Ali Mortazavi, CEO of e-therapeutics, set a small corner of X ablaze this week with a brutal thread on his intention to delist from London Stock Exchange’s AIM market. According to Mortazavi: “the UK markets are not just illiquid, they’re completely broken and closed. The situation is worse for small growth companies (in particular biotech) but even sizeable companies such as Shell and many others are saying the same thing.” I would recommend reading the whole thread. On the same day, City A.M. provocatively asked: Is the London Stock Exchange’s AIM in terminal decline? After all, the market ..read more

We just published a letter we’ve written to the Home Secretary alongside our friends at Startup Coalition. It argues that the new salary requirements will cut off international talent to many UK startups. As covered by UKTN, we think the Government should allow companies to count equity towards the salary requirements for the Skilled Worker Visa. This would enable startups to continue to sponsor foreign workers whose salaries meet the new general salary threshold (£38,700), but not the occupation threshold if they are also compensated through equity stakes in the business. As the letter ..read more

Together with Startup Coalition, we have written an open letter to the Home Secretary calling on the Government to rethink changes to individual occupation going rates for the Skilled Worker Visa, based on the negative impact they will have on startups’ hiring international talent. Dear Home Secretary,  SUBJECT: An open letter from the UK’s startup ecosystem on the changes to individual occupation going rates for the Skilled Worker Visa and its impact on startups. Britain’s tech sector is the largest in Europe, and is now worth over $1 trillion. From East London to clusters in cities such ..read more

Seven days from today, new immigration rules will come into force that will dent entrepreneurship in the UK, deterring foreign-born founders from starting and growing their business in the UK, while making it harder for domestic startups to hire the talent they need. The headline is that there will be a significant increase in the overall minimum salary threshold from £26,200 to £38,700, but in many cases the 'going rate' for a job will be the key concern. This will mean many startups won’t be able to hire from abroad, with some having to let go current employees if they can’t justify the pay ..read more

First off, on Wednesday we’ll celebrate our ten-year anniversary in style with an afternoon tea reception on the Terrace of the House of Lords, kindly supported by Octopus Group. If you’re a Patron, Adviser, Supporter (sign up here) or someone who has been closely involved in our work request a place here. It’s not just a party – we’ll be releasing a new report that sets out the fundamental building blocks that go into making sure the next ten years are the entrepreneurs’ decade. That eye on the future is why – as reported in the Sunday Times (paywall) – we’ve launched the Private Busine ..read more

For many years, going to university has been a given for ambitious individuals from all backgrounds, providing knowledge, soft skills, and perhaps most crucially a key to the corporate world in the form of a certificate. But, as the value of a degree decreases and in a world which threatens to be upended by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, it begs the question: is university now outdated? Practical degrees such as medicine are certainly valuable – you wouldn’t want your heart surgeon to have completed only half of their degree because they found the anterior cruciate ligament ..read more

We can’t have it both ways. We’ve all complained about governments too readily chopping and changing policies, and then a rather boring Budget comes along and suddenly we’re all asking: is that it? Nevertheless, it wasn’t without consequence. First and foremost, it was great to see the Government reinstate the lower eligibility criteria to qualify as a high-net-worth or sophisticated investor. This will make sure thousands of angel investors, many of whom come from underrepresented groups, can continue to back startups across the country. In an ideal world, u-turns would be celebrated in poli ..read more

It’s not rocket science, but we get more innovation when researchers have more control over their work. As Stuart Buck from The Good Science Project argues for the US, and we argued in Academic to Entrepreneur for the UK, numerous empirical studies show that we should give direct rights to patent and exploit discoveries and inventions to the researchers and inventors responsible, rather than handing these rights over to the universities that employ them. Take recent Nobel winner Katalin Karikó. She was driven out of academia over a decade ago due to the unpopularity of her work on mRNA – the ..read more

This week our friends at Form Ventures released Fix The Regulators, a policy report which delivers exactly what its title suggests. As it argues: “Creaking regulatory capacity is constraining economic and startup growth, slowing innovation in the sectors that matter most to people’s lives, and becoming a rate limiter on UK startup and tech progress.” It comes – as nearly every report from now until the election will – with a manifesto. (Guilty: We are planning something along these lines for our 10-year anniversary). I’ll focus on the first of its four manifesto points today: that the UK shou ..read more

Last Sunday, Phillip Inman wrote a piece for The Observer with the headline The hard truth is that Britain’s entrepreneurs simply don’t innovate. While he may not have signed off on the headline, the rest of the article isn’t much better. I don’t recommend reading it. It throws around lots of half baked ideas in an attempt to make the case against what he calls “the neoliberal narrative that has dominated politics for the past 40 years.” Nevertheless, it is a useful springboard for articulating why he is wrong. The central claim of Inman’s article is that the academic evidence shows that ent ..read more