Brent Hoberman on UK tech post-Starmer: 'Are we going to tax everyone to high hell?'

**John Thornhill** (0:01)
Hello, and welcome to The Sifted Podcast. I'm John Thornhill, Sifted's co-founder and columnist, and today I'm delighted to be joined by the serial entrepreneur and investor Brent Hoberman. Brent is one of the UK's most experienced and best connected tech operators. In 1998, he co-founded the travel site lastminute.com, Britain's OG tech startup, if I can put it that way, which listed on the LSE in 2000 and sold to the US firm Sabre in 2005
Then in 2010, he co-founded the e-commerce brand made.com, which after he left, listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 at a £775 million valuation. The company went into administration the following year, demonstrating what a white-knuckle ride it can be, building fast-growing tech businesses in today's volatile global economy. Brent co-founded the early-stage VC firm Firstminute Capital, which has backed leading names in the European tech sector, including self-driving car company Wave, AI model builder Mistral, workflow automation provider N8N, and the popular meeting summarization tool Granola. Brent is also the co-founder and impresario of the London-based Founders Forum, a global community of entrepreneurs which recently hosted 300 unicorn founders at Soho Farmhouse. He also co-hosts London Tech Week, which has become a fixture of the UK startup calendar. In February, as if he wasn't busy enough, he co-founded Enterprise Britain, a movement of entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors committed to growing the UK economy through entrepreneurship.
London Tech Week took place a couple of weeks ago, making this a great time to check in with Brent about the temperature of where the UK's tech scene is today, how he's approaching investing in AI, and what Europe needs to do differently to build significant companies. So Brent, welcome to the show.

**Brent Hoberman** (1:55)
Thank you, Tom.

**John Thornhill** (1:57)
We're talking just a few hours after Keir Starmer has resigned as Britain's Prime Minister, meaning we'll have had seven heads of state in just over 10 years. What's your reaction to that news and how much does this political merry-go-round affect people like you trying to build a better UK tech sector?

**Brent Hoberman** (2:16)
It's complicated. I think one part is the short-termism of our democracy is clear. So I think that whatever one thinks of Starmer, you can think, well, should one have given him more of a go? You don't want people to be measured on short-term two-year cycles when it's meant to be a five-year cycle. And that's even too short anyway for most things to impact. So if we really are just looking at opinion polls all the time, and most of the commentary I've seen this morning is, Starmer was kind of doing OK, but he was really unpopular and the opinion polls hated him, which doesn't feel like a good enough reason to throw someone out to me.
I think one thing though is he clearly, history will probably say he wasn't bold or particularly a risk taker. And I wrote an article for The Times last week about risk taking and that we are a culture of caution in an age of urgency and where risk taking is necessary. So that's one thing.
I think for entrepreneurs, the key thing is actually going to be who's chancellor. And what's sort of painful is we don't know, and I don't know how long it's going to take for us to know.
And why is it important? Because the chancellor is going to be the one who is bluntly either pro-business or pro-socialism to be simplistic about it. And entrepreneurs do not want to see some, we do not want these summers like we had a couple of, we seem to have every summer before the budget. It's like, are we going to tax everyone to high hell and heaven and drive all the innovators and creators out? Do we have a government that really wants growth and is going to reward risk takers? Do we have a government who recognizes that the growth comes from attracting brilliant people to the UK and brilliant talent? And I actually think the Starmer government and Chancellor Reeves, Rachel Reeves, were actually starting to get that memo. So this is disappointing for entrepreneurs.

**John Thornhill** (4:06)
And there were several ministers in particular who certainly kind of got that agenda, weren't they?

**Brent Hoberman** (4:11)
Yes, I think Kenishka, Peter Carr, Kenishka, Jason's Lord Stockwood all deserve callouts for being labor values but pro-business. So it shows it can be done.

**John Thornhill** (4:21)
Yeah. So Burnham has been talking about wealth taxes, welfare redistribution, windfall taxes and so on, nationalization. That doesn't sound a very pro-entrepreneur agenda.
What do you expect of him?

**Brent Hoberman** (4:35)
No, I think it's quite scary. I think again, the bit that's really hard to understand from the outside is, how much of this is what these people actually believe, or how much of it is pandering to the unions, pandering to the voters of Makerfield, who they think won't want a pro-business agenda, and how much of it is bluntly unrealistic for any government to put in practice.