The Entrepreneurs Network

Are we telling the world the most compelling story we can about London — and the country more broadly? It’s the theme of our latest survey, which closes soon. Your views will be fed directly to those who matter. If you want to help us make the UK the best place to start and grow a business, ten minutes filling in our survey is one of the most efficient ways to do it. (The most efficient way is to share it with a group of like-minded founders so they can amplify your ideas.)

Capital Gains — The Entrepreneurs Network This week saw a bonanza of policy announcements during London Tech Week. So many that this morning we put out a Policy Update on the main things you need to know so I wouldn’t have to bombard you with them all now. Alongside the policy, we’ve also seen some major private sector investments ann

Last week, the Maple Review published its final report. Spearheaded by Small Business Britain, its aim is to identify and dismantle the barriers to entrepreneurship caused by economic deprivation. The problem it identifies is one that resonates with us and many in our network. As Blair McDougall, the Minister for Small Business, puts it in his foreword, “talent and determination are spread evenly across society, but opportunity is not.” Or, to misquote Ratatouille’s Anton Ego: “Not everyone can become a great entrepreneur, but a great entrepreneur can come from anywhere.”

Grow on Trees — The Entrepreneurs Network This week, the Maple Review published its final report . Spearheaded by Small Business Britain, its aim is to identify and dismantle the barriers to entrepreneurship caused by economic deprivation. The problem it identifies is one that resonates with us and many in our network. As Blair McDougal

It won’t have escaped many of you that last week Tony Blair published an essay of close to 6,000 words on what he thinks is going wrong in the Government. Within hours it was leading the news. Whatever you make of him or the essay, he still has the power to lead the conversation even though he’s not leading the country. The headlines have focused on the political implications and the rebuttals, but the part worth the most attention is his theory of politics.

Order, Order! — The Entrepreneurs Network It won’t have escaped many of you that this week Tony Blair published an essay of close to 6,000 words on what he thinks is going wrong in the Government. Within hours it was leading the news. Whatever you make of him or the essay, he still has the power to lead the conversation even though he’s

Some policy areas are neglected. Others are tinkered with to death. Capital gains tax sits firmly in the second camp. In the last fifteen years, the headline CGT rate has been raised, cut, raised again, and split into multiple sub-rates. And now equalising it with income tax is being seriously discussed in Westminster again.

Entrepreneurs’ Relief was introduced with a £1 million lifetime cap, expanded to £2 million, then £5 million, then £10 million, then cut back to £1 million, then rebranded as Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR), then ratcheted from 10% to 14%, to 18%. The last clean settlement was Lawson in 1988. Every Chancellor since has felt obliged to fiddle.

BADR is now capped at a level low enough to be irrelevant for serious scaling, and has been continuously revised in ways that signal political instability to anyone considering where to base their business. We have, in effect, the worst of both worlds.

Tinker Taxer Founders Fly Why capital gains tax changes need serious thinking — plus we'll be at SXSW London with our Young Entrepreneurs Forum, and the government wants to hear from you

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...