Time to Build

“Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.” It’s a bold claim, but I think it’s spot on. So do many others from across the political spectrum, for whom it is the biggest policy failure of our time.

Central to the damage is the impact on innovators and entrepreneurs, who are held back by the high cost of housing and office space – even if many are unaware.

Talent is priced out of our most productive cities, threatening the position of the UK's entrepreneurial ecosystem. British startup employees have to face long commutes, over-crowded conditions, and lower disposable incomes. They are discouraged from taking entrepreneurial risks, and the growth of their businesses is curtailed. They struggle to hire and retain the best and brightest.

We want to change this, and are optimistic that we can. There are some great ideas already out there, some of which are on the cusp of legislation, such as Street Votes, which I’ve written about before.

We were inspired by what’s happening in the US. And certainly, Silicon Valley provides a cautionary tale. An inability to build enough homes, to tackle excessive rents, has led to an exodus of founders and investors. There is also a policy backlash against this in America and we want to lead the business case here.

We have a paper ready to launch making the case for building more houses and office space – and we want you to publicly back us.

First, read our short letter to understand what we want.

Second, if you agree that fixing housing policy would help your business, then we encourage you to take less than a minute to sign our open letter (which will be published in a newspaper).

If you have any questions or would like to read the paper (under a strict embargo), get in touch with my colleague Aria Babu, who has written the report.

Here Comes
There is no new thing under the sun. Including the Levelling Up missions, which look suspiciously similar to Theresa May’s Industrial Strategy missions. It’s not just 332 pages of cut and paste from the former government and Wikipedia, though there’s some of that.

While Leeds City Council leader James Lewis was “disappointed” that "there were more mentions of Medieval Italy than there were of Yorkshire in the levelling up paper," and while there were only a couple of mentions of “entrepreneurs”, there’s still much to interest businesses.

The 12 missions, if achieved by 2030 (as planned), would be good for British entrepreneurs. But that’s a very big “if”. After all, it would be something of a miracle if whoever is in power will still be using the term “levelling up” by then. That said, provided they’re rebranded, they’re reasonable, and, crucially, quantifiable goals.

The most relevant mission to entrepreneurs is the second one: “By 2030, domestic public investment in Research & Development outside the Greater South East will increase by at least 40% and at least one third over the Spending Review period, with that additional government funding seeking to leverage at least twice as much private sector investment over the long term to stimulate innovation and productivity growth.”

The Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), for example, has committed to invest at least 55% of their domestic R&D funding outside the Greater South East by 2024/5.

The White Paper also announces three new Innovation Accelerators, which will be major place-based centres of innovation, centred on Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, and Glasgow City-Region: “These clusters of innovation will see local businesses and researchers in these areas backed by £100 million of new government funding to turbo-charge local growth, learning from the MIT-Greater Boston and Stanford-Silicon Valley models.”

Despite some positives, Centre for Cities concludes that The White Paper lacks the funding to deliver and doesn’t offer a plan beyond 2030. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation considers it a valuable start that falls short, while Policy Exchange is encouraged by the innovation policy.

It's certainly worth a skim – if only for the early mention of Thebes 1360 BC.

(Incidentally, one nifty thing to come out of the levelling up project is this ​​subnational indicators explorer, which allows you to compare your area with others.)

Danker Schön
It’s great to see the CBI making bold demands of government, such as replacing the temporary super-deduction with a permanent 100% tax deduction for capital spending, and establishing an Office for Future Regulation to support a more dynamic framework for post-Brexit Britain. If you have an hour to spare, it’s worth watching Tony Danker’s speech and interview with the Centre for Policy Studies.

Access All Areas
I’m delighted to announce that we’re partnering with Enterprise Nation on a new project: Access All Areas. Led by Emma Jones CBE, the incredible founder of Enterprise Nation, and guided by a panel of around 30 small business owners, over the course of the year we will produce four briefing papers on key things we think small businesses need better access to: finance, people, markets, and government.

We’re busy building the panel of Members for our Small Business Forum ahead of our first virtual roundtable on 21st February. We have a couple of places left, so if you’re a small business owner with a passion for policy, drop us an email with details about you and your business and we might be able to squeeze you in.

Inclusive Innovation Forum

We’ve wanted to undertake a project supporting ethnic diversity in entrepreneurship for quite a while. But we’ve held off until now in order to do it properly. For context, during the pandemic we hosted a few virtual roundtables on the topic, and while the speakers and attendees were great, the feedback was that we needed to deliver more than just a platform for an interesting conversation.

A subsequent interview with Sharon Vosmek, CEO of Astia, cemented this view. In her words: “your job is to convene the conversations that lead to investment; not lead to more coaching; not lead to more sponsoring; not lead to more hand waving. 92% of all VCs are white male. It’s that simple. And when you have that profound disparity, or what I’ll call that consistent a phenotype, you should have no expectation to achieve any sort of result other than what we’ve seen in venture: that it invests in white men of a specific phenotype.”

Today we’re launching something substantive, working with Morgan Stanley on the Inclusive Innovation Forum.

It will bring together some of the leading ethnic minority entrepreneurs, investors and policy experts in the UK and Europe, as well as a wider network of the most ambitious, high-potential entrepreneurs and people supportive of ethnic minority entrepreneurship.

But crucially, it’s also a project to find entrepreneurs for Morgan Stanley’s Multicultural Innovation Lab, which is expanding to the UK. It’s offering £200,000 to each participating company in exchange for an equity stake. The 51 companies that have participated in the Lab to-date have already raised over £100 million.

The project will be led by the incredible Anisah Osman Britton, who has dedicated her career to ensuring that building the future is an inclusive venture. Anisah is the director of storytelling at alternative VC fund Calm Capital Fund and a startup life reporter at Sifted. She also founded 23 Code Street.

So what’s next? Subscribe to our new Inclusive Innovation Forum newsletter to be kept up-to-date with what we’re up to, and forward this on to entrepreneurs, investors, or policy experts that we should get involved.

Speak for Yourself
We already have lots of events in the pipeline, and in the coming weeks we’ll be announcing lots more. With so many speaking opportunities, we want to hear from you if there are any issues related to entrepreneurs that you wish you could talk about with our incredible network of entrepreneurs, experts and policy makers.

For example, we’ll be running roundtables with the immigration department of Kingsley Napley on the impact of immigration rules on businesses, and co-hosting an event in The Shard with The Office Group on how to attract talent in a disrupted landscape. We also have our ongoing Female Founders Forum with Barclays and our Green Entrepreneurship Forum with Mishcon de Reya. But there will be much else besides.

Whether online or in-person, speaking at one of our events doesn’t always require a lot of preparation. One format that works well is to have ‘conversation starters’, which just means you can talk off-the-cuff about an issue impacting your business or your area of expertise.

As well as getting prominence for you and your business, speakers at our events often give us insights for policy research and for our discussions with the government.

If you’re keen to get involved, just get in touch with our events team, letting them know a little about yourself and what you would like to talk about. Bullet points will be fine. We’ll read them all and we’ll be in touch if and when an opportunity arises.

On the Horizon
I don’t normally share job opportunities, but this one is too important to miss. The Regulatory Horizons Council (RHC) team is looking for its next Chair to manage and lead the Council.

The RHC is an independent expert committee that identifies the implications of technological innovation, and provides the government with impartial, expert advice on the regulatory reform required to support its rapid and safe introduction.

I’ve been very encouraged with the work they’ve done so far on drones, genetic technologies, medical devices and fusion energy, which are well worth reading.

Find out more about the role here.

Take it for Granted

What's wrong with the way the UK government funds startup R&D? This is the question my colleague Sam Dumitriu tackles in his latest substack, and if the experience of a business trying to disrupt clinical trials is anything to go by, the answer is “quite a lot”.

I’ll focus on two problems, but it's worth reading his article in full. First, the business in question, Lindus Health, was marked down because it failed to consider job losses due to automation. And to make matters worse, InnovateUK noted that it failed to “consider the possible negative effect of loss of jobs … when companies choose [them] over their previous contractor to run trials.”

As Sam writes: “This strikes me as exactly the wrong way to think about job creation at a time when many businesses are complaining about worker shortages. Suppose Henry Ford was applying for a grant and having listed all the potential economic opportunities cars could create, was marked down for failing to consider job losses in the horse-drawn carriage sector.”

Strange criteria apart, however, there are deeper problems at play. Co-founder Meri Beckwith told Sam that they hired a professional to prepare their application, “as there seem to be loads of unwritten rules/expectations, and [we] assumed an agency would know what these were.” But “a lot of their feedback was 'more detail needed on x' which seems harsh given we stuck to just within the word limits for each answer. Between the word limits and given that this is inherently speculative, we are not sure how anyone could provide more detail.”

This is a major source of waste. As Sam explains, the money wasted on unsuccessful applications can be staggering. A study published in Nature found that €41 million in salaries goes into writing up applications for a call with a total value of €226 million.

The government and research agencies are well aware of the problem. It’s the logic behind the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). But as we discussed in The Way of the Future we can go beyond the DARPA model, adopting a range of funding mechanisms to accelerate the pace of innovation.

What we need is experimentation – whether that’s experimenting with a lottery model that cuts bureaucracy and biases like the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), or longer-term grants in the form of a ‘Horizon Research Fellowship’ along the lines of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) or BP’s Venture Research Unit.

Part of the Progress
For those interested in US policy, friends of The Entrepreneurs Network Caleb Watney and Alec Stapp have launched a new think tank: Institute for Progress.

They’re focusing on biosecurity, emerging technology, immigration and metascience, and already have lots of pithy papers on their website. Many have relevance for the UK. Check out how to reduce recidivism with prison-tech, create an AI testbed for government, or create advance market commitments and prizes in pandemic preparedness.

Expect Beta
The Government’s Help to Grow Digital scheme launched this week offering funding for SMEs to purchase software to boost their productivity. I appreciate that it’s in beta, but the website is clunky and error prone.

That’s not the only thing we think is wrong. Small businesses with fewer than five employees are ineligible for the scheme, and the software available is limited to a few narrow categories. Even within the narrow categories there are currently very few products to pick between.

The Sign for Small campaign is looking to address some of these issues, which is why we’re backing it. If you are of a similar mind, take two minutes to sign it today.

Sign up to our newsletter here.

The License Raj and Grant Funding

Are unnecessary processes, rules, and general bureaucracy getting in the way of entrepreneurship and innovation?

It's been a theme of two things I’ve written over the past week. For the Sunday Telegraph, I looked at the UK’s growing License Raj and how despite deregulatory rhetoric there’s been little done to reduce the burden on business.

In my piece, I set out seven laws which prove this administration isn’t a deregulating one. You can read it here.

As well as looking at regulation, I also looked at the hoops startups have to jump through to access Innovate UK grant funding.

My post for my email newsletter Notes on Growth looked at Innovate UK’s Smart grants through the lens of a rejected proposal. You can read it here.

Abundance Agenda

History has a lot to teach us. But the most important lesson is so obvious we take it for granted: progress is possible.

If given a time machine, I would love to visit 5th century BC Athens, Renaissance Italy, and Paris in the 20s, but it would be mad to want to live in those times. Even if you were lucky enough to be wealthy (even the wealthiest) life in the past was objectively worse.

As Our World in Data reveals, until around 1800 today’s best-off places were as poor as today’s worst-off places, and child mortality was even worse. Finland, for example, is now one of the healthiest and richest places on the planet. Two centuries ago it was as poor a place as today’s poorest countries, with a child mortality rate much worse than any place in the world today.

This is both a privilege and a responsibility. It’s a responsibility to ensure that those living in the world today can live better lives – in Somalia the mortality rate for children under 5 is 12.7%, while in Iceland it’s 0.12%; in Sierra Leone, life expectancy at birth is 52 years while in Japan it’s 84.1. And we also have a responsibility to future generations that progress continues.

Derek Thompson gets it. Writing in The Atlantic he makes a brilliant case for an abundance agenda. His focus is on America – criticising its failure in restricting everything from doctors, housing, and university places, to infrastructure projects, visas, and nuclear power plants – but the UK has many of the same, and a few different, problems. (Interestingly, Thompson praises the UK in the article for having ordered so many lateral flow tests.)

This agenda runs counter to Cheems Mindset. An all-too-prevalent way of thinking among policymakers, who too regularly dismiss ideas on the basis that it cannot be done, or would be hard to do. As Thompson concludes: “The abundance agenda aims for growth, not because growth is an end but because it is the best means to achieve the ends that we care about: more comfortable lives, with more power to do what we want, with more time devoted to what we love.”

Critically, this is something that can unite people with different political instincts: “​​This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great – such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.”

As a think tank, to-date we’ve done a good job at devising, championing and helping enact policies to make the UK more entrepreneurial. But I think we could do a better job of articulating this vision – and making the case for why others, including policymakers, should be as ambitious as we are. After all, entrepreneurs are giving us a lot to be optimistic about.

To paraphrase Thompson, we don’t just want to produce a laundry list of marginal improvements, but a defence of progress and growth​.

Female Founders Forum
The bad news: "In 2020, lockdowns and school closures negatively impacted female entrepreneurs far more than their male counterparts. Women were more likely to lose their jobs. Research from America found that women were more likely to be working at the kitchen table, where they were likely to be disturbed by family members, while their male partners took the home office. With schools shut and working home becoming the norm, the number of chores at home increased, and this burden fell disproportionately on women who also had to homeschool children and care for older relatives. During lockdown, British women have taken responsibility for two-thirds more childcare than men and they have also cut down their paid hours. Before the pandemic, mothers worked 80% of the hours that fathers did. During lockdown this dropped to 70%.

The good news: "Women are half as likely to find working from home difficult. Remote work offers many advantages in terms of flexibility, which is very useful in the context of managing childcare responsibilities. Instead of having to pay for full time childcare, mothers may be able to keep their young children at home while working. Flexible working will also make it easier to manage a school run around other commitments. As a result, we may see fewer women dropping out of the workforce when they have children which means they will continue to build skills, rise higher in their profession, and start successful businesses."

Read Aria Babu's whole article here and sign up for the Female Founders Forum newsletter here.

The Future of Work

Thanks to the omicron variant, many of us are working from home once again. This new-found flexibility is often a benefit, but as our 2020 report Resilience and Recovery found, it has been both a blessing and a curse for female founders.

In 2020, lockdowns and school closures negatively impacted female entrepreneurs far more than their male counterparts. Women were more likely to lose their jobs. Research from America found that women were more likely to be working at the kitchen table, where they were likely to be disturbed by family members, while their male partners took the home office. With schools shut and working home becoming the norm, the number of chores at home increased, and this burden fell disproportionately on women who also had to homeschool children and care for older relatives. During lockdown, British women have taken responsibility for two-thirds more childcare than men and they have also cut down their paid hours. Before the pandemic, mothers worked 80% of the hours that fathers did. During lockdown this dropped to 70%.

But it is not all bad news. The pandemic has ushered in lots of changes to how we live and some of these new changes may help female founders. It looks as though working from home is here to stay. Only one fifth of businesses intend to have all their workers in the office five days a week.

Women are half as likely to find working from home difficult. Remote work offers many advantages in terms of flexibility, which is very useful in the context of managing childcare responsibilities. Instead of having to pay for full time childcare, mothers may be able to keep their young children at home while working. Flexible working will also make it easier to manage a school run around other commitments. As a result, we may see fewer women dropping out of the workforce when they have children which means they will continue to build skills, rise higher in their profession, and start successful businesses.

Women are more likely to have short commutes once they have children and this mostly takes effect about four years after the birth of their first child. So there appears to be a clear causal link with the school run. The impact is that it curtails womens’ ability to succeed in careers which require people to live in or commute to expensive cities. The life sciences and FinTech, due to being based in places like London, Oxford, and Cambridge, particularly suffer from this.

If employers only expect employees to come in once a week, that makes it much easier to commute for up to an hour, with support networks such as relatives or other parents supporting with the school run. If working from home remains the status quo, we should expect mothers to stay in these professions at higher rates.

2022 promises to be an exciting year for the Female Founders Forum. We’re going to kick off the year with a series of regional roundtables.

These are going to be in the North West, Yorkshire, Wales, London and the South West. While we are doing the North West Roundtable virtually, we are hoping to do the rest in person, Covid guidance permitting. We will be building on the issues highlighted in our latest Female Founders Forum report Inspiring Innovation.

We are going to bring together local policy makers and the UK’s female founders to discuss the four barriers holding back female entrepreneurs in high-growth, high-impact industries, and what we can do to break them down. So we will be discussing how to close the funding gap, increase the number of girls and women in STEM, give girls and women better role models and mentors, and how to close the chore gap between men and women.

You can find all the events on our website.

Puritanical Politicians

Happy New Year!

While last year was incredible, 2022 is going to be busier than ever: more research, more webinars (and hopefully a fair number of in -person events), more meetings with politicians, more responses to consultations, and more policy impact. There has never been a better time to get involved.

We have our work cut out for us though. The gap between entrepreneurs and politicians still needs bridging. Duncan Robinson does a cracking job of explaining on reason why in an article for The Economist, arguing that British politics has a unique disdain for the country’s strengths.

For example, Robinson calls out Britain’s puritanical politicians, who seem to think the country’s thriving creative industries are not serious enough to merit praise: “They talk about Premier League football as if it were a mere den of iniquity, rather than Britain’s most potent cultural export. Videogaming is dismissed as a hobby rather than acknowledged as a national strength.”

Instead of kicking winners, we need politicians to prioritise entrepreneurship. Not for the sake of the entrepreneurs themselves, but for the economic growth they drive and the living standards they raise.

And we want to be a big part in solving this: by unabashedly making the case for an entrepreneurial society, by putting entrepreneurs in front of policy makers, and by backing this all up with hard research and smart ideas.

We’ll be doing this in lots of ways, but I’m particularly keen to share one just agreed with Enterprise Nation. Its founder, Emma Jones, has been on a mission to make Britain the most enterprising nation for years, and we’ll be partnering with them on reports looking at how small business owners can better access finance, people, markets and government.

As always, there will be ways you can get involved. Watch this space!

The Great
Many of the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met have had a close relationship with a business school to help them scale.

This isn’t as common as it should be, but even less prevalent is entrepreneurs tapping into Further Education (FE) colleges – even though many businesses would clearly benefit from access to more bright young minds, as well as the resources of the colleges themselves.

That’s why we’ve teamed up with the educational charity Gatsby to look at how we can better bridge the gap. We’ll be hosting some virtual roundtables and are looking for entrepreneurs who want to learn more about how FE colleges can help their business or vice versa. Whether you’re totally new to this, or already have experience with FE colleges, just drop Anton an email to register your interest.

Saintly Patron
Again on the topic of partnerships, a particularly fruitful one has been with our Patron Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia. He is a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist who arrived in the UK in 1972 as a refugee, fleeing Idi Amin's regime.

Sukhpal founded Euro Car Parts in 1978 from a single site in Willesden, London, and grew the company into the largest distributor of car parts in Europe, operating from more than 300 sites across the UK and employing more than 12,000 people. It was acquired by Nasdaq-listed LKQ Corporation in a transaction valued at £280m.

Sukhpal has written an article reflecting on the Job Creators report he supported two years ago, which found that half of the fastest growing companies have at least on foreign-born founder: “I was delighted when the Chancellor quoted the report in the Autumn Budget last year. It is also satisfying to know that the report's recommendations have been adopted by the government. Since its publication, the Tier 1 Post-Study Work Visa has been reformed and now allows international students to work in the UK for up to two years after they graduate. This is a testament to the quality of the data in the report.”

Get in touch if there is a policy you’re keen to support in a similar way.

Tak' A Cup O’ Kindness

This will (obviously) be the last Friday Newsletter of the year, so, as I did last year, I hope you don’t mind indulging me in looking back at the year through our reports, events and webinars.

Despite the obvious challenges, 2021 has been our biggest and best year. It’s testament to the incredibly talented small team and network of Advisers and authors that we’re able to do so much on a relatively small budget.

If you want to support us, join us as a Supporter or Adviser (the price of this will double in a week and whatever price you pay for joining is locked in for life). Or you can help by simply letting other people know about us, suggesting that they sign up for this or any of our three other newsletters. Also, if you have any feedback, questions, policy ideas or partnership proposals I’m always keen to hear from you.

January
Fixing Copyright was our first report of the year. Dr Anton Howes argues for seven key reforms to create a world-leading copyright system that would protect intellectual property while giving entrepreneurs more creative freedom and legal certainty.

We also hosted Chi Onwurah MP, Shadow Minister for Science, Research & Digital, for a virtual Entrepreneurs’ Drinks, and heard from Lord Bilimoria and Nicolas Rollason of Kingsley Napley at a virtual roundtable on the future of visas and immigration.

February
In February we virtually hosted Lord Leigh for an Entrepreneurs’ Drinks. As well as being Treasurer of the Conservative Party, he speaks out regularly on business matters and advocates the case for entrepreneurs. As with many of our virtual drinks events in 2021, this one was supported by Mishcon de Reya, a long-term sponsor of our work. Later in the month we had Ian Murray MP, Labour's Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, for another virtual drinks event.

We also convened an event in partnership with Kingsley Napley on The Future of International Business with the government’s Global Entrepreneurship Programme, and held virtual interviews with our Adviser Farah Naz founder of EX1 cosmetics, as well as separately with Cecile Reinaud, founder of Seraphine and Member of our Female Founders Forum.

March
In March we released Making the UK the Best Place in the World for AI Innovation. Written by former Office for AI Adviser Seb Krier, it sets out the pro-innovation policies we need to build upon our strengths of being home to top universities and cutting edge businesses such as DeepMind and BenevolentAI.

Through the APPG for Entrepreneurship we also hosted a webinar on Levelling Up with Baroness Chalker, Seema Malhotra MP and Jo Gideon MP. The ideas from this will feed into a forthcoming report with input from the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC). We also had John Penrose MP for an Entrepreneurs' Drinks in March.

April
We hosted Sarah Olney MP for an Entrepreneurs’ Drinks in April. She undertakes the roles of Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Business and Industrial Strategy, Transport, and Energy and Climate Change, so it was a wide-ranging discussion. We also held a Female Founders Forum webinar on Trade Accessing New Markets.

May
In May we hosted Small Business Minister Paul Scully MP and founder of Octopus Chris Hulatt for a webinar on How to Build a Nation of Entrepreneurs. We also held a virtual roundtable on the Sharing Economy, which helped inform our report on the same topic released later in the year. In addition, we hosted an Entrepreneurs' Drinks with Selaine Saxby MP and a Female Founders Forum webinar on Preparing for a Crisis.

June
In June we released Conflicting Missions: The Risks of the Digital Markets Unit to Competition and Innovation. In this report, Sam Bowman, Sam Dumitriu and Aria Babu explained how the new Digital Markets Unit poses significant risks to competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

To launch the report we hosted a virtual event with the UK Government’s anti-corruption champion John Penrose MP; Will Hayter, Senior Director, Digital Markets Unit at Competition and Markets Authority; Camilla de Coverly Veale, Head of Tech Regulation, Coadec; and John Fingleton, former Office for Fair Trading CEO and founder of Fingleton Associates.

We also released Honours for Innovators in the same month. In this report, Ned Donovan and Dr Anton Howes make the case for establishing a new order of chivalry, specifically designed to encourage invention and raise the status of being an innovator in the eyes of the public. John Petrie OBE, who has helped design national honours and decorations for several Commonwealth countries, even created some potential designs.

June was a busy month for papers, with Knocking Down Barriers: Empowering Business Builders in the UK’s Most Deprived Communities also released. In partnership with Sage, Sam Dumitriu sets out how new business creation will play a vital role in the post-pandemic economic recovery and the wider levelling up agenda. One revealing stat: 43% of those in the UK’s most economically deprived communities could, unprompted, name a viable idea for a business or side-hustle.

We also hosted John Stevenson MP for Entrepreneurs' Drinks event. As Chair of the APPG for Family Business we were joined by many of the UK’s most innovative family businesses. We also held a Female Founder Forum webinar on Building a Team You Can Trust with Vanessa Tierne, founder of Abadoo; Karina Robinson, co-director of The Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics, and Louisa Chapple, HR Director for Barclays Execution Services.

July
In July, we released The Way of the Future: Supercharging UK Science and Innovation with The Tony Blair Institute. It includes a preface from Tony Blair and a foreword by Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe. If you’ve not read it yet, it would be my top recommendation out of all our 2021 reports. It covers a lot of ground in the pithy essays.

We kicked off our Something Ventured partnership with FieldHouse Associates in July. The formidable Sharon Vosmek, CEO of Astia inspiring all in attendance.

We also hosted Jerome Mayhew MP in July for a virtual drinks event. As a director of the Go Ape from 2006 to 2009, and its managing director from 2009 to 2018, Mayhew talked about how he plans on bringing his business experience into politics. We also spoke with ever-impressive Lord Young in July about his recently published Diaries of the Campaign That Saved Enterprise.

July also saw us virtually host some of the UK’s most impressive space entrepreneurs, the ideas from which will feed into a forthcoming APPG for Entrepreneurship paper on supporting space startups and scaleups. We also hosted a Female Founders Forum webinar on Funding Opportunities for Female Entrepreneurs with Tiffany Young of YFM Equity Partners, Helen Meade of UKRI and Katherine Morgan of Barclays.

September
Building on Conflicting Missions, Better Together: The Procompetitive Effects of Mergers in Tech saw Sam Bowman and Sam Dumitriu join forces again to explain how mergers in tech can enhance competition and why proposals to lower the burden of proof used by the CMA to block mergers involving digital firms with strategic market status risks harming the UK’s startup ecosystem.

We also hosted Stephen Page, founder & CEO of SFC Capital for another Something Ventured event. SFC Capital is the UK and Europe's most active seed investors, so we focused on early-stage funding. We also hosted Robin Millar MP for our first Hackatown event. Focusing on Llandudno, we convened local entrepreneurs and national experts to discuss what could be done to make the town more entrepreneurial.

October
In October, we published our annual Female Founders Forum report, which we run in partnership with Barclays. In Inspiring Innovation Aria Babu looks at female entrepreneurship in the high-growth sectors such as e-commerce, fintech, and greentech, setting out how the UK can capitalise on the opportunity for a £200bn uplift in our economic growth. It was launched in the House of Lords at our first in-person event for a while, with Baroness Susan Greenfield speaking at the launch.

In October we also released Digitise the Skies, in which Anton Howes and Sam Dumitriu highlight the potential of the UK’s nascent drone industry and set out reforms to unlock the sector’s £42bn forecast contribution by 2030.

We launched our Green Entrepreneurship Forum in October. In partnership with Mishcon de Reya, it’s a project we’re continuing next year. A week after the launch we hosted a virtual roundtable on Funding the Future – how to raise next stage funding for green businesses.

We also hosted a Late Payments Task Force webinar with the Small Business Commissioner. This was a culmination of Xero’s Late Payments Task Force which I chaired. It analysed the ​​lifecycle of an invoice in order to work out what interventions could really work to address the persistent problem of late payments. We also hosted David Glick, Founder & CEO, Edge Investments, for another Something Ventured interview.

November
Tim Mills, Managing Partner at ACF Investors, was our guest for the penultimate Something Ventured interview of the year. ACF (formerly the Angel CoFund) backs early-stage businesses across a variety of sectors through co-investment funds that partner with angel syndicates. Among other things, we discussed the increasing importance of "professional" angel investors in early-stage rounds. Also in November, we hosted our final Green Entrepreneurship event of the year on Ecosystem Economics.

December
As part of the APPG for Entrepreneurship, we released a paper on the Sharing Economy in December. It advocates for a continued level-playing field on tax and for preserving the regulatory environment that has allowed the sector to flourish, while also empowering platforms to prioritise standards.

In early December we hosted a physical roundtable on the future of regulation for Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies, as well as our final Something Ventured open interview with Michaël Niddam, co-Founder of the venture builder Kamet Ventures.

Expect even more 2022!

All that's left is to wish you and yours a Happy New Year.

Sharing is Caring

As many of you will know, we’re the Secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Entrepreneurship, which sits across all major parties in the House of Common and Lords. It's job is to encourage, support and promote entrepreneurship across the UK, and ensure that Parliament is kept up-to-date on what is needed to create and sustain the most favourable conditions for entrepreneurship.

Today it published a briefing paper on the Sharing Economy: a vibrant and growing pillar of the UK’s economy.

Over the past decade, venture capitalists have invested £3.47bn in 465 sharing and on-demand economy businesses. Almost half of us use sharing economy apps to access goods and services. This is a trend that’s only going in one direction.

And a good thing too. It’s so much more efficient to share than to own, and more efficient to rent services flexibly – whether rooms (Airbnb), cars (Uber), cleaning (Housekeep), wellbeing (Urban), baby clothes (Bundlee), or even dogs (Borrow My Doggy).

These innovations make the scarce plentiful, reducing transaction costs and cutting waste. Whether you’re a cold-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge looking to save a few pennies, or a warm-hearted Bob Cratchit trying to provide for your family on a tight budget – the sharing economy helps everyone. And, in the process – whether it’s their intention, or not – using fewer resources which is better for the environment.

It's not just the private sector. Norwich City Council has even backed the city to become the UK’s first ‘sharing city’ by helping coordinate charities and companies in the sector.

Today’s briefing paper isn’t really a celebration of the sector though. That's beyond dispute. It’s a policy-rich analysis of the key challenges it’s facing and what we need to do to ensure it continues to flourish.

Sharing economy businesses face headwinds – none stronger than the way they could be taxed. Many entrepreneurs we spoke with and who responded to our Call for Evidence worry about the Treasury’s consultation on applying VAT as standard to all sharing economy transactions.

All they want is a level playing field. Their competitors are offline businesses who sell their services directly to consumers and are under the VAT turnover threshold. One entrepreneur said the change would ‘essentially kill our business model.” Another argued this could be a net-revenue loser for HMRC as it could push people away from platforms to the grey ‘cash-in-hand’ economy.

As Sam Dumitriu writes: "As the sharing economy grows, the Treasury is understandably concerned about the set-up. But fiddling with the rules on VAT will create major problems for sharing economy start-ups. Take the cleaning platform Housekeep, which matches cleaners with customers. If they were forced to apply VAT in full to every clean booked through their platform, then customers and cleaners would soon leave the platform. After all, there would always be lower-taxed offline alternatives, not least old-fashioned word of mouth."

The Call for Evidence also uncovered problems with a rule designed to prevent low-risk activities such as leasing ships from gaining SEIS and EIS relief.

For example, the investors of Bundlee, the UK’s first baby clothing rental subscription were not eligible to claim SEIS on their investment. In contrast, an e-commerce business that sold the same clothing would qualify for the reliefs. A simple fix would be to amend the excluded trades list to only exclude businesses that are leasing high-value and long-lived assets such as ships or property.

We’ll be pushing for these and the other recommendations around third-party reporting requirements, the implementing an Estonian style tax system, and high visa fees. Once again, it’s proof that many of the most practical policies come from entrepreneurs on the ground.

As Gagan Mohindra MP – Officer to the APPG for Entrepreneurship, Conservative MP for South West Hertfordshire and a former entrepreneur – writes in his Foreword:

“The report suggests businesses desire a level-playing field in relation to taxes compared to offline businesses. The APPG supports the findings of this report, concluding that a fair and sustainable tax system would allow businesses on sharing economy platforms to compete, benefiting consumers. As legislators, work like this provides a vital reference point to continue to ensure the Government is on the right track to help entrepreneurs across the country thrive. We will use these recommendations to inform our decisions, with better knowledge of the practices as well as challenges that small businesses face.”

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UK's A-Bomb

Atomico’s annual State of European Tech report is a big deal, and a bit of a beast. I read it – well, heavily skimmed it, making liberal use of Ctrl-F – so you don’t necessarily have to.

The hundreds of charts speak for themselves: the UK is leading the way in European tech.

“On a cumulative basis, over the past five years the total amount of capital invested in UK tech companies has nearly reached $75bn. This is more than double the amount of capital invested in the second and third largest countries; Germany and France.” During the first nine months of this year we have had 68 rounds of $100m+ and according to the report, we are “Europe’s leading home for unicorns” with 100 in total – once again, that’s nearly double Germany (51) and over three times France (31).

More specifically, UK tech is leading the way on special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs): “Nine out of 15 of the companies are UK-based, accounting for 60% of the total cohort by count and 53% by enterprise value.”

Venture capital in the UK is raised from the most varied set of limited partners (LPs), with sources evenly distributed between pension funds, funds of funds, sovereign wealth funds and corporate investors. And UK VCs have the lowest share (12%) of capital raised from government agencies of any region in Europe. In contrast, 52% of VC funding raised in Central and Eastern Europe originates from government agencies.

But it’s not all good news. When is it ever?

Of those SPACs I mentioned, all went public on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. This is part of a broader problem, with the UK seeing more of its unicorn tech companies list on US exchanges than other European countries. As the Economist reported today: “any pretensions the City once had as the world’s stock exchange have been dashed. Its share of global IPOs has dropped by a factor of five, to 4%, and the number of companies listed on it has fallen by 40% since the peak in 2007. As a share of the global equity market, and even of the sclerotic European one, the value of Britain’s has dropped steadily.” It is why the FCA has just changed listing rules to attract more UK IPOs – something we recommended.

Also, talent remains a challenge, with 37% of UK-based founders believing that the depth of the talent pool is worse compared to 12 months ago. To be fair, 33% think it’s better, although in France, for example, it’s 54% (better) and 19% (worse).

The report compares the number of founders that have emerged from $1bn companies and the location of these unicorn companies. While we have the highest share of alumni founders (24%), this is lower than our 33% share of $1bn companies. Someone (perhaps us) needs to take a look into why more entrepreneurs aren’t emerging from our unicorns.

As we have written about many times, UK pension funds still aren’t backing entrepreneurs, with just 6% going into venture capital. As the report states, “Nordic VCs, in particular, have benefitted from the progressive, pro-venture approach taken by local pension funds; pension funds represent almost 30% of all capital raised by VCs based in the Nordics, more than 6x higher than the next region.” It’s not just rules, the problem is the culture of our pension funds. We’re looking at ways we can do our bit to help bridge this gap.

Overall though, it’s an incredibly positive story for the UK. Economic growth isn’t a zero-sum game of course. We should celebrate the growing strength of European tech more broadly. But given someone has to be leading the way, we should be grateful that it’s the country many readers will live and work in.

Go Further
Those studying at Further Education (FE) colleges will often go on to start a business, but are they getting the inspiration and skills they need? From the other side, FE colleges are well placed to support the ambitions of local entrepreneurs, but how many entrepreneurs engage with them?

Last year, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation supported the Think consultancy to produce an excellent review of the relationship between business support services and further education. It looked at the role of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and other business support services. It is an encouraging read, but given the chance that LEPs will be overhauled in Gove’s Levelling Up White Paper, I’m increasingly of the view that government might not be the most sustainable solution.

That’s why we’ve been working with Gatsby to explore the potential for connecting our network of entrepreneurs with FE colleges. We’ve undertaken a scoping exercise and our next step is to host some virtual roundtables with FE colleges and entrepreneurs around the country to test our ideas. We want to work out what best practice looks like.

Get in touch with Dr Anton Howes in our team to get involved. Perhaps you’re an entrepreneur who went to an FE college, and have thoughts on how your education benefited you, or could be improved. Or you could be an entrepreneur making the most of a local FE college already. Or maybe this is the first you’ve ever thought about it until now and just want to stay updated.

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Green Entrepreneurship Forum: Natural Resources

On 18th November we hosted the third instalment in our series of roundtables for the Green Entrepreneurship Forum: a new policy initiative we are running with Mishcon de Reya that brings together the UK’s most successful sustainability driven entrepreneurs to help support their growth and inform us on the policies they need to flourish.

As natural resources are declining and demand is increasing, the commercial value of natural resources that benefit people are becoming more visible. At this online roundtable we discussed how companies could create benefits for both themselves and the planet by investing in “natural capital”.

Alex Rhodes, Head of Purpose at Mishcon de Reya and a Fellow at the Royal Geographic Society, and a Conservation Fellow at the Zoology Society of London, opened the discussion by looking at COP26, in particular the rules to strengthen the integrity of Carbon Markets. The WWF Living Planet Report showed that we have destroyed about 60% of our biodiversity since 1970. Alex observed that this was one of the biggest challenges for the international markets and policy, as many of the countries with significant ecosystems such as rainforests need support transitioning their economies. Alex also identified 3 areas Mischon De Reya has seen changes in relation to biodiversity: 

1. Investment markets have an increased focus on trying to understand what biodiversity is, how to measure it and how to report on it. 

2. Development companies are looking at net positive biodiversity in relation to infrastructure.

3. Changes to agricultural subsidies and that move from the common agricultural policy’s system of paying people by the acre to a new policy of environmental ecosystem based payments which the government is currently trialling.

Next we heard from Ben Goldsmith, CEO of Menhaden and board member for DEFRA. Ben shared that his lifelong fanaticism for nature started as a child, and observed that one of the fundamental problems in our society is that most people lose their connection with nature as they grow into adult life. But, he can see through his work that people are rediscovering that connection in a kind of societally important way, and that is being reflected in global policy. At COP26 policymakers are talking about climate change and nature in the same context. In the UK there are new, significant budget initiatives around nature such as the Nature Climate Fund where £750m is available for restoring peatlands and forests and the new agricultural payments regime which, after a seven year transition period, will be focused entirely on rewarding land managers for restoring nature. The UK is also at the centre of new deals around slowing and ending deforestation, restoring mangroves and creating new marine protected areas. 

We then heard from Will Wells, Founder and President of Hummingbird Technologies, an Agri-tech platform which monitors natural resources from space using imagery and deep learning models and detects climate positive switches in regenerative agriculture. He shared his perspective as a leader in the emerging climate tech landscape, which he believes will not only be a great employer but will make a huge difference to the environment. His career has focused on three big questions. 

1. How can we produce food in a way that is regenerative - whilst agriculture, land use and forestry is responsible for 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions, it also has the potential to be a trillion metric tonne carbon sink?

2. How can technology be leveraged to measure, monitor and verify the natural resources that are being preserved so governments and big companies can reward responsible producers?

3. How can we get government politicians and everyone to unite on upstream biodiversity loss in the form of the global deforestation pledge?

Finally, we heard from Richard Roberts, Head of Research at Volans. Richard shared his enthusiasm for the forum because change requires enlightened businesses to engage in politics - as Ronald Reagan once said “politics is too important to leave it to the politicians”. Richard felt that the snail's pace of the COP26 process masks the significant collective change that is happening to our society. Another quote that gets used is from one of of Ernest Hemingway's novels where a character is asked how they went bankrupt, and the answer is “First, gradually, then suddenly”, which applies to the current environmental agenda which has been gradual for such a long time, but is now shifting into a phase of sudden capital, policy, and technology convergence to address the issue. Richard also shared some of his ‘Tomorrows Capitalism’ research that has shown that we have been running an economy that is in ecological deficit for a very long time, and the consequences of that are now becoming apparent. We are going to be paying off that ecological debt for a long time, but that creates a big opportunity for regenerative agribusiness and any business that is helping to restore nature and biodiversity.

A number of ideas were shared during the ongoing discussion, including the following:

• There is a significant political appetite for the government to raise its ambitions in environmental policy, particularly from younger MPs and Red Wall MPs. 

• The carbon credits system is masking the problem that all production has a carbon cost. Globally we need to ensure the carbon credits system can be strengthened to ensure that carbon credits are invested in a more effective and measured way, such as the Saudi system where developers are making direct contributions to marine conservation which is creating a long lasting carbon sink. We need higher fidelity, better monitoring, better measuring and a more robust and honest carbon credit system.

• Local authorities need to review their procurement system to invest in new green technologies. They are held back by procurement lists which mean they can only work with certain suppliers, stopping them from using more innovative and sustainable solutions. There are also barriers created by local politics which stand in the way of council efficiency and innovation. 

• Procurement is also a challenge when companies are looking to work with farmers. For example, biochar is part of the government plan with a goal to produce 5 million tonnes of it annually by 2040. However, there are barriers for biochar organisations looking to work with farmers who often work in a traditional way and do not have a lot of spare resources to look at new business models or suppliers. DEFRA is investing in organisations which build relationships with farmers to help educate them about new innovations, so these provide an opportunity for entrepreneurs in this sector.

• Schools could educate children on the positive changes that are being made to improve the environment and how these work in different regions.

• Water is becoming an increasingly stressed resource, and one of the areas DEFRA could look at is how to incentivise farmers to put in more nature based solutions, such as chalk streams, rather than relying on water treatment works, and how to get to scale. 

• We also need to review the regulation, which does not recognise the integrated nature of natural solutions. For example, if a company takes waste water from a treatment works and puts it into a wetland, they need a waste management licence.

• Nature is very place based, and there is an argument that we need to shift to seeing more businesses which are grounded in their local communities. This creates an existential challenge for the big multinationals with complex supply chains, but there is recognition particularly in food and agricultural companies that they need to reinvest in regenerative nature. 

• Corporate measurements of sustainability are extremely varied, depending on the individual companies focus or product. For example, Nestle are interested in 1000 farms upstream in the Amazon and deforestation, British Sugar might be about sugar bean fields and soil erosion, Wessex Water might be looking at planting cover crops near a river, and Diageo might be looking at carbon emissions across their supply chain so we can buy a zero emission pint. They are engaged, but it is extremely fragmented. 

• One of the challenges for the UK is we only account for 1% of world carbon emissions, and unless we can change things on a global scale we are making a tiny contribution. To make global changes we need to look at reducing other factors such as conflict and poverty to influence the economies and priorities of other nations. 

• If you took all the degraded land in the world it would be a greater land mass than Russia.

Our next roundtable is on 12th January, where we will be exploring ‘The Value of Nought - How to align your business with Net Zero’ . If you would like to get involved in the Green Entrepreneurship Forum and contribute to this roundtable please email katrina@tenentrepreneurs.org.

Miss the Mark

This week our friends at the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), in partnership with the OECD and EU, released The Missing Entrepreneurs.

GEN’s report finds that if everyone were as active in business creation as men between 30 and 49 years old, there could be an additional 9 million people starting and managing new business in the EU, and 35 million more across OECD countries. About three-quarters of these so-called “missing” entrepreneurs are women and one-in-eight are under 30 years old.

The young are less entrepreneurial than the old. One quarter of the 18 million people involved in starting or managing a new business in the EU are over 50 – even more than the proportion aged 18-30.

It’s not that the young don’t have ambitions. As the report finds, 45% of university students intend to start a business within five years of graduation, yet only 5% of youth aged 18 to 30 are actively working on a start-up. Along these lines, we found with Octopus that 51% of young people in the UK have thought about starting a business, yet 70% of them don’t know where to start. Let’s not let the UK’s equivalent of Whitney Wolfe Herd or Mark Zuckerberg go to waste.

The report also finds that women are less likely than men to be involved in starting and managing new businesses: “Over the period 2016-20, less than 5% of women in the EU were involved in creating a business or managing one less than 42 months old relative to 8% of men. A similar gap appears in OECD countries where 9% of women were starting and managing new businesses relative to 13% of men.” Our latest on this ongoing battle for equality can be found in our Female Founders Forum report.

Finally, the report finds that the share of immigrants among the self-employed in the EU has nearly doubled over the past decade, increasing from 6% in 2011 to 11% in 2020. A lot of this is driven by immigration flows, so any policy interventions designed to improve the quality and longevity of businesses need to account for the fact many immigrants will be less able to navigate their new country’s bureaucracy. We’ve tended to focus on the immigration of high-growth entrepreneurs rather than those starting out – an omission that we will need to fix at some point.

Be Animated
As I’ve written about before, we’re concerned that the trajectory of competition policy is damaging the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. In both Conflicting Missions and Better Together, we spoke out against misguided and unclear rules around mergers and acquisitions that are spooking UK entrepreneurs and investors.

We are one of the few public voices on this vital issue. This week Sam Dumitriu criticised the CMA’s decision to retrospectively block Facebook/Meta’s purchase of Giphy, as well as speaking more broadly about competition policy on a TechUK panel. His succinct speech, which neatly sets out our concerns, can be read here.

A Word on Advice
We’re cautiously planning in-person events for next year, including a host of dinners for our Advisers (we switched to wine and Zoom during the lockdowns). As well as our tried and tested format of dinners led by leading politicians from across the spectrum, we’re planning some with just entrepreneurs.

Now would be a great time to become an Adviser – not least because we’re putting the price up next year (while freezing the price for all current Advisers). Also, as the number steadily grows we will have to cap the number we have. Find out more about becoming an Adviser here and drop me an email if you would like to chat about what’s involved.

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Speech to TechUK Panel on Digital Competition.

This is an edited version of a speech I gave to TechUK on Thursday December 2nd at a panel on the new ‘pro-competition regime for digital markets’. Footage of the speech will be available online eventually.

I’m going to focus on a specific part of the proposed ‘pro-competition regime for digital markets’: merger control.

The reforms proposed by the government would block any deal involving a SMS firm that creates a ‘realistic prospect’ of reducing competition – defined as being a ‘greater than fanciful’ chance. 

Under the status quo, the CMA only blocks deals if they think there’s a 50% or more chance of it substantially lessening competition. So this would represent a substantially lower standard. 

It is already used in deciding whether to refer a deal to phase 2 review, but the CMA has already said that historical deals that were not referred to phase 2 would likely be blocked by this, like Facebook/Instagram, so I don’t think that’s as good a guide to what would and wouldn’t be blocked as we might like.

I think the CMA has underestimated the risks of this approach, and has been a bit myopic about the effects it has on the wider economy. 

It’s sensible for the CMA to take a narrow view when it’s reviewing individual cases, but when it’s proposing legislation I’m pretty disappointed that it doesn’t seem to have considered the harms that it can cause if it is given excessively broad powers.

To understand these harms, I think it’s first worth establishing that mergers often play an important pro-competitive role in tech.

I want to focus on two key reasons why we should not automatically assume that all acquisitions in tech are suspect and anti-competitive.

1. Acquisitions are a key route to exit for entrepreneurs

High-growth tech entrepreneurship is inherently risky. Most startups fail and the VCs who fund them know this.

Only a small fraction of businesses will go on to IPO.

According to data provider Beauhurst, only nine equity-backed startups exited through IPO in 2019. 

Last year eight British equity-backed startups were acquired by Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple alone.

Acquisitions, in effect, derisk entrepreneurship and investment in high-growth startups, because if your company isn’t going to be the next Facebook they mean you can still make money from it. I don’t think it’s a wise policy to try to force startups to become the next Facebook against their will – but increasingly it seems like the CMA thinks we need to protect startup founders from themselves, and force them into much riskier paths than might be wise.

Because exits are so important to founders and their investors, it should not be surprising that cross-country studies find that restrictions on mergers and acquisitions are linked to declining rates of VC investment. I think it’s likely that if the UK becomes more restrictive, we’ll see the same effect here.

2. Acquisitions facilitate interplatform competition. 

Competition in digital markets often takes place between digital platforms that have a strong position in one market and move into another market dominated by another digital platform.

Acquisitions can accelerate this kind of inter-platform competition. Instead of starting from scratch, platforms can use mergers to gain a foothold in the new market, and do so more rapidly and perhaps more effectively than if they had to develop the product in-house.

A few examples:

• Google’s acquisition of Android increased competition faced by Apple’s iPhone

• Apple’s acquisition of Beats by Dre increased competition faced by Spotify as it accelerated the development of Apple Music

• Walmart’s acquisition of Jet increased competition faced by Amazon in e-commerce. 

As Ben Evans puts it: “for every Instagram, there’s a PA Semi, which Apple bought in 2008 for $278m. PA Semi is the reason Apple is now creating its own chips to power all of its devices, and why those chips are better than anything from Intel or Qualcomm. Intel had a near-monopoly of CPUs for personal computing for close to 40 years, and now Apple has broken that dominance, because of an acquisition.”

If any of the mergers I’ve just mentioned were blocked then its likely competition in digital markets would have declined, and consumers would be worse off as a result.

In essence, and I hope we all accept this, there is a cost to over-enforcement as well as under-enforcement, and I’m not convinced the CMA is taking that seriously.

The question is whether or not new harms in digital markets justify changes to the merger control regime.

I’m sceptical for three reasons.

1. I’m sceptical of the ability of regulators to identify anti-competitive acquisitions in advance.

I recently saw Tommaso Valletti say: “1,000 and zero: mergers done by GAFAM and mergers blocked in the past 20 years.”

I’ve often heard something similar cited as an argument against the status quo, including from Andrea Coscelli and the Furman Report (Tommaso’s numbers are slightly inflated). 

But while these are impressive sounding numbers, the vast majority of these deals were absolutely tiny – half were worth less than $10m and 80% were worth less than $50m. Between 80-90% were acqui-hires of companies with fewer than ten staff members.

When you actually list the deals that people think were problematic, the list is much smaller – Facebook / Instagram and Whatsapp, Google / Waze and Doubleclick, and perhaps a few others. 

We can have different views on whether these should or shouldn’t have gone through, but it’s really just a rhetorical trick to use the biggest number possible that, on further scrutiny, really just muddles the question. 

It feels probable to me that any rule or burden of proof that picks out the rare anti-competitive acquisitions of startups will also end up picking out many more procompetitive or neutral buyouts.

The question for the CMA and the government isn’t just “Should we have blocked Facebook / Instagram?” – it’s “Are we sure that a regime that leads us to block Facebook / Instagram might not also cause us to block the next Apple / PA Semi, or Google / Android?”

2. Arguments about potential competition tend to prove too much.

Take the classic example of potential competition being snuffed out: Facebook buying Instagram.

If Instagram posed a potential or nascent competitive thread to Facebook when Facebook acquired it, with its photo feed and social features, then so must other services with products that are clearly distinct from Facebook, but have social features.

In which case Facebook faces potential competition from other services like Tiktok, Twitch, Youtube, Twitter and Snapchat, all of which have services that are at least as similar to Facebook’s as Instagram’s.

The loss of a single, relatively small, potential competitor out of many cannot be counted as a significant loss for competition, since so many other potential and actual competitors remain. We can define these markets narrowly, or broadly, but we can’t define them in both ways at the same time.

3. Are new powers necessary?

This week we saw the CMA order Meta to sell Giphy. (I blogged about it here)

One of the key justifications was that Giphy is a potential competitor to Meta in the display advertising market.

I think the decision is quite a stretch, but really it raises a more important question: If the CMA is able to stop this deal  under the existing burden of proof, on such speculative grounds, what deals does it want to stop but can’t because the burden of proof is too high? Are we really sure that we want to block deals on even more speculative grounds than Facebook / Giphy? 

Three thoughts on the Giphy ruling

In a ruling released today, the Competition and Markets Authority has retrospectively blocked Facebook/Meta’s purchase of Giphy.

It’s an interesting (and somewhat concerning) decision for three reasons:

1. Potential Competition

There were two main ‘theories of harm’ that led the CMA to call for Facebook/Meta to sell off Giphy. First, there was the concern that Facebook/Meta could limit access to Giphy’s GIF libraries for competitors to Facebook and Instagram, such as Twitter. Second, the CMA saw Giphy as a potential competitor to Facebook’s Display Advertising business.

This is a curious reason because, as my co-author Sam Bowman argues, “It proves too much.” Giphy is not currently a competitor to Facebook in digital advertising — its ad business is simply too small. It is so small, in fact, that the initial takeover did not require board level approval. The CMA’s concern is about competition in the future that could be lost – the fear that Giphy could, in effect, be the next Instagram and some day have a significant presence in digital advertising. 

But if Giphy is a potential competitor in display advertising, then why isn’t, for example, Google’s display advertising business also a competitor today? And why isn’t any company with a large userbase online a potential competitor that could be just as much of a constraint on Facebook as the CMA believes Giphy could be? In effect, the CMA is trying to define the market both broadly, to include Giphy’s potential competition, but also narrowly, to exclude every other actual and potential online advertiser.

This is a more general problem not linked to the specific deal in question. When you define a business as a potential competitor, you also inevitably define other similar businesses as potential competition too. This can radically change our view of how competitive any given market is.

As Sam Bowman and I wrote in our paper Better Together: The procompetitive effects of mergers in tech:

If one firm with a similar, but fundamentally different, product poses a potential threat to a purchaser, there may be many other firms with similar, but fundamentally different, products that do, too.

If Instagram posed a potential or nascent competitive thread to Facebook when Facebook acquired it, with its photo feed and social features, then so must other services with products that are clearly distinct from Facebook, but have social features; in which case Facebook faces potential competition from other services like Tiktok, Twitch, Youtube, Twitter and Snapchat, all of which have services that are at least as similar to Facebook’s as Instagram’s. In this case, the loss of a single, relatively small, potential competitor out of many cannot be counted as a significant loss for competition, since so many other potential and actual competitors remain.

There’s a further problem. In assessing potential competition, the CMA must assess the viability of various different business models. But is it capable of doing so? Questions like “Will Giphy’s paid alignment (i.e. brands agree partnerships with Giphy to show relevant GIFs when users search the library) model provide meaningful competition to Facebook/Meta’s advertising business?” and “Can loss-making Giphy raise additional finance if the prospect of a takeover from a tech giant is off the table?” are far from clear even to the most well-informed analysts of these markets, and it is unclear whether the CMA’s understanding is even that sophisticated. If the CMA’s assessment of market conditions is inaccurate, then there is a real risk of harm to competition and innovation if it erroneously blocks a deal that would have been procompetitive.

2. The CMA prefers structural to behavioural remedies.

The second theory of harm, other than the idea that Giphy might have become a competitor of Facebook/Meta’s in digital advertising someday, was the idea that Facebook/Meta could cut off access for competitors to Giphy’s GIF libraries, which the CMA found did not have many close substitutes. But, if true, this could be addressed by a range of behavioural remedies. 

Why not force Facebook/Meta to maintain open access to the Gif libraries for the near future, at least until competitor libraries are developed?

Alternatively, Giphy’s terms of services could be changed to allow ‘commingling’ where Giphy’s results can be viewed alongside a competitor’s GIFs. In theory, this could help a competitor develop using a Giphy-style ‘paid alignment’ advertising model.

However, both of these remedies were dismissed in favour of a break-up.

3. Is lowering the burden of proof really necessary?

Elsewhere, the CMA is proposing to lower the standard of proof needed to block mergers and acquisitions involving tech firms with “strategic market status” (e.g. Facebook and Google). Under the status quo, the CMA can block a deal if it is deemed to carry a greater than 50 per cent chance of substantially lessening competition. But under the CMA’s proposals, under consideration by the government, the CMA could stop any acquisition by a SMS firm that creates a ‘realistic prospect’ - defined by a court as being a ‘greater than fanciful’ chance – of reducing competition.

The CMA argues that changing the rules is necessary to block deals that threaten potential competitors – such as Facebook/Meta’s takeover of Instagram. But if the CMA is able to block the Facebook/Giphy deal under the status quo, it raises the question: is changing the burden of proof actually necessary to block the deals the CMA thinks need to be stopped? I’d argue the answer is no: it has blocked this deal on relatively speculative potential competition grounds.

There is, of course, a major risk attached to any real or perceived crackdown on mergers. Venture capitalists invest in startups in the hope of a lucrative exit. Most VC-backed businesses fail and only a chosen few are able to IPO and list on a stock market. Mergers and takeovers are a major route to exit. They derisk high-growth entrepreneurship and as a result, we get more of it. Studies show that tougher M&A rules are linked to lower levels of equity investment in startups. If exits are blocked, the result will be less investment, less entrepreneurship, and less innovation.

The Times is already reporting that Amazon “have paused the idea of making any UK acquisitions because it views the country’s regulatory regime as unpredictable.” If the CMA gets what it wants, along with its newly restrictive attitude to acquisitions, it may make it much more difficult for UK startups to grow. Though the CMA probably should not factor in the impact on startup formation and VC investment to its decisions, the Government should. 

The Life Aquatic

Earlier this month, Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of Open Philanthropy and GiveWell, wrote an article on the different ways people think about how to make a difference in the world – something we care about for obvious reasons.

It’s informative for anyone who wants to classify their approach. It may also help you better better understand the basis for why you’re disagreeing with others.

Karnofsky asks us to imagine the world as a ship. We can ‘row’ to help the ship reach its current destination faster, ‘steer’ to navigate to a better destination than the current one, ‘anchor’ to hold the ship in place or prevent change generally, and/or try to make the world more like it was a generation or two ago, ‘mutiny’ to challenge the ship's whole premise and power structure, or focus on ‘equity’ to work toward more fair and just relations between people on the ship.

We’re mostly a ‘rowing’ organisation. We work to advance entrepreneurship, technology and growth in order to make us all better off, something we set out in our evolving policy priorities page.

Karnofsky himself is pro-rowing, but raises some concerns. For example, those in favour of this worldview (e.g. venture capitalists, tech founders, etc.) suspiciously seem to also be personally interested in getting rich. He wonders if we should trust entrepreneurs’ narrative about the world getting better when some seem to clearly benefit from it.

No doubt the motivation of some entrepreneurs and investors aren’t purely altruistic, but they aren’t the reason I think progress matters. Intellectuals like Karnofsky tell the most convincing story as to why the world is getting better, and entrepreneurs, innovators and investors are driving this change.

Another counterpoint raised are things like environmental damage, rising global catastrophic risks and rising inequality. ‘Rowers’ have some answers – for example, entrepreneurs are critical to solving environmental problems – but not all of them. Just to give a micro example, it seems right that the government banned microbeads in 2018 even though there were no doubt some plastic entrepreneurs and investors who lost out. While the unintended consequences of bans and regulations too often outweigh the benefits, they don’t always.

Similarly, there is a strong ‘steering’ and ‘anchoring’ case to be made for the risks that come alongside the huge opportunities from AI – something I raised here back in 2018. It’s something that the Effective Altruism movement is particularly keen on.

And not all approaches are in conflict. As Karnofsky says: “I think that much of the progress the world has seen is fairly hard to imagine without significant efforts at both rowing and equity: major efforts both to increase wealth/capabilities and to distribute them more evenly. Civil rights movements, social safety nets, and foreign aid all seem like huge wins, and major parts of the story for why the world seems to have gotten better over time.”

There is also reason to believe that as we get richer, we get better at dedicating resources towards equity, the environment, and to safety. This means that by 'rowing' you create more interest in 'steering' and 'equity'. So these seemingly differing aims feed into each other.

The Entrepreneur Ship
On the subject of boats, next month the long-time supporter of entrepreneurs, Guy Rigby, is rowing across the Atlantic with David Murray. If successful, they will be the oldest pair ever to row any ocean.

We’re a supporter of their efforts (they have kindly put our logo on the ship) as they’re raising money to support social entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneur Ship will work with UnLtd to co-fund a technical assistance package designed to support diverse leaders from start-ups to sustainable investment over the next 5 years. Find out more about supporting them here.

Big Deal
As Sam Dumitriu writes on the blog, our big cities often function as if they were small cities, losing the benefits of agglomeration. As the Centre for Cities has shown, improving public transport is part of the solution: “67% of people in big European cities can reach their city centre by public transport within 30 minutes, compared to only 40% of the people in Britain’s big cities.” Sam also argues for the densification of cities and suburban intensification near public transport.

Why are big cities more productive ?

Why are large cities more productive than smaller cities? And why isn’t this as true in Britain?

The two questions will (or at least, should) be on the mind of Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up.

Economists give a range of answers for the first question. It may be a simple matter of human capital. The smartest graduates are drawn to the bright lights of the big city. 

There’s also the idea of knowledge spillovers. If you are a programmer in a big city, you will probably end up going to the pub with other programmers from other companies after work. At these informal meetings, new information and ideas about working practices is spread. Likewise, you may jump around from company to company. Solutions move from one company to another. Businesses become more productive. 

In recent years, economists have paid significant attention to the latter factor. For example, economists have studied how a new factory owned by a multinational corporation opening raises productivity levels for nearby manufacturers and found large benefits. 

A new study looks at a different, and under-appreciated, factor: matching. 

Cities allow for deeper specialisation and make it easier for workers to find the best possible job for them. There are a range of reasons for this. For instance, if there are only two employers who are hiring data scientists in town, then a data scientist might be reluctant to move from one employer to another, lest it be a bad match. By contrast, in somewhere like London, they can move between jobs with confidence knowing there is a large pool of employers to choose from so they can find the best possible match.

This new study looks at matching and productivity in German cities across a range of professions. 

In large cities such as Hamburg, the most productive workers within a profession work for the best firms within that industry. While in smaller cities, the distribution of talent across businesses looks rather random. The best architects work for the best architectural practices in large cities, but that’s far from guaranteed in smaller cities.

In big cities like Hamburg, the relatively best workers tend to be in the most high-paying plants, further boosting their wages -> positive assortative matching, PAM

In small cities like Daun, worker-firm matching is all over the place, and it's more random who works for whom /7 pic.twitter.com/eIcUJeL55O

— Jens Suedekum (@jsuedekum) November 24, 2021

This within-city matching between the best workers and best firms has major implications for productivity and regional inequality. If matching in local labour markets had not improved in the largest cities over the past 30 years, then geographical wage differences would be around 2.5% smaller, but aggregate earnings would be €31bn a year lower. In short, this wouldn’t be levelling up.

What are the implications for policy?

The authors note that if you want to ‘level up’ smaller cities by incentivising the best employers from big cities to relocate (i.e. using targeted regional tax breaks) then this will likely negatively affect productivity as we lose the benefits of better matching.

There may be lessons for remote work. If knowledge spillovers between nearby firms drive productivity differences then a shift to remote work may have disastrous impacts on productivity. However, if matching between workers and businesses plays an equally important role then there could be big productivity gains from better worker-employer matching.

The authors suggest that one approach to helping under-performing small towns and cities would be to improve job-matching in those places. This might involve the creation of new job-market institutions such as new learning platforms – no easy feat.

In the UK’s case, the solution may be simpler. Our problem is less that small cities underperform big cities, but rather that our big cities (Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, Newcastle, Nottingham, Liverpool and Glasgow) outside London often function as if they were small cities.

Recent research from the Centre for Cities lays out the problem clearly.

Urban public transport commutes to European city centres are easier and faster than in the UK. Approximately, 67 per cent of people in big European cities can reach their city centre by public transport within 30 minutes, compared to only 40 per cent of the people in Britain’s big cities.

Poor urban transport limits people’s job opportunities and effectively makes our largest cities much smaller than European competitors. This negatively impacts the productivity and economic performance of big cities, costing the UK economy more than £23.1 billion per year.

But the problem isn’t just our public transport infrastructure, it’s also our inability to build houses near it. This makes our commutes longer, creates congestion on our roads contributing to air pollution and climate change, and as a result new investments in public transport deliver less bang for their buck.

If we can fix that by allowing more mid-rise development and suburban intensification around transport, then more workers can feel the productivity benefits of being in a large labour market. 

If you are interested in this policy area and want to learn more about what we’re doing in this space, get in touch with Aria.

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Who Wants to be a Trillionaire?

UK exports are predicted to hit the £1 trillion mark by the mid-2030s. But the Government wants to hit that before the end of this decade, according to a new UK export strategy: “Made in the UK, Sold to the World”.

The Department for International Trade’s strategy comprises a 12-point plan, including the creation of a new Export Support Service. This allows you to contact the government’s export support team by phone or online to ask questions on exporting to new markets, as well as providing the paperwork you need to sell your goods abroad, and rules for a specific country where you want to sell services.

It currently only includes EU countries, which sits a little uncomfortably alongside the overall strategy of “tilting towards the Indo-Pacific.” And while there isn't a single mention of Brexit in the entire report, but the need for an ​​Export Support Service is evidence of one of its costs.

The strategy also announces the extension of the reach and range of the (presumably successful) Export Academy pilot, which offers bespoke training programmes and digital tools to help businesses navigate the technicalities of exporting and finding opportunities overseas.

Currently, you can sign up for a foundation course for those new to exporting, which includes 10 educational online seminars to help create a tailored export action plan, while there are more detailed sector-specific webinars, masterclasses, and virtual missions. They also have market access events that outline the benefits of new market opportunities, including from new free trade agreements. You can find everything you need here.

A new UK Tradeshow Programme will also be piloted, which will provide training and grants for entrepreneurs to attend key tradeshows. This comes on the back of the Government scrapping the similar Tradeshow Access Programme (TAP) earlier this year. I’ve not read anything conclusive – or otherwise – on the value for money of subsidising business to attend trade shows, but at face-value it is odd to scrap a scheme only to replace it with something similar.

Whatever the pros or cons to the exchequer, we’ll share the opportunities as and when we find out more details. For example, in the past we’ve provided departments with case studies from within our network. If you want to be part of one, you might see your face and business being celebrated on government billboards!

Talkin' 'Bout Their Generation
We’re delighted to announce that in the new year the APPG for Entrepreneurship will be kicking off a theme on Entrepreneurship Education at schools. It is kindly supported by FinnCap, which already supports entrepreneurship education in a number of ways.

For our part, we’ve already published three reports on the topic.

As with all our themes, we’ll be hosting a virtual roundtable, putting out a Call for Evidence and then launching it – hopefully in Parliament if they open it up to outside events. We will share more details of the first event next week.

On the topic of enterprise education, Huddersfield and Liverpool John Moores Universities are looking for an entrepreneur to speak about entrepreneurship to their students. They are studying Events Management or International Tourism Management, and it could be in-person or via Zoom. Drop Leslie Fair an email to find out more.

Keep it in the Family
Our friends at the Institute for Family Business (IFB) will be leading their first ever Family Business Week, which kicks off on Monday. As part of it, they’re encouraging family businesses to host MPs and have created a briefing document and template letter on how to do this successfully. As well as using this for Family Business Week, this could be useful for any business looking to get their local MP along to their business.

Price is Wrong
We’re working on a project about the impact of housing and office shortages on the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. We’re looking for case studies and endorsements, so if you would like to share your thoughts on what high house prices and office rents have meant for your business get in touch with Aria.

Reach for the Tsars

“Well, first of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fellow who’s greedy”... “Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organise society for us.”

So said Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. And he has a point. While we should punish people who don’t follow the rules, we need to focus on getting those rules right in the first place. We need systems of government that work with the grain of the crooked timber of humanity – not against it. Everything else is destined to fail.

We already have rules to limit those in power. MPs are not allowed to take money to raise issues in the House of Commons or with the government. That’s why Owen Paterson got into trouble when the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards found that he had approached and met officials at the Food Standards Agency on behalf of companies and ministers at the Department for International Development. It was also reported that he used his parliamentary office and stationery for his consultancy work and failed to declare his interests in some meetings.

This is not the same as MPs having second jobs. Stephen Bush makes a spirited defence of Geoffrey Cox in the New Statesman, while David Gauke argues in the same publication that banning second jobs would likely lead to talented individuals refusing to become MPs: “​​In addition to discouraging potentially good ministers from becoming or remaining parliamentarians, there would be a decrease in the understanding of business within the Commons and an increase in the potency of the Prime Minister’s powers of patronage. The benefit of attaining ministerial office and the cost of losing it would become all the greater. At a time when the country could do with a few ministers being willing to stand up to the Prime Minister from time to time, this would be unwelcome.”

While the broad point has merits, Gauke fudges the issue. He’s right to defend second jobs, such as his ​​NED roles, as offering “invaluable experience”, but many second jobs don’t pass the smell test so easily, with too many clearly just employed to lobby on behalf of companies. The rules really need to be tightened and enforced.

There is a bigger issue that needs addressing if we really want MPs to focus on legislating: we should pay MPs more. This isn’t excusing the likes of Patterson breaking the rules, or even those pushing them to near breaking. It’s about acknowledging that it’s an important job that MPs shouldn’t feel like they have to top up with external pay. And while they are paid more than the average voter, only a quarter have a second jobs (being an MP is very demanding), and their peers are often earning a lot more. In fact, many of their peers would make better MPs, but are put off by the idea of taking a significant pay cut for a precarious job. I know many such people.

As Tom Chivers argues: “[I]f there’s even a small chance that increased pay would improve the calibre of MP candidates, then since MPs are responsible for decisions about the UK’s one-trillion-pound budget – 38,000 times as big as the sum required to raise their salary by 50% – then it seems like a decent bet. If improving MPs’ wages by that much raised GDP by 0.001% it would pay for itself. Or, in expected value terms, there was a 1% chance of it raising GDP by 0.1%, then it would be a worthwhile bet.”

That said, I don’t think boosting pay (even if it were politically feasible) would suddenly lead to the very best and brightest becoming MPs. In order to prove loyalty, potential candidates need to spend years wooing their local party chair, delivering leaflets and knocking on doors. Let’s face it, that immediately cuts out 99% of the population from wanting the job.

That’s why we need to be more open to bringing outside talent in. The example of the venture capitalist Kate Bingham coming in to head up the UK's Vaccine Taskforce is a textbook example of what can be achieved. This is about bringing in individuals with particular skills to solve problems better than politicians and the civil service. And here, finally, is the relevance of all this to entrepreneurs: often the best people for the job will be entrepreneurs.

To date, business experience has often been the main reason for appointments, with 40% of appointees having a business background. Earlier this year the Commission for Smart Government recommended that the Prime Minister should be able to appoint ministers from outside parliament, which is an idea worth considering.

Of course, Tsars (like Ministers) aren’t always successful. They have tended to work best when brought in for a short burst of activity, to mobilise around an issue, and then to retire. But there are plenty such problems to solve and many entrepreneurs with the skills and public spiritedness to give it their best shot.

Sign up to Philip’s Friday newsletter here.

Small Change

This week, we backed a campaign to make sure small businesses can benefit from the government’s Help to Grow: Digital scheme.

Alongside Coadec, Enterprise Nation, the FSB, and CfE, the Sign for Small coalition is calling for the scheme to be expanded.

Right now, it only supports small businesses with 5-249 employees and only offers vouchers for three types of technology. This means over 750,000 small businesses will not be supported.

The coalition is arguing that the scheme should be expanded in two simple ways. First, it should include small businesses with 2-5 employees, supporting small businesses by giving them a productivity boost through access to subsidised software. Second, the government should broaden the range of software covered under the scheme, offering small businesses a greater variety of tools they need to grow.

We’re not backing this because we want business owners to get freebies – that’s not our style. We’re backing this because we know that tech adoption will help tackle the UK’s sluggish productivity, making the whole country better off. While Help to Grow: Digital might not be the perfect intervention, given it's the main thing the government is doing to try to support digital adoption cutting out micro businesses is an error.

As our Upgrade report found: “If the UK’s 1.1m micro businesses doubled their uptake of key digital technologies, it would lead to a £4,050 average productivity boost for the 4.09m workers employed by micro businesses, restoring four-fifths of lost productivity growth since the financial crisis.”

You can support the campaign by signing up, and forwarding this on to others who you think will back the campaign too.

What is Means to Me
Whether John Major’s Back to Basics, Tony Blair’s Respect agenda or David Cameron's Big Society, flagship policies have a habit of being vague to the point of incoherence. And so, it’s not a huge surprise that the Levelling Up agenda can seem a bit wishy washy.

Neil O'Brien, Minister for Levelling Up, did a decent job of explaining in the Guardian last month: “To empower local leaders and communities. To grow the private sector and raise living standards – particularly where they are lower. To spread opportunity and improve public services, particularly where they are lacking. And to restore local pride, whether that is about the way your town centre feels, keeping the streets safe or backing community life.” And the forthcoming White Paper is expected to put some meat on the bones.

Clearly, this leaves a lot of room for policy. And, given the reliance on the private sector, a significant role for entrepreneurship. That’s why as part of the APPG for Entrepreneurship, which we’re the Secretariat of, we’re writing a briefing paper on the topic, which includes a Call for Evidence.

The deadline for responding is next Friday. You can find the questions here. Please don’t feel obliged to answer them all. We appreciate you are busy and would prefer that you focus on one or two questions where you feel you can add the most value. In fact, many of the most persuasive submissions we have received to past Calls for Evidence only addressed a single question.

Reya Light
As regular readers will be aware, this year we set up our Green Entrepreneurship Forum with the law firm Mishcon de Reya. Whatever targets come out of COP26, we know that entrepreneurs will be critical in creating the technology to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate other environmental harms.

As part of this new Forum, we've already hosted two engaging roundtables. The first with Danny Kruger MP covered a lot of ground, illustrating the breadth of the challenge – but also the incredible entrepreneurial solutions. Read a summary of the launch roundtable here.

The second focused on how sustainable businesses and businesses working for social good can scale through debt and equity fundraising, including the role the government plays – or should play. Read the summary of the funding roundtable here.

Our next event is on 18th November. Get in touch with Katrina to enquire about places.

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