This week we published a new study on the age of some of Britain’s most successful founders. My colleague @MannVirdee looked at the UK's 100 highest-raising companies — those that raised the most capital over the last two years — and identified the ages of the 183 founders behind them. We found: – a median founding age of 37; – a range from 18 to 67 years old at the time of founding; – almost as many founders were 50 or older (20%) as were under 30 (23%) when the company was founded. There were also important sector variations. Energy & climate founders were the oldest founders, with a median age of 53 when they founded their company. Around half were aged over 50. Several companies were founded by people with 25+ years in the sector. Biotech & pharma founders were the second-oldest cohort, with a median age of 46. More than a third were 50 or older at founding, reflecting the academic, clinical and regulatory expertise needed to bring a drug or device to market. Fintech founders were slightly younger than the median founder for this dataset, with a median of 34. That is old enough to have worked inside the financial systems they set out to disrupt, but not yet institutionalised by them. AI & software founders were the youngest in the dataset we looked at, with a median age of 33. That’s younger than the median founder in other sectors, but still older than popular stereotypes suggest. Although a third started before turning 30, most did not, and many came from research or established tech firms first. While many great businesses are started by young entrepreneurs, it’s in no way a prerequisite for being on the cutting edge, as this data shows. ten-founder-age.com/

The King’s Birthday Honours landed last week, which gives me an excuse to return to ask the same question we’ve been asking since 2021: how many of these honours go to the people inventing and building things? Five years ago, in our report Honours for Innovators, @Ned_Donovan and @antonhowes ran the numbers and found the answer was not many. We have now repeated the exercise across the last eight lists — every New Year and Birthday Honours since the end of 2022, more than 9,000 appointments to the Order of the British Empire — to see whether anything has shifted. It hasn’t. Just one in ten citations mentions anything to do with innovation, science or industry, almost exactly where we found it in 2021. Strip out the broadest catch-alls of “industry” and “business” and it is lower still. Narrow it to the word “entrepreneurship” and it all but vanishes: 0.68% of honours. And these are generous counts — plenty of the citations we include are really for management or charitable work within a sector, rather than for invention in its own right. As we argued in Honours for Innovators: “Given the current system, one would be forgiven for assuming that the surest way to an honour is to become a civil servant, politician, or philanthropist, or to achieve the fame that comes naturally to especially successful sports people, musicians, authors and actors.” There are always honourable exceptions. In the latest list, our Patron Chris Hulatt, co-founder of Octopus, was made a CBE for services to entrepreneurship. More of this, please. Or, if the Government is feeling more ambitious, they might institute our dedicated order — what we called the Elizabethan Order — of genuinely equal standing to the OBE, with the same familiar four classes and a Sir or Dame at the top, awarded purely for invention and enterprise. It would cost around £66,000 a year: less than a single MP’s salary, for a payoff in status and aspiration many times larger. This isn’t as radical as it might sound. Britain built its early reputation as the best place in the world to innovate partly by heaping status on inventors: the Society of Arts (now the RSA) struck medals to encourage them, monarchs granted them personal pensions, and there was even a chivalric order — the Royal Guelphic — that honoured the likes of Charles Babbage and William Herschel, the astronomer who discovered Uranus. It lapsed in 1837, not because the idea failed but because Queen Victoria could not inherit the crown of Hanover. It’s time for a new chivalric order. This is the signal we need to give that Britain is serious about being the best place in the world to be a scientist, an inventor or a founder.

Some policy areas are neglected. Others are tinkered with to death. Capital gains tax sits firmly in the second camp. In the last fifteen years, the headline CGT rate has been raised, cut, raised again, and split into multiple sub-rates. And now equalising it with income tax is being seriously discussed in Westminster again. Entrepreneurs’ Relief was introduced with a £1 million lifetime cap, expanded to £2 million, then £5 million, then £10 million, then cut back to £1 million, then rebranded as Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR), then ratcheted from 10% to 14%, to 18%. The last clean settlement was Lawson in 1988. Every Chancellor since has felt obliged to fiddle. BADR is now capped at a level low enough to be irrelevant for serious scaling, and has been continuously revised in ways that signal political instability to anyone considering where to base their business. We have, in effect, the worst of both worlds. The behaviour the Treasury actually wants — or should — is reinvestment. Capital gains are taxed differently from labour income to attract entrepreneurs from abroad, keep the ones we have, and incentivise them to do it again. In our recent Entrepreneurs Survey, 72% of founders told us they would invest the proceeds of a more generous BADR in someone else’s startup, while 70% said they would launch a new venture. The reinvestment instinct is overwhelming, and it is the thing the UK tax system most needs to protect. The case for equalising CGT with income tax comes dressed in sophisticated economics: get the base design right — exempt a “normal” return on capital through a rate-of-return allowance, make losses more generously offsettable — and the headline rate stops mattering. It is a serious argument. It is also, as the tax policy expert Tom Clougherty argued in The Times, one that does not survive contact with how entrepreneurship actually works. On losses, Clougherty notes the basic asymmetry: “an entrepreneur’s potential losses are uncapped; their upside is highly uncertain. If you tax the gains without subsidising the losses (and you should definitely not subsidise losses) you are skewing incentives around risk-taking.” On the rate-of-return allowance, his point is even sharper: it “assumes that any returns above a ‘risk-free’ rate are ‘unearned rents’ — unrelated to skill, effort, or the risks taken. This assumption does not hold up in the real world. High returns on capital are not random strokes of luck — often they are a manifestation of precisely the qualities that drive economic progress.” That is the substantive case. Then there is the practical one. The most carefully designed CGT regime in the world is useless if founders can’t plan around it. A founder building a company is making a ten- to fifteen-year bet. The UK tax system has been resetting every year. CGT does more than raise revenue. It tells founders what the country thinks long-term, illiquid, risk-bearing capital is worth. A regime that keeps changing tells them something else: that the tax treatment of their decade-long bet will turn on a single Budget, election or leadership race. The behavioural evidence is visible. Pre-Budget realisation spikes are now a standard feature of UK tax data, as founders rush to crystallise gains ahead of expected changes. The 2024 spike was the largest on record. Our own polling found that 62% of founders personally know an entrepreneur who sold up or left the UK after the 2024 Budget. Seven in ten know one planning to leave because of the current or expected tax regime. None of this is hypothetical — which is why over a thousand of Britain’s most ambitious founders, including those behind Synthesia, OakNorth, Zopa and CMR Surgical, signed our letter to the Chancellor when this was last being seriously considered. Clougherty puts the pattern starkly: “If you look at the blended marginal tax rate on capital income — combining the effects of corporation tax, CGT and dividend tax — since 2000, you see two big spikes: one immediately after the financial crisis, and another after the pandemic. Why do we keep responding to economic crises by hiking taxes on investment? Could this possibly have anything to do with our failure to bounce back from these downturns?” A tax system can be defensible at every point in time and still be impossible to plan around, because founders are not pricing today’s rate — they are pricing the range of rates they expect to face over the next decade. Britain has spent 15 years teaching them to expect the worst. Sweden faced the same question in 2003: how to tax founder gains without choking off new ventures. It didn’t cut the rate. It changed when the rate applied. Corporate tax on capital gains from selling shares in unlisted companies was deferred indefinitely, provided the proceeds went back into other unlisted companies. Founders who exit and consume pay tax. Founders who exit and reinvest defer it. As Luis Garicano and Per Strömberg set out, Sweden — a country of 10 million — has produced more unicorns per capita than almost anywhere in the world. Alumni of the first wave of Swedish tech successes have founded and funded the second because the 2003 reform let them recycle exit proceeds at scale. It worked because it targeted people who already had deal flow, judgement and operating experience — and because, crucially, it has been left largely alone for over two decades. Reward reinvestment, then get out of the way. This isn’t a left-right argument. One of Mark Carney’s first acts as Canadian Prime Minister, in March 2025, was to cancel his predecessor’s planned increase to the capital gains inclusion rate. The centre-left Carney framed it as catalysing investment and rewarding the people who take risks to build things. The Treasury will point out that income reclassification through closely held companies is a real problem. They are right. Owner-managers can dress up labour income as capital gains to lower their tax bill, and the rate gap creates the opportunity. But the answer is not a blunt rate hike on every capital gain. It is to fix the specific structures that allow the reclassification in the first place. Punishing genuine entrepreneurship to close a definitional loophole is a category error. Any reform has to pass two tests: does it keep founders building and reinvesting, and can they plan around it for a decade? Everything else is just tinkering.

Last week, and not for the first time, I heard from the founder of a genuinely innovative British technology company that has been blocked from the next iteration of G-Cloud. The reason was not poor delivery, a weak product or lack of relevance to public-sector buyers. It was negative EBITDA and a lightly capitalised balance sheet, both of which are completely normal for growth-stage tech companies. It goes without saying that the government should not be cavalier about supplier risk. But there is a difference between a company that is structurally insolvent and one that is investing in product, people and expansion. There is a difference between a supplier whose failure would bring down a critical public service and one offering a substitutable software or data product. This is precisely the kind of domestic scaleup ministers claim to want in the public-sector supply chain. This ‘computer says no’ approach needs to be replaced with something smarter. If procurement rules cannot distinguish between those cases, they will select for the wrong things: incumbency, corporate backing and the ability to satisfy a bureaucratic risk model. They will not select for innovation, and competition will suffer. This matters because public procurement is one of the largest levers government has. If the state wants more British scaleups, it needs to be a better customer to them. If it wants more competition in public services, it cannot design frameworks that only large incumbents can comfortably navigate. If it wants domestic technology companies to grow, it should not tolerate blunt financial tests that keep them out of public-sector markets. Get in touch if you have experienced similar issues with procurement frameworks, financial viability assessments or public-sector buying processes. tenentrepreneurs.org/blog/cl…