BritishVolt a busted flush

[Oldgreybeard]

The UK always seems to have a problem with doing anything new at scale. We're pretty good at small scale innovation (Arm comes to mind) but seem to fail big time when it comes to large scale stuff. No idea why, but I have a strong suspicion that it's related to a culture where we are just far too risk averse. The companies that have grown fast and made large scale production work seem to all be led by people that are prepared to take high risks. Elon Musk stands out, can't stand the bloke personally, but there's no getting away from the fact that he's pretty good at making big and very risky things happen.

[Stinsy]

The UK always seems to have a problem with doing anything new at scale. We're pretty good at small scale innovation (Arm comes to mind) but seem to fail big time when it comes to large scale stuff. No idea why, but I have a strong suspicion that it's related to a culture where we are just far too risk averse. The companies that have grown fast and made large scale production work seem to all be led by people that are prepared to take high risks. Elon Musk stands out, can't stand the bloke personally, but there's no getting away from the fact that he's pretty good at making big and very risky things happen.

I agree. I remember going to conferences in the US and meeting people who’d gotten $14m investment in their 10-man company, terrible idea, and zero revenue. Meanwhile there I was struggling to get the company I worked for to allocate a few hundred dev hours a month to develop a product that was generating £1m a month in revenue with the realistic chance of turning that into £10m in a year or two with the teeniest of effort.

We just have a risk-averse business culture. British thought-leaders didn’t cut their teeth dropping out of uni to found a business worth billions a few years later. They came up through middle management in 100-year-old companies.

[Mart]

I may have much (all) of this wrong, but didn't the UK sell off a couple of specialised ships just before off-shore wind took off? So that slowed things down about a decade ago, and upped the costs for a while.

And for a scary few weeks recently we were looking at fracking again, despite original geology advice that European shale wasn't economical, then the failure in Poland, and then Cuadrilla themselves saying that UK shale was unsuitable.

We do seem to have a particular skill at picking losers, and avoiding winners.

[Oldgreybeard]

The UK always seems to have a problem with doing anything new at scale. We're pretty good at small scale innovation (Arm comes to mind) but seem to fail big time when it comes to large scale stuff. No idea why, but I have a strong suspicion that it's related to a culture where we are just far too risk averse. The companies that have grown fast and made large scale production work seem to all be led by people that are prepared to take high risks. Elon Musk stands out, can't stand the bloke personally, but there's no getting away from the fact that he's pretty good at making big and very risky things happen.

I agree. I remember going to conferences in the US and meeting people who’d gotten $14m investment in their 10-man company, terrible idea, and zero revenue. Meanwhile there I was struggling to get the company I worked for to allocate a few hundred dev hours a month to develop a product that was generating £1m a month in revenue with the realistic chance of turning that into £10m in a year or two with the teeniest of effort.

We just have a risk-averse business culture. British thought-leaders didn’t cut their teeth dropping out of uni to found a business worth billions a few years later. They came up through middle management in 100-year-old companies.

The odd thing is that a couple of hundred years ago the UK was a world leader in innovation and taking huge risks with new technology. The way we developed things like the canal network and then the railway network, not just within the UK, but across a fair bit of the planet, involved taking enormous risks with unproven technology, at a huge scale. Shipbuilding was another example, as was aviation for a short time (before the US took over).

Something changed after WWII that seemed to remove all interest in taking business risks. Our existing industrial capability seemed to start to stagnate from the 1950's onwards, with the final nail in the coffin being the falling apart of just about every manufacturing capability we had ever had and a switch to an economy based on service industries.

[FourFootFarm]

Part of the problem is many of these companies were reliant on the free money investment environment.

That suddenly no long exists so a lot of startups that lurched from angel investor to venture capital in order to keep the lights on are no longer able access the free money spigot and are hitting the wall

[spread-tee]

we have become really good at trashing our manufacturing industry for at least fourty years, why would we stop now??

Desp

[smegal]

The fat lady hasn't sung just yet.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63459393