London Tech Week sums up everything wrong with UK tech
London Tech Week, at its worst, is complacency in conference form. We wheel out the same statistics about unicorns and call it a job well done, writes Adam French
This week, the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London and a parade of politicians came to Olympia to spend a day talking about tech startups. They shouted about big funding figures, AI infrastructure investments and corporate partnerships that are entirely meaningless to the people actually building technology companies in this country. And in a spectacular piece of planning, every serious VC and LP in Europe was in Berlin for SuperReturn anyway.
Two problems are damaging UK tech, and London Tech Week put both on display.
A nation of Negative Nancies
First, the public narrative around the British economy, and the country’s tech companies, is overwhelmingly negative. We don’t celebrate our success stories, we complain about our inability to scale. We have spent 10 years lamenting the sale of DeepMind to Google, instead of thinking about how we will build the next DeepMind.
This starts at the top. Sir Keir Starmer’s most prominent engagement with the tech sector so far this year has been the Online Safety Act. His London Tech Week speech focused on the debate around children’s access to social media. That is an entirely legitimate conversation. But if the Prime Minister’s primary association with technology is risk and harm, that signal travels.
The UK has the world’s third largest tech ecosystem. Our team at Antler operates across 30 cities worldwide. Ours is the only one that opens its investor pitch deck with a slide titled “Why invest in the UK” and another titled “Why London is a great city to build a startup”. We don’t need that slide in Nairobi, Singapore or São Paulo. We need it in London – a city that has produced more unicorns than anywhere else in Europe, sitting on one of the deepest concentrations of financial, technical and creative talent on the planet.
We need political leadership that holds both things at once: yes, we must protect children online, but we also must build the companies that will drive British economic growth for the next 30 years.
Seven American technology companies generated the majority of US market returns over the last decade. Britain’s FTSE 100 contains no technology company at that scale or ambition. If this government is serious about growth, the tech sector is the only place it is coming from. That requires a different kind of attention than a few days a year at Olympia.
The bigger problem: complacency
The more dangerous problem, though, is complacency. London Tech Week, at its worst, is complacency in conference form. We wheel out stats about our unicorn count, our fintech dominance, our funding league tables, and we assume the work is done. It isn’t. The UK won the 2010s on the back of the financial crisis producing a generation of founder-ready talent, and a regulator that deliberately chose to compete for innovation. Neither of those conditions exists today, and we have not replaced them with anything equivalent.
The data reveals two specific problems that deserve an honest conversation. First, our early-stage ecosystem is weaker than it looks. Analysis of more than 41,800 UK funding rounds shows that only 12 per cent of UK startups reach Series A. We are producing high numbers of startups, but the vast majority fail. And our tax incentive schemes are rewarding that failure instead of prioritising real winners.
Second, our visa system is losing us the talent that matters most. Visa routes are too expensive, too complicated and too slow. We are handing it to France, Germany and Sweden as a result.
These are policy choices we can change if we believe our tech sector is still worth fighting for.
The ingredients for something great are here. London’s density of finance, deep science and creative industry is a real and durable advantage. The UK’s first generation of unicorns has produced tens of thousands of operators with exactly the scaling experience that predicts founding success. The next generation of great British companies will be built by those people – if we create the conditions for it.
That means political leadership that shows up for tech all year, not just in June. It means an honest conversation about what is working and what isn’t, rather than a press release and a few panel discussions. And it means understanding that the choice is not between protecting people online and building world-class technology companies. We have to do both. The countries that figure that out first are the ones that will own the next decade.
The day we can ditch the “Why London” slide will be the day we’ve solved the two problems of negativity and complacency. London Tech Week did nothing to bring that day closer.
Adam French is a partner at Antler