When the EU announces a €5 billion Scaleup Fund, the instinct of every British founder is to look sideways at their own government and ask the obvious question.
Where is the similar support in the UK? But something is shifting. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulatory Authority’s (PRA) fintech scale-up unit is now operational. Sheffield’s AMRC is moving. Quietly, the infrastructure around British ambition is being rebuilt.
Venture Partner at OpenOcean.
If this really is the year the UK scale-up gets its moment, I want to offer a word of caution alongside the optimism: the playbook most founders are carrying is out of date. Not just slightly out of date, structurally wrong for the environment we’re now in.
The era that shaped us is over
Fundamentally, this era of scale-ups will be defined by software being essentially free. If you can think it, you can build it. The days of scaling up massive teams to deliver a feature are simply gone. “Move fast” has never been easier.
That doesn’t mean that you should “break things” either. In an uncertain world where anyone can build, your path to scale will be defined by ensuring that you move fast, test fast, and break as little as possible while learning.
AI has collapsed the timeline on competitive advantage. What once took eighteen months to prototype now takes weeks. However, when it comes to data and AI usage in products, regulatory scrutiny has intensified.
And trust, particularly in sectors like fintech, health, and infrastructure, has become as much a product as the software itself. The risk premium of “breaking things” has grown to a point that a single mistake can now pose a mission-critical instance and end your business.
Your scale-up story needs to ensure your use of AI can scale all the testing and other parts of the product beyond scaling up the software development.
Five myths it’s time to retire
1. Speed is the goal.
It isn’t. Learning is the goal. Speed now matters only insofar as it accelerates learning. Previously, getting something into users’ hands quickly was the only way to discover what actually worked.
Once customers are paying, the calculus changes entirely. Real velocity comes from building systems and teams that let you move confidently, not recklessly. Used in the correct way, AI can translate speed to real learning and from there to confidence. The founders who confuse speed as the only driver find themselves very busy going nowhere.
2. Technical excellence builds companies.
It contributes to them. But I’ve watched too many brilliant engineers spend months perfecting architecture that customers never asked for. Perfection too early is a form of avoidance. It feels like progress while deferring the harder question of whether anyone actually wants what you’re building.
With AI tools now available, the time to a testable prototype has compressed dramatically. If you’re spending months getting to a hypothesis, in most industries, someone else is already testing theirs.
3. Scaling is a technical problem.
This one is perhaps the most damaging. The majority of scaling failures I have seen were human. Clarity of communication. Empathy between teams. Leaders who stayed close enough to understand what their people actually did, and hired people who could extend that understanding upwards and outwards.
When management loses that contact, processes multiply to compensate, and dysfunction follows. The technical problems are usually downstream of the organizational ones. Today, this is even more important as leaders need to be close to their teams to help them transform processes with AI.
4. AI will solve it.
AI is genuinely transformative. The tools available to engineers today represent a step change in what’s possible for other parts of business. However, they don’t replace judgment.
Engineers who understand generative AI deeply, who can combine technical skill with creative thinking and are outcome-driven for their products, are now among the most valuable people in the market.
Those who use AI to skip the fundamentals are building on sand. The gap between those two groups will widen, not narrow. Those who also understand how “Automate Last” works will scale their businesses faster than those who try to automate everything and run in circles.
5. Growth is linear.
It never has been, but founders keep expecting it to be. The journey from zero to ten million can feel almost effortless once product-market fit clicks. The journey from fifty to a hundred million is where companies quietly come apart. The processes that helped you get there start to hide the problems developing underneath.
Leaders need the same observability in their organizations as engineers build into their systems. Genuine visibility into what is really happening, before it slows you down. It is always, in the end, about people. Today, AI is showing the gaps in this latter journey far faster than at any time in the last many decades.
What the new playbook looks like
None of this means being cautious. The opportunity in front of British businesses right now is real, but it will not wait around. Seizing it requires founders who can do something harder than moving fast: knowing when to move fast, and when to stop and think.
The best founders I work with hold two things in tension simultaneously. Speed without direction is noise. Quality without agility is paralysis. The ones who get it right have an unusually clear sense of their people and their purpose — and they use that clarity to make better decisions faster.
We’re at an inflexion point for the British technology ecosystem. What we need now are founders who’ve outgrown the mythology of the last decade and are ready to write something new.
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