Can the UK Create Its First Trillion-Dollar Company?

I want to dig into that in a moment, but I think that it's really interesting, this identification of the problem statement.

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.

We're hearing all these stories about investors and entrepreneurs who are leaving the country, who are choosing to grow their companies elsewhere.

And if those of us who really believe in Britain and are staying here and building here don't start to stand up and do something about that and say something about what still makes the UK a great place to scale a business, then this narrative is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And so Enterprise Britain was really created with that ethos, really a groundswell of interest amongst that entrepreneurial and investment community in the UK that we want to stand up, be part of the solution and both shout from the rooftops about why people should stay and invest and build here and have a really honest conversation about some of the policies that make that harder than it should be and to try and get more people voices of scale up founders and investors in those conversations to shape policy that will be good for the economic growth of the country as a whole.

So you're really shaping a counter narrative here, but I like that you touch there upon the fact that there are still things that can be improved upon and that that's a core part of your work.

So I'd love to dive into, you know, some of the specifics of that, you know, what are the things that are coming through those discussions from people you're talking to?

We came out with a report a few months ago when we launched, which was called Time to Act.

And we set out three pillars of things that we think need to be areas of focus.

The first is ambition.

The second is capital.

And the third is talent.

So we put ambition first, not only because it then makes a nice acronym of ACT, and we put it first because we think you have to have that as a starting point in a North Star because you can have all the money in the world and all the talent in the world, and if you don't have the ambition... to build globally relevant companies here, you're not going to succeed in the mission.

And so ambition for us is perhaps some of the trickiest bit to change.

It's being really not naive, but optimistic and bold about what the future of the UK could look like if we support our most ambitious companies to succeed.

Then the second pillar is capital.

And within that, we looked at three things.

The first was retail investment.

So coming from the US, we have an incredible culture of retail investment.

Over 30% of American household wealth is in public

equities.

In the UK, that's 8%.