Technology is the key to creating a genuine Western powerhouse Henry Humphreys Senior Associate (Private Equity and Venture Capital) at Foot Anstey in Bristol, discusses the vital tech sector in the West We are, demonstrably, living and working in a golden period of innovation in UK tech, and – perhaps behind only London – Bristol and Bath as a region is leading the charge. There are people here doing extraordinary things.
The need for an ecosystem Tech, especially digital tech, is now everywhere, and superfast broadband takes it to billions of gadgets worldwide. For some time there have been more mobile phones in the world than people. At the same time design and build costs, and the costs of starting a businesses, are declining exponentially. But to fund, develop, build and launch the next generation of tech at scale you need geographical proximity and clustering; i.e. an ecosystem. Silicon Valley set the mould, London has Tech City; here, we now have Silicon Gorge (we hope that name sticks!).
Rise of the accelerators/ incubators The Engine Shed, the enterprise hub next to Bristol Temple Meads station, is now into its third year and the two accelerator/ incubators within – Setsquared and WebStart – are housing and pumping out a wave of ambitious new ventures. The Engine Shed recently launched its Boxworks expansion which sees Bristol imitating Shoreditch.
Elsewhere, Bristol University and UWE continue to collaborate on Bristol Robotics Lab, the largest (37,000 square foot) academic centre for multi-disciplinary robotics research in the UK and world leader on current thinking in service robotics. Guess what, there is a business incubator there for spin outs. Nestled between the M4 and M5, Bristol and Bath Science Park offers hot desks, laboratories and a home for university spin outs and growth companies. Many of the facilities you see in the region are comparable to those in and around Tech City, but living costs are lower which generally means longer runways for founder teams. Good news if you have just raised seed finance.
Entrepreneurialism as a vocation For previous generations, route A for a significant majority of the talent was school, followed by university, followed by safe, well remunerated, job with a corporation. Now, for perhaps the first time in the UK, talent in significant numbers is taking the school, followed by university, followed by scale-up route, drawn by the attraction of being a (co-)founder and CEO on day 1, building a product that they love, going through the funding rounds over a small number of years and then selling out to a trade buyer (or, for the really ambitious, executing an IPO). Of course life rarely pans out as we expect and many (most?) new ventures fail, but the pace of success and failure has greatly accelerated in recent years. Failure still leaves plenty of time to try again, or to try something else. Silicon Valley has had this ‘fail fast’ mantra for many years. These themes are buzzing around campuses all over the country and there are over 45,000 students currently enrolled in Bristol alone, some of whom will choose to graduate and start a business here or join one of our 1,000+ tech companies. There are already more than 60,000 people working in tech here and more people working in our digital economy than anywhere else in the UK.
Scalable ventures
The Boxworks opening in Bristol was a key milestone
We see and meet new ventures all the time in region but the ventures that really excite VC type investors look well beyond the South West to address or disrupt significant national and global markets. A return on capital invested into high risk businesses requires exponential growth and
22 BUSINESS GUIDE 2016 - FOOT ANSTEY THURSDAY JANUARY 28 2016
Main picture; Henry Humphreys a senior associate at Foot Anstey in Bristol, said the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, above, is one of the key elements of the city’s tech sector WBG-E01-S2