Advertisement

Entrepreneurs 'Could Spark UK Job Growth'

Entrepreneurs 'Could Spark UK Job Growth'

Young entrepreneurs could help turn around the record rate of unemployment among Britain's 16 to 24-year-olds, according to the organisers of a Cambridge conference.

Nick Heller, Google's head of new business development (Europe, Middle East and Africa), told Sky News a return to job growth would be sparked by people deciding to launch their own businesses.

"Entrepreneurship, and specifically high-tech entrepreneurship, and innovation will drive the next stage of economic growth across Europe," he said.

Mr Heller is in Cambridge, with several other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, to meet European counterparts at "Silicon Valley Comes to the UK".

SVc2UK brings together ambitious students, serial entrepreneurs and investors to discuss and debate entrepreneurial business and foster relationships between Silicon Valley and Europe.

Prime Minister David Cameron has called SVc2UK "one of the most important inward investment events of the year".

But why are UK start-ups so attractive to international investors?

For US venture capitalists and later-stage technology investors, the UK offers a chance to find hidden gems - and perhaps billion dollar success stories.

European technology start-ups can be bargains when compared to the US, where valuations have soared in the wake of companies like Twitter and Facebook.

According to Ernst and Young LLP, last year deal values in Europe stood at a pre-investment average of $5m, compared with $15m in the US. Twitter's takeover of London-based TweetDeck is one of many recent high profile deals.

Mr Heller, a Cambridge MBA, is co-chair of the events taking place at the university and said SVc2C is "meant to inspire entrepreneurship, and hence it's primarily focused on students, but there are two keynotes which are open to the wider community".

He said SVc2C "will reach over 2,000 students across the University of Cambridge, and many more via a live simulcast web stream".

Two of the people involved at Cambridge University's sessions are product design and marketing professional Patrick Sterling and his partner Catherine Bolton.

Both took voluntary redundancies from AOL in 2010 and Ms Bolton decided to turn it into an opportunity to follow her lifelong dream of owning a cafe, opening the doors to Stickybeaks Cafe with her business partner Lucy Robinson last autumn. She now employs 15 people.

Meanwhile, Mr Sterling has just completed his MBA from Judge Business School and is starting at a Cambridge based green-tech start-up in December as its third employee.

Students are not just being engaged through masterclasses this week. In October teams from universities around the UK competed in a coding competition where they were asked to use recently released government data to build applications that solve consumer problems.

The winning Appathon team from each participating university will meet Mr Cameron at Downing Street and then pitch their applications to investors and journalists on Saturday at Tech City.

SVc2UK is an annual event now in its fifth year and was created by Linkedin's Reid Hoffman in San Francisco and entrepreneur and angel investor Sherry Coutu in Cambridge.

Anyone interested in the open sessions at Cambridge University can register to attend or watch them live stream by visiting the SVc2C website.