagement and Cheems Mindset.

It’s time to celebrate our successes and build on them – literally.

Group Think
The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Entrepreneurship – for which we’re the Secretariat – published its latest newsletter this week. Among other things it included an update on our new Officers: Anna Firth MP, Virendra Sharma MP, Paul Howell MP, Brendan Clarke-Smith MP and Ben Bradley MP.

Sign up to the APPG monthly newsletter here, and feel free to drop me an email if you’re keen to see how you can get involved in the APPG.