The Entrepreneurs Network

Entrepreneurs are economically important but politically diffuse. They’re often too busy building companies to organise as a bloc, despite the fact that the decisions made in Westminster often shape whether businesses start, scale or stay in the UK.

But founders have power — not least because they create jobs and wealth, but also because they’re often unusually mobile. A company can be incorporated in one country, funded in another and built across several more. Countries increasingly compete for them not just through tax rates or regulation, but through narrative and ambition. The question is whether the UK can convincingly present itself as a good place to build.

Poll Position — The Entrepreneurs Network Westminster has spent much of this week focused on political survival. Moments like these tend to sharpen political attention around groups, voters and constituencies that parties believe they cannot afford to ignore. A core aim of ours is to ensure founders command more of that attention. Entrepre

Just this week, and not for the first time, I heard from the founder of a genuinely innovative British technology company that has been blocked from the next iteration of G-Cloud. The reason was not poor delivery, a weak product or lack of relevance to public-sector buyers. It was negative EBITDA and a lightly capitalised balance sheet, both of which are completely normal for growth-stage tech companies.

Cloud Nein — The Entrepreneurs Network As the local election results come in, it’s worth remembering what councils actually do once the campaigning stops: they spend money — a lot of it on technology, and a chunk of that through G-Cloud, the framework designed to give innovative British suppliers a clearer route into the public secto...

Wave after wave, our Entrepreneurs Survey makes headlines. Just yesterday, following the release of our latest instalment, journalists from Sifted, The Telegraph, and City A.M. all reported on our findings. We don’t measure our success by headlines and quotes (encouraging as they are), but by our ability to impact policy, and — ambitious as it sounds — change the hearts and minds of the country.
To that end, each quarter, we reserve half the survey for questions to dig into a thorny policy issue. This time around we focused on tax breaks for founders, with the results feeding into our submission to HM Treasury’s call for evidence around Tax Support for Entrepreneurs.
I won’t bombard you with every stat, but it’s fair to say that these schemes are seen by founders as essential to unlocking early-stage investment. Huge majorities of those who’ve used the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), and Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) say they would have struggled to raise capital without them — 84%, 86%, and 78% respectively — and even more believe the schemes helped their businesses scale.

That said, founders don’t think the schemes are flawless. While fees and terms are broadly considered fair for SEIS and EIS, VCT users feel differently — 41% of founders regard VCT terms as unreasonable compared to just 33% who find them fair. Opinions on size limits and eligibility were also mixed, particularly for SEIS, where 39% of founders feel the criteria are not appropriate compared to 36% who think they are.

On capital gains, the founder consensus is clear: over seven in 10 believe Capital Gains Tax (CGT) relief drives startup creation, and when asked what they’d do with the proceeds of a more generous Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR), 72% say they’d invest in someone else’s startup and 70% would use it to launch a new venture of their own. Only 7% say it wouldn’t change their behaviour.

We aren’t claiming this is the only evidence that HM Treasury will need to decide whether and how exactly to reform these tax breaks. But it does add data where previously there was little — and as our panel of entrepreneurs grows and grows, we’ll be able to get more granular with our questions and findings. If you want to have your say next time round, join us.

On the topic of what next, get in touch with Eamonn Ives to share your thoughts on what policy area we should dig into next time around.

Making Waves — The Entrepreneurs Network Wave after wave, our Entrepreneurs Survey makes headlines. Just yesterday, following the release of our latest instalment , journalists from Sifted , The Telegraph , and City A.M. all reported on our findings. We don’t measure our success by headlines and quotes (encouragi

One of the best things about running The Entrepreneurs Network is meeting genuinely extraordinary people at our events each week — people building incredible businesses that restore my faith in human ingenuity and our ability to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. It’s a privilege to spend time among people like this.

That was certainly true on Tuesday, when we hosted the launch of our latest Female Founders Forum report, Ideas to Impact, in partnership with Barclays. To pick just three examples from a room of 150 phenomenal female founders: Wenmiao Yu of Quantum Dice is building cryptographic infrastructure for a post-quantum world, using quantum mechanics to secure everything from financial networks to national systems. Di Gilpin of Smart Green Shipping is cutting emissions from global shipping through wind-assisted propulsion. Magdalene Ho of Traxion Biotech is developing breakthrough therapeutics for neurological conditions. I could go on (over one hundred more times).

Ideas to Impact The Female Founders Forum launch showed both the extraordinary ambition of women building frontier technologies and how much UK policy still holds them back

Ultimately, our work is in service of entrepreneurs. Everything we do comes back to individual founders whose contributions to society are all too often underappreciated. Politicians can talk endlessly about growth, but entrepreneurs are the hinge on which progress swings.

‘Tis the Reason — The Entrepreneurs Network Season’s Greetings! I promised myself that I wouldn’t end the year harping on about the dynamism-denting Employment Rights Bill , tempting as that is. Instead, let’s discuss some highlights, ways you can get more involved, and how you can support us in 2026. Although we’ve taken to describin...

Among the 219 founders behind this year’s fastest-growing companies, 42% came from abroad – remarkable given immigrants make up less than half that in the population at large. Of the 54 immigrant-founded firms, almost half were created entirely by foreign-born teams, while the rest were built by mixed founding teams. This shows how international founders typically complement, rather than compete with, domestic talent. Put simply, this cohort of immigrant founders is more than twice as entrepreneurial as their population share would predict.

Half the Battlers — The Entrepreneurs Network To those outside the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the fact that more than half of the UK’s fastest-growing businesses have a foreign-born founder often comes as a surprise. This outsized contribution certainly surprised me when I first dipped my toe in the entrepreneurial waters while interviewing e...

Here’s a bold idea: Let’s ban the Budget

Ban the Budget Annual Budget theatrics freeze investment, delay hiring, and distort economic decision-making

Whether the next disruption comes from strikes or something else, we know that e-bikes make transport systems more robust – antifragile, even. This also points towards the benefits of the UK becoming a testbed nation for more technologies from around the world. As we argued in The Way of the Future:
“[F]or the UK to become the most attractive place for innovative investments, it needs to do all it can to support domestic demand. This means making the political decisions that enable the adoption of new technologies.”

In the Limelight — The Entrepreneurs Network It’s been a miserable week for commuters in the capital, and even though strikes on the London Underground are now winding down, the disruption is forecast to have cost the UK economy £230 million in lost productivity. Whether or not the actual figure hits almost a quarter of a billion pounds, on...

Some thoughts on how to get more involved in our work

On Reflection — The Entrepreneurs Network On 18 April 1930, BBC Radio’s 6.30pm news bulletin announced: “Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news,” which was then followed by piano music to fill the remaining time. As the News and Views section below shows, while the headlines never truly stop, they do have a tendency to s...

Policy proposals that surface in the doldrums of summer often prove insubstantial. Yet rumoured changes to capital gains tax on residences could so profoundly undermine economic dynamism that it demands careful examination.

Ill-Gotten Gains — The Entrepreneurs Network Today’s newsletter comes from our Research Director, Eamonn Ives . Normal service with Philip will resume next week! Veteran Westminster watchers will know that the long summer months when Parliament is in recess are a breeding ground for less credulous stories to find their way into n

According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), “substantial adjustments in the Autumn Budget will be needed to meet the ‘stability rule’.” In plainer, more worrying words, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will have to hike taxes in October’s budget to make up for a £40 billion deficit.

Broadly Speaking — The Entrepreneurs Network According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), “substantial adjustments in the Autumn Budget will be needed to meet the ‘stability rule’.” In plainer, more worrying words, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will have to hike taxes in October’s budget to make up for ...