It’s time to unleash British dynamism

From the Welsh valleys to Silicon Valley: the success story of an AI startup tells profound truths about the ailing UK’s ability to lead in the future

Originally posted on The Times

The village of Llanfyllin

The tiny farming village of Llanfyllin, where I spent my childhood summers, has a population of around a thousand. There are more sheep than people. Nestled in the remote Welsh hills, the Cain Valley is about as far removed from Silicon Valley as anywhere you could imagine. Our family home has no phone reception and no broadband access. 

So you can imagine my surprise when the venture capital firm I co-founded backed a Llanfyllin tech entrepreneur as part of the most competitive AI seed funding round in British history. Surprise turned to astonishment when CuspAI’s CEO, Dr Chad Edwards, told me that his classmate at Llanfyllin High School was former Manchester United coach Eric Ramsay, now the youngest manager in the history of America’s Major League Soccer. 

As we often see in entrepreneurial arcs, the two friends had spurred each other on, each one’s excellence inspiring and expanding the ambition of the other. Their story says something profound about ‘British Dynamism’: our world class potential - and the very real risk that we waste our opportunity to escape a national doom loop through technology and culture. 

The co-founders of Cusp AI: Prof. Max Welling and Dr. Chad Edwards

CuspAI’s cutting edge AI develops novel materials to transform the viability of carbon capture and storage. They raised a $30M seed round and have won partnerships with Meta and other Big Tech heavyweights. The ‘godfather of AI’ and recent Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton (himself a Brit), serves as a board advisor. 

It’s a meteoric rise for Edwards, the first person in his extended family to attend university. He credits his greengrocer father “who showed me the meaning of hard work with his 1am starts.” An inspirational chemistry teacher sparked a love of science which took him to Manchester University for a PhD and then on to build Cambridge tech unicorn Quantinuum, by way of Google. 

Coaching prodigy Ramsay, meanwhile, got his big break under Kieran McKenna (who later took Ipswich back to the top flight) at Loughborough University and then Manchester United where he became first coach. “The quality of this new generation of British football coaches is sky high,” says Ramsay. Britain’s multiculturalism, even in rural Welsh villages, is the secret to his ability to thrive in America’s multilingual Major League Soccer. “We had people from all over the world staying in our house because my dad was a language teacher. I speak English, Welsh, French and - importantly for this job - Spanish.” Ramsay will no doubt return to the Premier League, which remains Britain’s most successful export. 

Former Manchester United coach Eric Ramsay, now the youngest manager in the history of America’s Major League Soccer. 

The remarkable tale of the Llanfyllin two is a reminder that the UK has all of the ingredients to compete as a leading power of the future. We have four of the world’s top ten universities, an advantageous time zone and language, and the rule of law. Britons pioneered and discovered the World Wide Web, AI, electric motors, penicillin, MRIs and DNA. One of the world’s two AI superpowers, Deepmind, remains in the UK following Google’s acquisition. We punch above our weight on soft power more than any other country. British artists and creators continue to shape culture in the age of Netflix and the Premier League is, as Sky TV boasts, the greatest show on earth. And, as Eric Ramsay reminds me, the gentle beauty of our landscape is an underrated inheritance. 

Yet the nation languishes in a state of unconfident decline, divided still by Brexit and impoverished by an anaemic economy. This is the first generation to be poorer than their parents. Annual real wages are 7 percent lower than in 2008. America’s economy has grown almost three times as fast as the UK in the same period. The US stock market has grown over 450%, driven largely by homegrown technology titans. In contrast, lacking high-growth technology stocks, the FTSE 100 is up only 60%. 

The risk is that our politicians (of all flavours) are burning our lifeboats. Only Britain would witness the extraordinary success of the Premier League and conclude it required a regulator. If only the zealous rush to become the best in the world at regulating AI were matched by a desire to create more companies that will actually shape the future of machine learning. There is a recurring impulse to bash London’s world leading financial centre, London itself, and the foreign students who fund our elite universities. 

Instead, we must embrace British Dynamism. That is the name of the practice at my firm, Giant Ventures, that backs UK founders with outsized ambition to solve national priorities like climate change, energy resilience and healthcare. Companies like Doccla, building virtual wards to ease pressures on hospitals, or Cambridge spin-out Matta whose AI copilot enables low-carbon advanced manufacturing. 

The only escape from our national malaise is to supercharge growth by building an economy focused very specifically on our three world class national strengths: technology, life sciences and finance. We need, in short, a vision of a country that can win again. 

The new government must redirect two ailing but mighty national assets - the military and the NHS - to act as innovation hubs to match American counterparts like DARPA. 

The new National Wealth Fund is a start, but to compete with our rivals it must extend beyond green energy and increase in size many times over. Trust must be rebuilt following tax raids on entrepreneurs. Irrational squeamishness about health data can no longer hold the NHS back from full digitization to allow transformative innovation partnerships. 

At the same time, we need somehow to regain what the architect Thomas Heatherwick calls ‘creative confidence’. The cultural swagger that manifested itself in Cool Britannia and the London Olympics is an essential ingredient, too, if we are to make Britain great again.

Tommy Stadlen is the Co-Founder of Giant, a global venture capital firm backing purpose-driven technology founders. He also co-founded Swing Technologies, which was acquired by Microsoft.