This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Why brilliant engineers struggle as CEOs - and the identity shift that changes everything
What happens when the person who built the breakthrough technology isn't naturally suited to scale the company around it?
It's a question that haunts every technical founder approaching their first serious funding round. You've solved the hard engineering problem, proven the technology works, and assembled a believing team. But now investors are asking different questions - about market timing, competitive positioning, commercial strategy - and your instinct to dive deeper into technical details isn't serving you anymore.
The problem isn't that you need to learn "business skills." It's deeper: transitioning from technical founder to CEO is a fundamental identity change that requires you to redefine your value proposition entirely.
Most brilliant engineers never make this shift successfully because they approach it as a skill-building exercise rather than an identity evolution...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The AI compliance deadline you think doesn't apply to you
Do you use predictive analytics in your SaaS product? Route optimisation in your logistics platform? Computer vision in your hardware? If so, you may well be building an AI system under EU law - whether you call yourself an "AI company" or not.
And if you’re a UK founder thinking "EU law doesn't apply to me" - think again. The EU AI Act applies to any company placing AI systems on the EU market, regardless of where that company is incorporated. It is about where your customers are, not where you are based. If you have European users, you are in scope.
Why does this matter? Five months from now, the Act's full compliance requirements for high-risk AI systems are scheduled to become enforceable. Penalties can reach up to €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover. Investors are already factoring this into due diligence. Enterprise buyers are asking about regulatory readiness before signing contracts.
The startups most at risk are not the ones building "AI-first" products. They are the ones who have integrated AI into part of their solution and assumed none of this applies to them.
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Trust is now a technology: why UK founders are best placed to sell it
Most founders look at the war in Iran, rising tariffs and supply chain disruption and see a harder fundraising environment. They're reading the situation backwards.
Yes, geopolitical instability tightens capital, slows enterprise decisions and makes every board more risk averse. That part is real.
But the same forces are doing something else simultaneously - something that most founders are missing at first glance. They are rewriting the procurement priorities of every large government and enterprise on the planet. And the category that has just moved to the top of that list is one where UK startups are unusually well positioned to win.
The category is 'trust' - specifically, the ability to demonstrate that your technology is sovereign, auditable, and not dependent on a foreign government's goodwill to keep working.
That might sound like a compliance issue. It is not. It is rapidly becoming the single most important commercial differentiator in enterprise technology.
Here's why that shift is happening now, why it is structural rather than temporary, and what founders should be doing about it.
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The hidden AI advantage investors are using to evaluate your funding proposition
Your pitch call is in 30 minutes. You've rehearsed the deck, sharpened the narrative, prepared for every question you can think of.
But here's something you probably haven't considered: the investor on the other end of that Zoom has almost certainly already fed your company into an AI-powered evaluation platform before you've even shared your screen.
Does that change how you prepare? It should.
The venture capital industry has undergone a quiet transformation over the past 18 months - one that fundamentally alters the dynamics of every fundraising conversation.
The question for founders isn't whether AI is reshaping how investors evaluate you. It's whether you're walking into the room equipped for the conversation they're now having - or the one you think they're having.
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
The moat has moved: why hardware companies are winning the AI era
What happens when the thing that made your business defensible can be generated for free?
That’s the question confronting every software founder right now. In the first six weeks of 2026, nearly $2 trillion in market capitalisation has been wiped from the global software sector.
The catalyst was not a recession, a rate hike, or a regulatory crackdown. It was a set of plugins.
On 30 January, Anthropic released a set of open-source plugins for its Claude Cowork platform - simple files that automate tasks across legal, sales, finance and data analysis. By the following Monday, roughly $285 billion in market value had evaporated.
The market has given this moment a name: the SaaSpocalypse. But what does it actually mean for founders?
And which businesses will still have defensible moats when the dust settles?...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Crossing the chasm in DeepTech – the critical role of Business Development in early scaling
Most scaleups don’t struggle to find their growth path because the technology doesn't work. They stall because they never reach the commercial tipping point.
Geoffrey Moore's foundational insight is that between the early adopters and the early majority lies a major discontinuity - the chasm.
Reaching the 15-18% market penetration needed to trigger mainstream adoption and cross the chasm requires winning over visionaries in the early market: buyers who share your belief in why the product matters, even before it's fully proven.
Most startups never get there. They stall in the early adoption phase, unable to generate the commercial momentum needed to break through.
For Europe's DeepTech founders - building complex solutions that often combine hardware, software, and services - this challenge is magnified. And the critical capability that could accelerate them towards that tipping point has a name that too few founders recognise: Business Development...
