Last week in Scale ups

Latest news from the Scale up Report on UK Economic Growth.

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Hi there,

Welcome to the latest Scale Up newsletter that highlights the week’s agenda from the perspective of the recommendations in the scale-up report.

Growing companies have specific requirements for capital, management, skills and organisational processes, and most scale-ups face similar issues:

The Evidence Gap: public and private sector organisations identify, target and evaluate their support to scale-up companies
The Skills Gap: Improve the ecosystem so scale-ups can find employees to hire who have the skills they need
The Leadership Capacity gap: building their leadership capability
The Export Gap: Accessing customers in other markets / home market
The Finance Gap: Accessing the right combination of finance
The Infrastructure Gap: Navigating infrastructure

The Evidence Gap: public and private sector organisations identify, target and evaluate their support to scale-up companies

I am speaking at a start-up to scale-up event with the Digital Catapult on 7th October.
This event aims to bring scale-ups and VCs together in one room to explore how we can help take some of the UK’s best digital ideas to the next level.

Apply to attend here.

Interesting report on the Israeli start-up ecosystem including recent IPOS and building a ‘scale-up nation’

Read the report here.

India is also pushing for more scale-ups.

It is disappointing to see that research from Centre for Entrepreneurs, NESTA and Spend Network have found less than 3% of public sector spending is with start-ups. While it is harder to nail down figures for the scale-ups it doesn’t look promising. As I mentioned in the Scale-Up report, A single contract from a large corporate or government department or agency can have a major impact on company growth rates. This figure needs to increase.

Read the full report here.

The Skills Gap: Improve the ecosystem so scale-ups can find employees to hire who have the skills they need

Fantastic news that the number of children taking Computer Science as a GCSE has doubled. This is forming a pipeline of homegrown talent to service the scale-ups of the future

Check out the stats here.

The Leadership Capacity Gap: Building their leadership capability

Applications are open for the CEO Summit 2015 bringing UK and Silicon valley scale-ups, experienced entrepreneurs and investors together for workshops and mentorship. The event is being held by Silicon Valley comes to the UK (SVC2UK).

Anyone interested in attending can apply here.

Earlier this month 35 entrepreneurs in Scotland took part in the Scotland Can Do Scale programme, a week long course in entrepreneurship delivered by professors from MIT and Harvard. The feedback from the chosen entrepreneurs is great and it will be interesting to see how they take these learnings back to their business.

More information on the programme here.

The Export Gap: Accessing customers in other markets / home market

UKTI are running a competition for entrepreneurs to win a bespoke business trip to LA including meetings with industry figures in Hollywood

More information and how to apply here.

The Finance Gap: Accessing the right combination of finance

Interesting article from Tech EU on where the VC investments have gone across Europe. It is fantastic to see the UK topping the table in the EU but they also identified signs of a worrying bottleneck at the Series C stage which could be an issue for scale-ups.

Check out the full article here.

Zopa has become the first UK peer-to-peer lender to surpass the £1bn of loans mark. As I have said before, a healthy alternative finance market is only a positive for scale-ups as they have more choice and flexibility when sourcing the capital they need to scale.