Brent Hoberman

I think it would be great.

Um, it is an idea that first came across my radar, um, about, uh, nine or ten months ago when Brent Hoberman, who's also a great advocate of this idea, spoke at the City AM Awards and specifically took aim, uh, at these restrictive non-compete clauses and said, "We've got to get rid of them." Why? Well, let me put it to you in the way it was put to me by a tech founder in the US, who said that all great tech companies and AI companies, um, are born in Boston.

They're all sort of born out of, uh, great universities on the East Coast, and then they grow in California.

Why? Because California has banned non-compete clauses.

Um, there were some people there, uh, and we've, we've talked about them early on, that did, but, but they were Brits, and, you know, o- one example in particular.

Yeah, Brent Hoberman, um, so you'll know him from Founders Forum.

You'll know, if you've got a very long memory, from Lastminute.com, um, was talking a hell of a lot of sense, uh, and sharing his frustration with trying to explain to those who rule us from a political point of view what it is that they don't know, which of course they don't wanna, they don't wanna hear too much about that.

Um, he's, uh, speaks to the current cabinet all the time, and he shared with us that, um, whilst a lot of them are learning, uh, at least two of them, he called out as, um, as, as complete socialists, and, um, by which he meant not prepared to listen to anything that would, uh, talk about growth or, uh, you know, technology, building productivity.

And so let's go perhaps into the mission statement of Enterprise Britain.

So Enterprise Britain was really established by a group of British entrepreneurs, investors, spearheaded by our two co-chairs, which are Brent Hoberman, who's the founder of LastMinute.com, now runs Founders Forum and First Minute Capital.

and Steve Fitzpatrick, who was the founder of OVO Energy, Colusa, and Vertical Aerospace.

They had been having this series of conversations with other British entrepreneurs and investors that were all having very similar themes, which was, we're seeing this kind of doom and gloom narrative about the UK.