London Tech Week 2023: Bringing Startups and Corporates Together
Back in June, my team and I went to the UK for London Tech Week (LTW). This year, the event returned for its 10th year with an action-packed agenda, uniting the most innovative thinkers and talent of tomorrow in a week-long festival.
On the first day of LTW I moderated the panel “Venturing Beyond the Norm: Exploring the Power of Corporate VC Innovation in Today’s Business Landscape”. Harnessing the power of emerging technologies and investing in bringing in talented founders from outside of enterprises is crucial for corporates to scale, drive innovation as well as promote diversity and inclusion in the industry.
In this session, we discussed how corporates can continue to prioritise investing in innovation and how this can benefit everyone involved — corporates, founders, and the tech ecosystem. I was joined on stage by Jacqueline Davidson, Aerospace Xelerated’s Program Director; Gerard Kelly, UK Innovation Director at National Grid; Carol Hilsum, Senior Director of Product Innovation at Farfetch; and Andre Wegner, CEO & Founder at Authentise.
Moderating this panel was an amazing experience as we got to discuss the importance of investing in emerging technology and bringing founders from outside of enterprises to help corporates accelerate their growth and businesses. We also talked about how founders can benefit from corporate VC through access to mentorship, more tools, and an opportunity to build their network.
It was rather special to have Andre on the panel as Authentise is one of Aerospace Xelerated’s portfolio companies from our first cohort, in 2020. Andre shared his stories and experiences in the programme and the ways in which working together with a corporate helped his company — for example, having the chance to be introduced to the relevant industry and test their proof of concept much faster than they would without the support of a corporate accelerator.
We had such positive feedback from the audience and after the panel I met really interesting people who reached out to say they also want to start engaging with and creating corporate innovation programmes — this was particularly rewarding and I took it as a sign we are doing something right that is inspiring others to follow the same path!
Afternoon tea with founders
Then, in the afternoon, we headed to Home Grown, a lovely venue in Central London, for an event hosted by Aerospace Xelerated in partnership with The Europas. It was refreshing to see a panel with women founders discussing the highs and lows of startup life.
The talk was moderated by Mike Butcher, Editor-at-large of TechCrunch, and he was joined on stage by Bianca Cefalo, Co-founder & CEO of Space Dots; Irra Ariella Khi, Co-founder & CEO of Zamna; and Divya Sukumar, Behavioural Science Lead at Signol.
We spent a lovely afternoon delving into the raw and real side of founder life. The panellists shared their entrepreneurial journeys and personal experiences, discussing the often-unseen mental and emotional challenges they’ve encountered in building their startups. I was impressed with the level of detail founders put into pitching their business — one of the panellists shared how she builds different versions of her pitch deck depending on whom she is pitching, something that now has led her to have over 1,000 versions of the same deck!
London Tech Week was a great opportunity to connect with my peers and meet new people who are also working to foster innovation in the UK and beyond. We will certainly continue to build on the learnings from such a constructive week in the months to come.
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