The Guardian view on venture capitalism: investor profits are no industrial strategy | Editorial
That is the provocation issued by the thinktank Common Wealth in a paper titled We Aren’t the Champions, which takes aim at the UK’s venture capital (VC) industry.
Key points
- Public investment should develop domestic capabilities and meet urgent social needs Britain keeps selling its most valuable companies.
- The authors say that as long as the UK is subordinated to US cash, getting startups to a heavyweight size will be a sisyphean task.
- The Financial Times calculates that 300 went to foreign buyers, mostly American, over the past decade.
Britain’s venture capitalists might argue that they are in it for themselves, not for building up British tech.
What if innovation were scaled up to serve social needs here rather than US investors’ profits?
Additional details
- DeepMind, founded in London in 2010, went to Google just four years later.
- Britain’s tech pioneers are often sold before they become giants.
- Higher returns for backers do not guarantee national prosperity.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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