I sat down exclusively with the US Chancellor @RishiSunak to discuss his "startup treasury" and what he is doing to kickstart tech and entrepreneurship in the UK.

A of highlights

One interesting point was just how he saw the Treasury, saying that what he took from his Sanford MBA was the power of startup thinking

He said that he wanted to create a "startup treasury" with a mindset different to normal government — faster moving with less bureaucracy

“We want to move quickly, be highly consumer-orientated and do things that scale with impact,” he said. “We want to do things that are technology-centric as that’s how people are living their lives. So hopefully we can have that ‘startup Treasury’ mindset.”

I thought this type of language was cool because it spoke to how startups are not JUST small tech companies.

They are a new culture — an entire way of looking at the world.

And this way of thinking is having a huge impact on business & society — but also clearly government too

Anyway, onto the policy.

The first point was that amid all the issues facing UK startups, he thought the most important issue was access to talent.

“The thing that most founders, entrepreneurs, people in the community have raised with me is people and talent,” he told me.

He talked about training to help people move into tech but also new visa reform to help skilled people come to the UK.

"It’s quite an ambitious set of reforms. So designing them, delivering them and implementing them is important… I think they’ll make a huge difference.”

He said that the government’s rollout of the Future Fund Breakthrough co-investment scheme later this year and pension reforms to try and get more funding for later-stage “scale-up” tech companies were pressing ahead.

“I don't think that [late stage capital] is actually the biggest issue [for UK tech], but we can always do better at everything. So unlocking capital from corporate pension funds, for example, into a liquid venture ecosystem is something that we're working on as well."

He also said he wanted to review the EMI options scheme, a program allowing cash-poor companies to better attract talent by awarding their employees equity in the business in a tax-efficient way.

“It's a key feature of the tax system that supports startups. And we want to have a look at it and make sure that it's still working in the way we wanted to, to incentivise and reward people to work in businesses like this. So that's on the agenda for this year.”

The UK has long had a scheme in place to give tax credits to companies doing R&D, but Sunak told @Siftedeu it was under review to make sure it was still fit for purpose.

“We have, I think, pretty generous tax incentives to do R&D. But we want to make sure that the definitions of it and how it works in practice are actually supporting the type of activity that we care about. And that's again on our agenda for this year.”

Sunak also said that he was looking to implement many of the recommendations of the Kalifa Review of UK Fintech and the Lord Hill Review that talked about visas as well as listing rules and creating a regulatory sandbox to help to scale fintechs as well as ones just starting out.

He said: “we are a global leader in fintech: all this should put us at the front of the pack for Fintech innovation."

Asked if he could ever see the Bank of England holding reserves in Bitcoin, he said he did not want to comment on that specifically but said that it was important the central banks “explore the use cases for opportunities and risk around central bank digital currencies.”

Finally, and this is the headline of the article, he said that we are living through the "age of entrepreneurship”.

I agree with him.

This is a world where high achievers want to start tech companies, not go to work for Goldman Sachs or McKinsey any more.

To me, that change in the world is amazing and profound. And I think @RishiSunak gets that.

The full interview is here. Check it out! https://sifted.eu/articles/rishi-sunak-startups/