10 at 10 - a new Downing Street competition
✍️ Latest Times piece
🎧 Hiring: Assistant Producer
🧑💼 Join me at CBI: Future of Work Conference
💰 Samir Desai, founder of Funding Circle gears up again
❓ The art of questioning
🚢 Fisherman’s Friends - The Return
Welcome to the 8 new subscribers. If you are new here, my name is Jimmy McLoughlin, a former Downing Street adviser turned podcaster. I write this notebook on the most interesting things I have seen on the future of work, jobs, technology and politics.
If you want to keep up with more of my work, please subscribe or forward to a friend or colleague who may find my post interesting.
✍️ Latest Times piece
I wrote this piece in The Times about how the Prime Minister should launch a new national competition for entrepreneurs hosted at 10 Downing Street. The full piece is below
On Friday, I interviewed both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak for my Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future podcast. Normally we interview entrepreneurs about where and how they plan to grow their companies. However, as they are auditioning for the biggest job of all, we made an exception. Both made clear their desire to grow the UK economy and stated their admiration for Silicon Valley and how they want Britain to emulate it. So here are some simple ideas that could be implemented quickly with little cost to the taxpayer.
The StartUp Britain campaign initiated by David Cameron and George Osborne in 2011 has helped the UK to become one of the best places in the world to start a business. We need to double-down on supporting the start-up phase, but we also need to look further down the funnel so that we can get more businesses growing beyond the eight-figure valuation mark.
We have no shortage of supply. When it comes to entrepreneurs, we are living in an age where our brightest and best want to start companies. In the Noughties, elite graduates wanted to go into investment banking; in the decade before that, it was to work for one of the consulting firms; now they want to create and build their own ventures from the very outset of their careers.
Sunak, who started his career in banking, pointed out he didn’t believe that access to capital was our biggest challenge. He is right that Britain has an all-time high of venture capital funding. In addition, we are known to have some of the best tax breaks in the world when it comes to encouraging investment, via EIS, the Enterprise Investment Scheme, and its “seed” variation for the smallest companies. However, the SEIS is capped at £150,000 and hasn’t been updated since its introduction in 2012. Such a sum barely covers the cost of a decent development team for six months. It should be doubled. Concerningly, the EIS has a looming “sunset clause” at 2025. This should be removed.
The next issue is talent. A huge number of people have not returned to the workforce since Covid. It is the main reason the governor of the Bank of England cites for domestic inflation pressures. People should be offered digital training to rejoin the workforce. Even entry-level digital jobs are paid above the national average salary. There are plenty of schemes in place, but they should be rebranded, relaunched and targeted more effectively.
Finally, most importantly, there is one thing that the new occupant of 10 Downing Street will be uniquely well placed to do — lead on the culture of ambition. The new prime minister should launch a national entrepreneurs’ “scale up” competition to encourage those who start companies with high potential. There is a gap now that Prince Andrew’s “Pitch@Palace” awards, which brought together founders, investors and advisers at Buckingham and St James’s palaces, no longer exists. A Downing Street competition should take its place. There could be regional competitions, with the final hosted at the world’s most famous address. It would give some of the brightest and fastest-growing companies access to the prime minister, the new chancellor and a host of our greatest entrepreneurs and business leaders.
Silicon Valley has Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator programme that helped to launch the likes of Airbnb. At the moment, something similar is missing in Britain. There is support from the second wave of UK technology entrepreneurs who have exited businesses and are still way before retirement age who are happy to give back to the country that gave them such great opportunity. It would cost little to nothing for the taxpayer.
At the moment, every detail of difference is being scrutinised between the two candidates, but both agree that the most the government can do is create the fertile conditions to let private enterprise grow, allowing and encouraging British entrepreneurs to swing big. One of Downing Street’s most impressive assets is its unique convening power, which has been under-utilised because of the coronavirus. Such a competition could be one of the final pieces in the jigsaw as the UK looks to emulate Silicon Valley. The original piece is here.
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We have just edited the video of Rishi Sunak at the hustings where we talk about his plans to win a record fifth term and what more he would like to do for entrepreneurs.
Click on the screen to play.
🎧 Hiring: Assistant Producer
Things are scaling here at Jimmy’s Jobs with several partnerships agreed for the Autumn, we are hiring an Assistant Producer to help us pull together Series 6.
Our first team member came from an introduction from this notebook, he started as an ‘associate’ in May 2021, and is now a full producer on the show.
It is a three month contract to work on Series 6. We will have a lot of focus on your career and development, after all, it is a core tenet of what Jimmy’s Jobs is about.
It is four days a week, ideally Monday to Friday, but there is flexibility. The total payment would be £5.5k - 6k, so therefore working out annual salary is £25-30k.
The full details are on LinkedIn
Feel free to hit reply to this email with questions.
🧑💼 Join me at CBI: Future of Work Conference
One of those partnerships is with the CBI, and Jimmy’s Jobs will be hitting the road for a special episode at the CBI’s Future of Work conference on 13 September at 8 Northumberland Avenue, London.
During the session I’ll be joined by Tania Gandamihardja and Ian Muldowney from BAE Systems to discuss their history of enabling social mobility. They are one of the biggest employers in the UK and it is going to be great to hear their individual stories too.
Notebook subscribers can attend the full conference - which will look at how businesses can maximise and futureproof their people strategies - for free.
Just use this link to register and make sure you use your business email.
💰 Samir Desai, founder of Funding Circle gears up again
Funding Circle is one the UK’s fintech sucess stories, originally founded in 2009 it went onto IPO within a decade. I saw Samir for lunch earlier this year after he stepped down as CEO, he was already itching with ideas and plans for a new venture.
It is exactly this spirit that gives me such hope for the UK entrepreneurial ecosystem. Samir is far from retiring for a life on the golf course, many are itching to go again.
Full story in The Times about how Super Payments will look to get rid of internet payment fees - One day I’ll persuade him to come on Jimmy’s Jobs.
❓ The art of questioning
I wrote last week about how do you structure interviews for different guests and how important the opening question is.
Well one of the UK’s leading public speaking coaches, Alex Merry has written an interesting analysis of Steve Bartlett’s interview with Ogilvy exec, Rory Sutherland.
I once watched Rory wow a room of 1,000 people at the Design Museum, he has such presence, charisma and insight.
He’s an ‘old school Ad man’ and Steven is very much a ‘new school Ad man’, so it was fascinating to see the two spark off each other, and perhaps a useful reminder of there is no such thing as a new idea or perhaps in this case, no such thing as a new feeling.
Alex’s post is available here.
🚢 Fisherman’s Friends - The Return
My Grandpa was in the Navy, so I have always felt an affinity with sea shanties, not just because it was a TikTok sensation in the pandemic.
So I am excited about Fisherman’s Friends two coming out this week and so thought I would post one of my favourite songs from the original.
It also sometimes reminds me of my time in politics ….
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