Nick Clegg on Europe, AI and big tech

Freya (0:03)

Hello, and welcome to The Sifted Podcast. I'm Freya, Sifted's Associate Editor. Today's episode of The Sifted Podcast is a fireside chat between fellow pod host John Thornhill and former UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who's now GP at Hero Capital.

The pod was recorded live at The Sifted Summit in London in October, enjoy.

John Thornhill (0:28)

Welcome back to the main stage. And I am delighted to be joined in this session by Sir Nick Clegg, whose career has spanned Brussels, Sheffield, Westminster, Menlo Park and now Shoreditch.

From 2010 to 2015, as leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, Nick was Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government. From 2018 to 2025, Nick was a senior executive of Facebook Meta in Silicon Valley, where he worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg and introduced the Facebook Oversight Board. And since returning to Britain, he has become a general partner at the VC firm Hero Capital, which invests in the super abundant future of humanity, which sounds like a good thing. He is also on the board of the British data center operator NScale, which is aiming for an IPO in New York at a valuation of about $35 billion. But Nick can't talk about that or his lawyers will drag him to the stage because they're in a quiet period before that.

In earlier lives, Nick was an MEP. He was also for a short time a journalist at the Financial Times until his career took a wrong turn. When I was preparing for this session, I discovered a fact about you, Nick, that I never knew before, which is that while you were a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, you were arrested for drunkenly setting fire to the leading collection of cacti in Germany. Is that right?

Nick Clegg (1:54)

Yes. Yes.

Do we have to go this far back? I thought it was going to be a short intro.

John Thornhill (2:00)

Well, move on.

So clearly of most interest to this audience is your role as a VC, investor and scale-up board director. But so let's start up on the investment side. Of all the many opportunities that I'm sure were available to you when you left Meta, why did you choose to become a VC in London?

Nick Clegg (2:21)

Partly because, like I suppose, many of you here, if you work, if you're a European who works at Silicon Valley, it has quite a, I'm sure many of you share, it has quite a radicalizing effect, certainly on me in terms of being surrounded by all these wonderful Europeans running these monster American companies. And of course you come back and think, why on earth can't we do better in our own neck of the woods? And of course all of that has become dramatically more important as the geopolitics of the Trump shock and its sort of detrimental effect on the transatlantic relationship has accelerated in recent years. And of course the entirely inevitable rise in concerns about European resilience and sovereignty and autonomy with a war raging in the heart of the continent, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought I might as a hat, what would be, I'm just about to turn 60 I spent what, yes, you've said about 20, 20 odd years in politics and public life, almost seven years working alongside Mark Zuckerberg. And I thought, what can I do in my own sort of private life, if I can put it like that, to help European entrepreneurs and innovators do great things. And I'm not, you know, I've never written a code, a line of code of my life, myself. I don't think I'm, I don't think I'll be well equipped to sort of create and run and start a company myself.

But I like to think that maybe I've picked up a few things along the way about what talent looks like, what are the sort of ingredients for success?

What are the sectors where we might do well and always hang on the coattails of the Americans? And I just think, I just think these, I mean, I'm not sort of unlike many people here. I'm not sort of born and bred in VC. It's not something I've done for a very long time at all. But what I love about it, of course, it seems to me at its best, it's kind of what you want from capitalism working at its best. You're taking a risk, usually with other people's capital, but in investing in things which are not a surefire bet to prove to be successful. But hopefully you place enough bets on things which become very, very successful to pay for the rest of the bets you place in the market. And it allows you to really go quite deep and sort of niche into areas which you care about or you feel you know about. So I'm not the hero capital that I'm a GP at. We're not an all-purpose fund at all. We very much try and go in on the areas that we know about. So that's what really attracted me. Okay.