There’s a particular flavour of British disappointment that only surfaces when you put enough tech people in one room with enough politicians. You need a grand hall, a stage, and someone at the front to announce a funding figure that sounds impressive until you realise it’s spread across five years, three departments, and a committee that doesn’t sit again until October.
London Tech Week does this every year. This year, Adam French at Antler called it what it is: complacency in conference form. The PM and the Mayor came to Olympia to talk about startups while every serious VC in Europe was in Berlin for SuperReturn. The funding figures were big. The actual builders of companies weren’t there.
French identified two problems, and they’re worth sitting with. First, the public narrative around British tech is relentlessly negative. We don’t celebrate what we’ve built; we moan about what we’ve sold. We’ve spent ten years talking about DeepMind going to Google as if it were a national tragedy rather than one company’s choice. The UK has the world’s third largest tech ecosystem, and our own startup accelerators have to open their pitch decks with a slide titled “Why invest in the UK.” You don’t need that slide in Nairobi, Singapore, or São Paulo. You need it in London.
Second, and more dangerously, we’ve mistaken counting unicorns for building them. We wheel out the same league tables every year, pat ourselves on the back, and assume the work is done. Only 12% of UK startups reach Series A. The FTSE 100 doesn’t contain a single technology company at the scale or ambition of the seven American firms that drove most US market returns over the last decade. We won the 2010s on the back of the financial crisis producing founder-ready talent and a regulator that chose to compete for innovation. Neither condition exists today, and we haven’t replaced them.
All of this is fair. But it’s also worth noticing that French wrote his piece at London Tech Week, and the man who founded the event had a rather different read on the same week.
Russ Shaw, London Tech Week’s founding partner, attended 28 events across the week and walked roughly 25,000 steps a day going from Olympia to Canary Wharf and back. His conclusion: the conversation had moved from “what could AI do” to “what are we building with it right now.” He saw climate tech startups converging with AI for grid optimisation and materials modelling. He saw the South West’s aerospace cluster, contributing £2.7bn annually, discussing frontier robotics across land, air and sea. The week closed with the Tech Nigeria Advocates community hosting their “Tech Owambe” — founders, investors, and operators gathering to talk about ambition. Thirty thousand delegates from 128 countries showed up. It’s easy to dismiss that as self-congratulation, but it’s also hard to dismiss as nothing.
The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in the middle. The complacency complaint is real. Counting unicorns doesn’t build them, and the visa system is expensive, complicated, and slow enough that France, Germany, and Sweden are winning the talent war on price alone. The tax incentive schemes reward failure more than they prioritise winners. These are policy choices, and they can be changed.
But the ecosystem isn’t standing still either.
The UK government just announced a £1.1 billion plan for domestic AI computing capacity — a national supercomputer and funding for homegrown chip firms. They’ve taken stakes in Kraken, Wayve, and Oxford Quantum Circuits specifically to keep high-growth startups from relocating abroad for funding. A billionaire investor has pledged nearly £2 billion for AI data centres. The climate tech sector is now worth over £50bn with more than 2,200 startups. The South West of England just recorded its strongest equity investment performance in years, putting a £4bn investment case on the table at a regional tech showcase.
None of these things fix the structural problems. The 12% Series A conversion rate doesn’t magically improve because someone built a data centre. The FTSE doesn’t suddenly become interesting to growth investors because one government fund took a stake in three companies. But they’re all signals that the conversation is broadening beyond the annual conference at Olympia, and that’s progress.
The countries that figure out how to be both protective and ambitious about their tech sector are the ones that’ll own the next decade. Britain has the ingredients — finance, deep science, creative industry, and a generation of operators who’ve built the first wave of unicorns and now know exactly what it takes to build the second. The question isn’t whether we can. It’s whether we’ll stop complaining long enough to actually do it.
