Silicon Valley is bleeding talent. Where it lands next is up to us.

London has a genuine, time-limited shot at becoming the most compelling city in the world to start a company.

Political uncertainty from the Trump Administration has accelerated the flow of talent and capital away from the US. Abrupt policy changes, restrictive H-1B policies, and intrusive border checks all culminate in growing fear and uncertainty that sending the “wrong” political signal can invite punitive federal scrutiny, unsettling many of the world's best workers in the process.

Meanwhile, for the first time in years, the UK Government is really accelerating: the £500mn Sovereign AI fund, AI Growth Zones, a new Regulatory Innovation Office, a three-year residency track for senior talent. These aren’t just speeches - these are real, specific, funded commitments.

The UK is the closest English-speaking nation with a globally respected, diverse capital city, political stability, and an unprecedented level of cross-party political alignment around business growth and the technology sector. The tide is turning in our favour, and we have all the ingredients for success: plentiful talent with smart ideas, massive ambitions, and global access.

But here’s the thing: none of these plans will bear fruit unless the UK has a tech ecosystem that genuinely supports its talent to chase their dreams. I’ve been in far too many conversations about “boosting our capital markets” with policy leaders, and barely any about retaining early talent. I firmly believe that capital is an output, not an input.

It requires an environment that not only attracts the best and brightest talent, but one that brings them together to grow businesses, then gives them a reason to stay.

This is the drum I kept banging last year as a distinguished contributor to the Tony Blair Institute's From Startup to Scaleup report. Today I’d like to share some of those contributions with you.

We attract incredible talent, then show them the door 🚪🏃

London is an attractive city to live in, universities like Cambridge and Oxford attract some of the world's brightest minds, and the UK is an incredible bridge between the US and EU, so it's not a surprise that many start their early careers here! We have an immense amount of talent with bright ideas and strong conviction across the country.

But I've heard one piece of advice more and more often: Move to the US.

Over the past decade, I've witnessed a steady stream of LinkedIn posts from some of the smartest people I've worked with about their relocation to the US. Multiple friends in the industry have moved.

The same applies to the sciences – my husband considered leaving Cambridge for the US because he was offered a Chemical Engineering PhD at Columbia with a $50k/yr salary and a full scholarship. In the UK he would've had to pay to study, and would probably need an extra job on the side to cover his living costs.

If he stayed in the UK and founded a startup, he'd need to allow plenty of time for negotiations with the university, and would likely have to give up ~15% equity. That figure would be 5% at most elite universities like MIT and Harvard.

There just isn't a reason to stay: low salaries, high living costs, little community, less capital, grey weather… the list goes on. When the internet shouts about progress in SF and you’re struggling to find a mentor in London, it seems like leaving to the US is the right move.

A common part of that narrative is that people in the UK are just "too risk averse" and have "a big culture problem", but nobody seems to ask why.

My take: In an ecosystem where it’s hard to find real opportunities and build relationships, people won’t be as willing to help each other. You’ll instinctively conserve your own ideas, guard your own access, refer fewer people, because you're worried about damaging the few relationships you have. That's not a culture problem. That's a scarcity problem, and that’s fixable.

We don't develop the talent that stays 🏚️😓

Moving to a new city is hard, and it's no secret that many of us are lonelier than ever. Not only is it essential for our mental health, it’s also imperative for business: most startups have multiple co-founders, so you need the ability to find and build relationships with your peers.

London's tech scene is much bigger than you think, but it looks tiny because it’s so disparate. There’s hundreds of monthly events, thousands of startups, dozens of communities, but it’s pretty hard to get involved. You can easily get lost scrolling through meetup.com to find trashy sales events posed as mixers or scammy conferences, because all the real events are approval-gated on Luma, Partiful, or Eventbrite. We don’t do SF-style tech parties, and whilst little pockets of community for different niches are dotted across the capital, there’s no bridge between these networks.

This is the ecosystem's missing layer. Not capital, not policy, but connective tissue. The thing that turns a collection of activity into a scene.

🌱 If we attract the talent, that talent will look for community.
🌿 If that community can help them meet new friends, industry peers, and mentors, there is a decent likelihood they'll found new startups.
🌳 If exciting companies are being built by talented people in the UK, early stage capital will come.
🍃 As those companies grow, some will die, but their talent will be re-absorbed by their peers in the ecosystem (e.g. when early fintech Loot collapsed, the community rallied together and put on a job fair so that companies like Monzo could bring on that talent).
🏕️ As those companies scale, later stage capital will be attracted.
🏡 When this pipeline is thriving, more investors will have confidence in the results of the ecosystem and want to step in (e.g. domestic funds, multi-stage funds).
🏞️ As those companies succeed, they'll be incentivised to IPO in the UK, growing our capital markets, making the UK a better place to live.

We don’t retain our success stories 🕊

The 20 ex-PayPal ($68bn) team members largely stayed in the Bay Area, founding companies like Palantir ($324bn), Affirm ($20bn), SpaceX ($350bn), Tesla ($1tn), The Boring Company ($7bn), Neuralink ($8bn), YouTube ($500bn 🤷), OpenAI ($80bn), LinkedIn ($26.2bn exit), and Yelp ($2.5bn), and many more. Combined, that represents $2.39 trillion in the US economy.

That happened because those people stayed in the same city, in the same ecosystem, surrounded by the same community. The flywheel worked.

Now look at @monzo ($5.9bn). Monzo reincorporated as a US company in 2020, and Monzonauts (including myself) have gone on to create over 20 growing companies 🚀

Whilst some companies like @GradientLabsAI and @incident_io have decided to remain headquartered in the UK, others like @SlingMoney and @pave_bank are based elsewhere. Many of our notable team members no longer live in the UK (e.g. @t_blom, @obeattie, @simonvc, @natashavernier to name just a few).

This pattern tends to repeat itself. Revolut has similarly spawned countless startups, but many are based in the US like Maroo, DolarApp, LiveFlow, Solvo, and Pledge. It's worth noting that Nik has also been pretty public about the fact he's unlikely to list Revolut on the LSE, too.

We attract talent, then show them the door. We build startups, then watch them reincorporate. We create value, then export it.

This "leaky" scale-up pipeline starves the local tech flywheel of oxygen and pushes talent and capital out of the UK. Only by closing the exit loop can we ensure that talent and capital is recycled into a self-sustaining ecosystem.

We've done this before 👀

Between 2010 and 2017, the government's Tech City initiative transformed Old Street into one of Europe's most productive innovation districts. The number of tech firms in the area surged from around 85 to 5,000 within two years. By 2015, London-based tech startups had collectively raised over $5.2 billion in venture capital, a 69% jump on the year before. The area's contribution to London's GVA exceeded £15 billion by 2019, powered by a 190,000-strong workforce.

A focused, government-industry campaign scaled a nascent community into a world-class innovation district. We've seen similar initiatives do the same in New York, Boston, Amsterdam, and Berlin. And then... we stopped. The money dried up, the attention moved on, and everyone assumed the job was done. As Tech City showed us, if you stop putting in the effort because you've "made it" by overseeing some new unicorns, you cut off the ecosystem's funnel and ultimately starve your scaleups of the pipeline they need to survive.

Nothing like Tech City exists in London today… until now.

It's time to stop admiring the problem and start building the solution.

Government can create the visa frameworks, the tax incentives, the growth zones. They're doing that. But I don’t believe Westminster is able to build the community that makes a founder choose London over San Francisco. Nobody in Whitehall can create the density of events, the shared directory, the single entry point that makes a new arrival feel like they've landed somewhere that's going somewhere. That's on us.

So, we're fixing it. The biggest names in UK tech and government are joining forces around a shared mission – a spiritual successor to TechCity, built by the industry rather than by government, designed to be the connective tissue London's ecosystem has been missing. A unified brand. A single entry point. A commitment to action over commentary.

The UK has its best shot in decades. We can't afford to waste it.
London, it's time to build.