Notes on Britain in the Entrepreneurial Age

European Straits | Work in Progress

Hi, it’s Nicolas from The Family. Here’s the first round of an ongoing assessment of how Britain is doing in the Entrepreneurial Age. I’ll launch similar series covering various countries in the coming months.

1/ As a reminder, my personal framework for assessing a startup ecosystem has two dimensions:

• At inception, you need three essential resources: know-how, capital, and rebelliousness. I discussed this terraforming in What Makes an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (October 2015).

• Then, as the ecosystem grows, it becomes stronger if you manage to build institutions that make it self-sustainable over the long term: 5 Steps to a Healthy Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.

Let’s go through these two dimensions to assess how Britain, largely in London (but only largely, since there are startups outside London as well), has been faring so far.

2/ Let’s start with the know-how. In his remarkable Welcome to Somers Town — a New Palo Alto? (and the related deck), my friend Saul Klein of LocalGlobe makes the cas…