Can the UK Create Its First Trillion-Dollar Company?

Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Oxford Plus the podcast focused on innovation around Oxford. We look at everything across the ecosystem, the institutions, the people, the technology. If you need to learn anything about Oxford, whether it's how to take a first step in through the door, or as an experienced investor wanting to go deeper, this is the podcast for you. The UK has no shortage of world-class science, exceptional universities, or brilliant ideas. Yet for decades, we've asked a reoccurring question: Why don't we build enough globally significant companies? Increasingly, the answer may lie not in capital or policy but in culture. Do we encourage people to become founders? Do we celebrate ambition, resilience, and calculated risk-taking? Are we equipping people with the confidence and skills to start businesses, not just at university, but throughout their careers?

Enterprise Britain was created to address exactly these questions. Its mission is to inspire more people to see entrepreneurship as a viable and exciting path, helping to create a stronger pipeline of founders capable of driving innovation, productivity, and long-term economic growth for the UK.

Our guest today is Eva Barboni, Executive Director of Enterprise Britain. We'll discuss what it takes to build a more entrepreneurial nation, why ambition matters, how different stages of entrepreneurship require different forms of support, and what more the UK can do to unlock the potential of its people as investors and founders.

Eva, thank you so much for joining today. Before we crack on to learning all about Enterprise Britain, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background and experience that led you to this point.

Eva Barboni: Sure. So I started my career originally working on political campaigns first in the States. My accent may slightly betray me, but I originally was born in the US and began my career there. For those who are political junkies, you remember the early 2000s, my first big campaign was working for Howard Dean, who was running for the Democratic Party nomination at that point.

And while he had quite a wild ride in terms of that campaign, catapulting himself to the front-runner and then ultimately exiting quite quickly after the Iowa caucuses. It really made me catch the bug for politics and really understand how to engage the public around big picture policy ideas and bold policy platforms.

And I spent a number of years after that working in the States on Democratic political campaigns at the state level and for House and Senate races, and then made the move over to the UK about 15 years ago. Originally still working on political campaigns. Did a couple of campaigns here in the UK and then made the pivot from really trying to get candidates elected on policy platforms to really trying to advance policy change from the outside.

So worked a lot with big philanthropies and nonprofits on policy advocacy campaigns both at the UK level and at the global level through the UN system. And I built a consultancy doing that for a number of years, experienced what it's like to be an entrepreneur in this country, and then was approached about running Enterprise Britain and jumped at the chance to do

Susannah de Jager: I think it's so interesting your background in relation to this role because so often in the UK we talk about capital and we talk about quite a lot of the functional problems. But the fact that you are the person that's been appointed and coming from a political campaigns background, I think speaks to one of the other missing pieces in the UK, which is perception.

And I'd love to just dive into that a little bit because I think that the UK does often have, and it's part of your campaign, so I don't want to steal your thunder, but a bit of an ambition issue and a communication issue around entrepreneurship. So I'd love to understand how Enterprise Britain is really approaching this problem in a way that I guess is just quite different.

Eva Barboni: Yeah. I think that's one of the things that working on political campaigns taught me is that you can have the best policy ideas in the world, but if you can't sell them to the public, you're not going to get very far. And obviously, the first hurdle when working on electoral campaigns is just getting elected and having the chance to shape policy.

But one of the things that I saw working on those campaigns was actually sometimes once people get elected, they forget that they have to continue selling what they're doing and they have to bring the public along and create a narrative that helps people understand why the changes they are making, the reforms that they are pushing, are not only good for a specific audience or demographic, but can actually be good for the country as a whole.

And I think that's one of the reasons why I was approached about taking this job was that I had that background in crafting compelling messages that can engage the public and shift the narrative on some of those really thorny policy issues. And that's something that we at Enterprise Britain are really advocating for and have as a core focus of our work because I think for too long in the UK and in many other countries policy that helps companies grow and advance and succeed is often seen as a bit of a zero-sum game.

And it's perceived that the policies that would help companies succeed in this particular country necessarily come at the expense of workers and vice versa. Really we're trying to advocate for policies that would not only help more innovative businesses grow and succeed in the UK, but make sure that when that actually happens, that it leads to shared prosperity for the country.

Susannah de Jager: I want to dig into that in a moment, but I think that it's really interesting this identification of the problem statement and so let's go perhaps into the mission statement of Enterprise Britain.

Eva Barboni: So Enterprise Britain was really established by a group of British entrepreneurs, investors spearheaded by our two co-chairs, which are Brent Hoberman, who's the founder of lastminute.com, now runs Founders Forum and Firstminute Capital and Steve Fitzpatrick, who was the founder of OVO Energy, Kaluza, and Vertical Aerospace.

They had been having this series of conversations with other British entrepreneurs and investors that were all having very similar themes, which was we're seeing this kind of doom and gloom narrative about the UK. We're hearing all these stories about investors and entrepreneurs who are leaving the country, who are choosing to grow their companies elsewhere, and if those of us who really believe in Britain and are staying here and building here don't start to stand up and do something about that and say something about what still makes the UK a great place to scale a business, then this narrative is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And so Enterprise Britain was really created with that ethos, really a groundswell of interest amongst that entrepreneurial and investment community in the UK that we want to stand up, be part of the solution, and both shout from the rooftops about why people should stay and invest and build here and have a really honest conversation about some of the policies that make that harder than it should be and to try and get more voices of scale-up founders and investors in those conversations to shape policy that will be good, for the economic growth of the country as a whole.

Susannah de Jager: So you're really shaping a counter narrative here, but I like that you touched there upon the fact that there are still things that can be improved upon and that that's a core part of your work. So I'd love to dive into some of the specifics of that. What are the things that are coming through those discussions from people you're talking to?

Eva Barboni: We came out with a report a few months ago when we launched, which was called Time to Act, and we set out three pillars of things that we think need to be areas of focus. The first is ambition, the second is capital, and the third is talent. So we put ambition first, not only because it then makes a nice acronym of ACT and we put it first because we think you have to have that as a starting point and a North Star because you can have all the money in the world and all the talent in the world, and if you don't have the ambition to build globally relevant companies here, you're not going to succeed in the mission. And so ambition for us is perhaps some of the trickiest bit to change. It's being really, not naive, but optimistic and bold about what the future of the UK could look like if we support our most ambitious companies to succeed.

Then the second pillar is capital. And within that, we looked at three things. The first was retail investment. So coming from the US we have incredible culture of retail investment. Over 30% of American household wealth is in public equities. In the UK, that's 8%. We have much more investment in property. And so when people see businesses scale here, they don't necessarily have skin in the game or feel the positive impact of that, certainly for public companies. And so we want to change that by getting more Britons invested and excited and investing in British businesses.

The second piece is looking at institutional investment. So there's been a huge amount of conversation, obviously, about pension funds and the fact that there's very low levels of investment in the UK. Obviously, the Mansion House Accord is set out to address that, but within that kind of bucket of domestic investment, we really want to focus on getting more pension funds into venture and growth equity and so looking at some of the incentives and some of the cultural issues that would help change that are really core priorities for us. And then the third piece under capital is looking at how to make our public money, our public investment, more effective. So how do you leverage the investment by the British Business Bank and others to create a really thriving, venture and growth equity ecosystem in this country?

And then the third bucket, looking at talent. We looked at both homegrown talent, the skills agenda, understanding the wave of changes that is not only coming but already here in terms of how AI is disrupting the labour market, how do we prepare for that and make sure that British workers can succeed and thrive in that environment. Looking at homegrown talent, how to stop the brain drain, not only of very wealthy entrepreneurs and investors, but frankly, people who are in their 20s or 30s and are really ambitious and want to build careers who are looking at other markets, how do we keep more of them here? And then the third is having a bit more of a sensible debate around immigration and the value that skilled migrants and entrepreneurs in particular bring to this country and the value they create in terms of jobs and investment as well.

Susannah de Jager: Thank you, that's very clear. I am going to make us go back over them in a bit more depth because I think there's so much to dive into there. But taking them in order once again, if we look at ambition and you're American, and so I've heard this in many discussions I've had that the Brits are perceived to be, but I would love to know if in your current seat, you think this is a fair accusation, a bit less ambitious. Do you perceive that there's a genuine ambition gap?

Eva Barboni: It's tricky. I think when you sit with entrepreneurs and investors in the UK, you definitely don't feel like there's an ambition gap. You feel like they're setting their sights very high, they want to build globally relevant businesses, they understand what that takes, and they're not pulling out any stops.

I think what is different though is the attitude towards both success and failure, which is a key part of ambition. So in the US there's this kind of almost mythology of the American Dream, and whether it's still possible or not, you can debate some of the stats on upward mobility are a little bit problematic. But people believe that if they work hard enough and they put in the effort, that they can succeed, both personally and within their businesses and that creates an attitude towards hard graft and hard work that is different than what you have in the UK. I think therefore in the US, when people see those that are at the top of their game, they've built incredible companies, there's a lot more support for them and for the policies that have helped them get there.

In the UK, I think there's almost a bit of a suspicion towards success and a bit of tall poppy syndrome. So when we came out with our launch report, we did some polling and we asked people, hypothetically, if you look at a company that has 20 employees, based in your local area, what's your level of support for them? And then taking that same business, if it had 500 employees and a few offices in the UK, what would be your level of support? And then a thousand employees and headquartered in the UK, but offices around the world. And there was a pretty linear decline in support for those companies, knowing nothing else about them other than their size. So I think it started at around a majority over 50% saying they supported the 20 person company, and then less than 30% supporting the one with a thousand employees.

There's this kind of suspicion or belief that as companies succeed and they grow, they get out of touch with their employees, they are not contributing as much to this country, and that kind of perception and lack of support for successful British businesses, I think is something that then cuts down the level of ambition for entrepreneurs as they start to scale and grow their businesses because they see that support drop.

Susannah de Jager: And arguably cuts down their sense of loyalty to the place that they did start and grow their business. You know, there's no need to name names, but some of those kind of more high profile reported on names that have taken their larger businesses overseas and their kind of domiciles and themselves, you definitely see that playing through that people feel that they are not supported. I don't even want to use this word celebrated. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be patted on the back, but the discourse can be quite stark and actually, I'm even quite shocked, if I'm honest, when you talk through that data, which is amazing that it only starts at just above 50%. You might hope that for a local 20 person company, it started at more like above 80% and I think that the next point that you were building upon of therefore drawing in retail investors and a sense of ownership in a more tangible way is really very relevant and I think in the past kind of few months, there's been a few changes, some of which have been, again, by the media, not very positively reported, but the removal of the tax break for cash ISA holdings.

I'd love to know what your view is on that if you have one, because people see it as a tax break being removed, but there's an argument there should never have been a tax break for holding cash.

Eva Barboni: Yeah one of the things that we talk about in our report is that we've essentially incentivised people to put their money in very low return investments, both in terms of incentivising people to invest in property, creating tax incentives for things like cash ISAs, and then also incentivising pension funds to go for very safe investments like government bonds, which obviously don't have the same potential returns as potentially higher risk investments. As a whole we're very much in favour of incentives that encourage a healthy investment risk appetite, both from individual investors, retail investors, and from institutional investors.

The ISA debate was an interesting one. I think that will potentially be something that gets reopened. Obviously, a lot of the big banks and building societies were very strongly advocating to keep the cash ISA incentives as they were. There are a lot more folks on kind of our side of the debate pushing for more incentives to get people investing that money more effectively and more productive assets.

Susannah de Jager: Yeah. I had a conversation along similar grounds the other day with Marcus Studdard, who, for those that aren't familiar, is head of the primary markets and the AIM at the London Stock Exchange. And he said they've just started a campaign on railway stations. I don't know if you're aware of this, where they're advocating companies that have successfully listed here.

And I think that there is a sort of hangover as well around success being quite a lot of the financial crisis, even though a lot of these companies we're talking about aren't financial. That sense of what a company means if it starts here and how many amazing companies do start here for cancer treatment, for things that people might really care about, for jobs, obviously, in the UK, for tax take more broadly that feeds into other areas of our society and I do think that thread has been not broken entirely, but that the kind of the continuum that people can benefit from is not well understood and I'm very pleased that people such as yourselves and the London Stock Exchange are focusing more on that.

Eva Barboni: Yeah, I loved seeing that LSE campaign because, you can see that people do get excited about these opportunities. You just look at the SpaceX IPO recently, and certainly Americans were excited about that, but it was such a moment and it consumed the media for that week that I guess, I'd assume if you asked the average Brit on the street, they would know about that.

But if you ask them what the latest British company to IPO was, they probably would struggle to name it and so I think seeing that LSE campaign and the efforts of others to really showcase and celebrate British companies that are staying here and listing here is absolutely essential and will help get people more interested and excited in investing in them.

We've obviously seen that cultural change, but it's important to also know that has been backed up by successive policies that have pushed people away from retail investing as well. Obviously, many of them with the best of intentions, for example, the risk warnings associated with retail investing have really scared people away from investing and pushed them towards safer but lower performing assets.

That's almost a hopeful thing to look at how policy can push people towards certain investment choices because then we can reverse it. It's going to take some time. We've spent 30 years pushing people towards property investment and scaring them off from investment in the stock market. If we start to change our narrative and change the associated policies alongside of that, then we can turn the tide in, in the other direction. And so that's really what we're trying to do, is not only using our own platform to advocate for those policies, but also collaborating with others in this space that have, bigger established voices that can be singing from the same hymn sheet.

Susannah de Jager: And there's a huge amount of education. You touched there on the US system being so much more engaged with this. That is both structural and then of course it's a momentum thing because people feel more confident in that space, because it's more common, you'll get, your cab driver in the US will be talking to you about the investments they have in their portfolio and that's just not a discourse that we're comfortable with in the UK. So I think huge amount of that is educational.

Conversely, to what one might assume, and you touched upon some of the policy areas around pension capital, but again both in that space now as well, there's a policy lead, and obviously the fact that we have defined benefit contribution schemes has made them even more risk averse and you'll know this, but about 3.5 trillion, of our four trillion pension capital, still sits in that side. But about 500 billion and growing is in the DC side, which is obviously a little bit less hamstrung by Solvency II rules. But there is this kind of question over, you know, that there's a lot of pushing for pension funds to go into more productive assets because people on, you're my side of this argument to that going, "Hey, we've got less than 1% in our own equities, let alone unlisted." To put that in context for people that may not be familiar, I think it was more like 65, 50 years ago or something kind of wild, it's dropped off a cliff.

But I think what's so interesting is that in those groups, they also need education, and that I think there's a lot of feeling of being quite put upon for not having already jumped in line with the Mansion House Compact and subsequently Accord, when actually there's a whole skill base at an institutional level that needs to be developed and honed and brought on board.

I've spoken, as I'm sure you have, to Ian Connity at the British Business Bank about this, and just how much time venture capitalists are spending educating pension funds before they're even trying to see if they might be interested in their particular fund.

Eva Barboni: No, absolutely. And I think that's something we hear, from the pension funds themselves is that, there's a capacity issue. Investing in government bonds and fixed income assets is a very different skill set than investment in venture. There's a charge cap issue, so looking at the fees associated with venture and putting money into venture funds is a very different factor as well. And then there's also, I think, a bit of a challenge with a narrative around this.

A lot of the argument in favour of the Mansion House Accord and previously the Compact is around it's our kind of almost duty to invest in the UK, and that makes it very easy for pension funds to push back and say, "actually, no, we have a fiduciary duty to our savers." And those things don't have to be in conflict, but the narrative has put them in conflict and I think what we actually need to be saying is that, you as pension funds have a duty to get the best returns for your savers within the risk profile they're comfortable with, and by investing in these safe but lower performing assets, you are not necessarily meeting that obligation as well as you could. There's an opportunity for you to educate your savers a bit more about what their economic future could look like if they choose the lowest risk profile investment versus if they are open to other types of investments, particularly at the earlier phase of their careers and their kind of saving journey.

So I think that conversation needs to shift from one that is about almost patriotism and investment in the UK to one that is about making sure that Brits are set up to have a comfortable retirement, which frankly, at the moment, they are not.

Susannah de Jager: Yeah, I think it's very difficult though, because there are two things here, and I think you're correct to say they've been conflated to too high a degree. But in addition to what you've just said, which is totally valid. There is this reality that if you ask pension holders how much of their money you think is invested productively in the UK, they think it's a higher number, and they would like it to be a higher number. So I think that you're correct that we don't need to be trying to beat people whose primary objective should be their fiduciary duty, i.e. the pension trustees, to invest in things that don't serve their agenda. But additionally, there is a want with these large pools of capital, which are our largest in the UK, we don't have sovereign wealth funds, to invest in things that move the needle for the UK and people want to see that.

Eva Barboni: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there also needs to be a bit more of a conversation about what the value of having more British investment in British businesses is because when you have a company that has huge potential to scale, massive job creation potential, and they're not able to raise money in the UK, and they're taking it, for example, from the US investors instead, it's tempting to think of that as net neutral.

They've got the money they need, they can grow, that's still a British success story, but the reality of that is that money tends to come with strings and pressure to move and an incentive to take those jobs and that investment out of the UK and into the market where the investors are, and in many cases, that's the US.

So, I think there's a conversation that needs to be had as well about why it is that having more British capital behind British businesses can actually lead to more benefits, more growth, more job creation for the UK, and not just benefits for the investors and the entrepreneurs behind that individual company and I think there's a real disconnect in terms of how people understand that, not only amongst the public, but even in some of the conversations that I'm having that is quite surprising.

Susannah de Jager: Are you going to do some research and then a campaign?

Eva Barboni: We are, we will be doing a campaign around the Autumn Budget coming up, so watch this space and a key part of that will be looking at the economic benefit and contribution that scale-ups make to this country and some of the policies that would help them grow even more quickly.

Susannah de Jager: And you led me very naturally on there because you used the term scale-ups, and we've been talking up till this moment about all companies, but I was going to ask exactly that. What area are you particularly focused on?

Eva Barboni: So we're particularly focused on scale-ups. I think our thesis, which was validated by a lot of the research going into our launch report, was that the UK has a great startup ecosystem. We're pretty competitive when it comes to raising Seed and Series A. Some of that is changing a bit given some of the mega rounds that are now being raised much earlier on but, at the moment, we're pretty competitive there. But when you hit Series B, that funding starts to fall off a cliff and the companies that are really ambitious start thinking well before Series B about where they're going to be raising those funds, and they're often looking to other markets.

And so we're looking at that kind of scale-up capital gap, and also the unique kind of talent needs of companies that are in that kind of fast growth phase. But we do look across the entire pipeline, and we do look at the end of that pipeline when companies are looking to IPO or what the needs of publicly listed companies already because we think that some of the challenges that they face at that stage, have knock-on effects all the way down.

For example, for a company that's looking to have an IPO and they have their sights set on the States, they're probably not going to wait to start to set themselves up well to do that and we need to look at that kind of entire journey. But we're particularly focused on some of the challenges at the scale-up phase.

Susannah de Jager: It's very interesting. I think we're at a really pivotal moment in the UK because not to sort of denigrate the work that you've done because it always needs to be brought up to date, but I'm going to be speaking to Hermann Hauser for this season of the podcast. He wrote the Hauser Report in 2010. I was working on the scale-up capital pension reform work in 2021. I've interviewed Tom Adeyoola, who's also written a report on this in 2022, and now we're talking about sort of 2025, but it does feel like there's an interesting moment in the UK where government really seemed to get this. There is more of a burning platform on sort of defence spending, technological sovereignty. These were not buzzwords five years ago that people realise we need to invest inwardly in order to perhaps protect our values, not just our economic interests.

I think that there's also a maturing of the venture capital system in the UK itself and we've seen some of these bigger exits. How do you see your work at this particular moment in time and what excites you the most about it?

Eva Barboni: Yeah, I mean, we're at an interesting moment, both for all the reasons that you've mentioned and obviously the political situation right now. We've been really heartened to see over the last few months some quite ambitious new initiatives being launched. Obviously there's the sovereign AI fund. We've seen the announcement of the scale-up concierge service, which for those who aren't aware of that, it's essentially going to be set up within the Department for Business and Trade, which will help support scale-ups to both navigate different government departments and unblock some of the things that are hampering their growth.

So we hear a lot from people in our community that, the machinery of government isn't really set up to understand or support scale-ups. So you've got small business agenda, and then you've got the kind of the big corporate agenda, but there's this kind of gap in the middle, which actually has the highest potential to drive growth and innovation in this country and it's very poorly understood, I would say, across government in terms of this particular needs of that kind of set of companies. And so we were really excited to see the scale-up concierge service, which we called for in our launch report and have engaged with DBT on because we think that has real potential to support scale-ups to supercharge their growth.

And we were also really pleased to see the kind of level of ambition and some of the rhetoric which you referenced in that speech announcing the scale-up concierge service. We set the ambition of the UK having its first trillion dollar business. And, there were a couple of people behind the scenes afterwards who scoffed at that when I was talking to them. And I was like, "You know what? You have to set your aims high, and if we get many more 10 billion dollar and 100 billion dollar businesses along the way to that trillion dollar milestone, then fantastic, that's what we need. But you have to set your ambition there or else you're going to artificially cap where you can land anyway."

So we hope that that ambition and that narrative continues whatever happens in terms of the political situation and that there's a real case made to the public for why that will have benefits that go beyond those companies and those shareholders.

Susannah de Jager: Just coming back to the sort of final part of it, talent again. We touched upon the maturation of venture capital, but there's also now a recycling of second, in some cases, third generation entrepreneurial talent coming in.

And actually, again, in a conversation I had the other day, somebody was illuminating on the fact that non-competes basically barely exist in America and therefore you can be a scaling company on the West Coast and you can look across to a large department in a global tech company and you can go, "Right, well, we'll hire that amazing talent and that they will be working with you two weeks later," which doesn't happen here. So I think that there are still some policy areas. Are you lobbying on that kind of stuff at all?

Eva Barboni: Absolutely. Founders and investors who have also operated in the States are much more comfortable with this because they know that one of the things that made Silicon Valley what it is today is that California had banned non-competes and it was much easier to hire talent away and start something quickly than you could in other states across the US. That has now changed over recent years because people have seen what that has meant for the Valley and the ecosystem that has created. And so other states have followed suit.

Here in the UK, obviously, we have a compounding effect of both non-competes and very long notice periods. So we're certainly not advocating for American style lack of employment protections, but we do think that notice periods have also gone a bit too far. So we've called in our launch report for both the ban of non-competes and also giving employees a one-sided right to reduce their notice period to one month. So if they find a new role and they choose to leave more quickly, they're able to do that. And we think that could make a real difference for companies that are trying to scale here because at the moment, you're trying to hire for a senior role, you've got a notice period of four to six months, you've probably got a non-compete of the average is about six months. So you're waiting for a year for that person to join.

In the world of fast growth companies, the company you were a year ago doesn't exist anymore. It's been replaced by something else. And so increasing mobility and, the velocity at which talent can move across companies and roles is really, critical, for our ability to create a really thriving scale-up ecosystem, and that it also creates real benefits for employees themselves as they're able to join new opportunities.

Susannah de Jager: It's wild. In a recent advisory role I had, I was redrafting and helping bring in employment contracts and they had 12 months non-competes written in there, which are unenforceable by the way. And I said to them, "You've got to reduce these to something you can actually enforce," which at the time our HR lawyer was saying was more like three months. And they basically were there saying " "No, we want to leave this in." It's a very culturally distinct thing in the UK and I hope we get there on it because I do think it's hamstringing us.

But on the more positive side, there is this, more mature talent coming through. At the other end of the spectrum, what are you guys going to be focusing on the sort of skills side of things? Should everyone be trying to be an entrepreneur or how do you see that side of things?

Eva Barboni: One of the things that is great about the UK is it is such an entrepreneurial culture. And if you look at younger workers in particular, the interest in entrepreneurship is huge. Now, that's not to say that everyone is destined to be an entrepreneur but the skill set and the attitude that is essential to being an entrepreneur is also of huge benefit to other countries.

So we think you should support entrepreneurial education and support a entrepreneurial mindset amongst young people who are coming through the education system, because those will be the same needs that will be required if they join a mature company as well because of the pace of change. So that resilience, the risk taking, the ambition that are central to entrepreneurship are a value in any role. So we're really pushing for that to be something that we support and reinforce in the education system.

The other thing obviously that we're looking at is the impact of AI. There's obviously a huge amount of fear around, you know, potential for displacement and everything that comes with that. And so we really want to focus on making sure that people are equipped with the skills that they need to thrive in roles where they are using AI effectively to be more effective and efficient rather than potentially being displaced by it.

We are also looking at policy incentives that would help bring more young people into the workforce and make sure that it is cost-effective decision for a company to hire a person rather than to deploy AI for that more junior level tasks. I think that will be a core area of focus for us, is how you create resilient roles and make sure that we don't just cut out the bottom of the career ladder by not thinking about how to get young people into the workforce.

Susannah de Jager: Yeah, it's a very interesting area at the moment. And I think just to draw it out further, a lot of the skills that we historically perhaps have associated with kind of startup or entrepreneurialism and being very adaptable and moving across things is now a skill set that a lot of people, more people, are going to need in order to have those resilient careers.

And actually I hear quite hopeful things where people, that have actually raised money for their businesses, they say, "Well, we didn't need to hire a whole bunch of people here because this task has really been expedited, but actually we're moving so much faster that we need a whole load of very slightly differently skilled people over here to catch the outputs that AI is not actually able to do the task on the other side of that pipe."

So I'm hopeful that what we're seeing at the moment won't be a permanent downtick in those entry level roles.

Eva Barboni: Absolutely.

Susannah de Jager: Eva, we started this conversation very much focused on your background and how so much of this is a communication problem. Scale-up companies often are so focused on their core mission that they're not necessarily engaging in this debate. What advice would you give to those that are in that spot at the moment?

Eva Barboni: I think that's a really good point. And for many scale-ups, when they're prioritising hiring, they're not necessarily prioritising big policy or public affairs teams, and that makes complete sense. And obviously, they're often part of industry organisations that are representing their voice in government.

But I do think there's a real important need for those who are at the coalface of building and scaling innovative companies here to really put some time into being part of the policy debate. Particularly now, obviously, we've gone through a phase of political uncertainty. There's a potential for a bit of a policy refresh. And so there's a real moment for entrepreneurs and investors to be part of that conversation and to really be able to share their personal experience of some of the policies that are currently holding back their growth and what would help to unlock it.

So I think my message for founders in particular is yes, obviously your top priority has got to be growing your business and raising the money you need to do so. But by engaging in the policy discussion, you can help reduce some of the hurdles that you're facing and I hope that you will engage both with us at Enterprise Britain and with your industry organisations and other groups to be part of that conversation because really needed.

Susannah de Jager: And we are at this very kind of crucial moment where we are going to see quite a lot of shift. And how do you see that impacting the work you're doing more regionally in clusters? He's clearly got a kind of devolution lens on the whole thing. How do you see that impacting what you've been doing to date?

Eva Barboni: I think the devolution agenda provides a real opportunity. I think looking to our universities and creating really sustainable ecosystems around them and supporting more spin-outs to stay in those areas, create jobs there, reinvest in those communities, making sure that we're capitalising on the incredible innovation that's already coming out of our universities.

Those are incredible strengths that we can build on and we need to make sure that, yes, some of those companies may choose to come to London, that's okay, but we need to capture more of that economic growth and development in the areas in which those spin-outs are created and that includes Oxford, but it also includes some of our world leading universities across the country.

Susannah de Jager: Absolutely. Eva, thank you. I wish you all the best with it. I'm really excited that there are people such as yourself and particularly with your background who are focusing on this kind of campaign, educational piece because I, like you, think it's really something that we've been lacking in the UK.

Eva Barboni: Delighted to speak with you about it and look forward to keeping you posted as we carry our work forward.

Susannah de Jager: Amazing. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+, presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford+, please visit our website, oxfordplus.co.uk and sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update. Oxford+ was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya and is produced and edited by Story Ninety-Four.