Sherry Coutu CBE’s Post

View profile for Sherry Coutu CBE

Founder of interactive investor, F4S, Digital Boost, & the Scaleup Institute. Chair, SID & FTSE 100 NED. Mother, Entrepreneur & Angel using tech to help build a better world. Sector agnostic. Views my own…

Thank you Hermann Hauser for joining us at the ScaleUp Institute’s 10 year review and prompting us to imagine how, by working together over the next ten years, we could be celebrating decacorns & centacorns rather than just unicorns. This on the back of discovering that our concerted efforts in the past ten years had moved the dial- from the UK being 13th in the the global league table of scaleups per capita to 3! Decacorns? Centacorns? What? How? If we accelerate the 183% growth we have created in the category of UK Companies with £10M revenue consistently growing by over 20% per annum. —> These statistics provide evidence that we know how to grow companies- we’ve got the interventions that work. We have proven that we can remove the barriers these ambitious & able unicorn companies face. Removing the barriers to decacorns & centacorns (in addition to those slowing down unicorns) will bring us the growth that we all want. If we don’t focus on barriers to centacorns, then these barriers will remain. The decacorns will continue to go elsewhere or remain unicorns rather than flourishing. As always, by continuing to work together, we can explore real opportunities & ambition and remove the barriers to the next stage. I loved hearing how Hermann felt quantum computing, Ai, and synthetic biology were the breeding grounds for our decacorns and centacorns, do you agree? If not, where do you think our greatest opportunities lie?

  • No alternative text description for this image
Emma Bondor

Communications adviser to c-suite & board | professional & financial services | technology businesses including fast growth scaleups | strategic & integrated campaigns | corporate communications | fractional CMO

3mo

and of course how to manage investment portfolios to incorporate sustainable growth of funds over the long term and ALSO the transition to sustainability sector more fully in time. With hardware, chips, data centres & cloud capacity comes consumption of even more natural resources & the need to get smarter about the single use micro amounts of heavy metals & plastics, batteries & cooling agents - all currently sitting in landfill & leaching into the ever diminishing fertile soil - more often than not in the geographies where developed nations have sent their waste thru carbon trading/ offsetting. 📢 Calling all solutions to the issues that will arise along with the next leap forward 🔔

Like
Reply
Sean Redmond

Managing Partner Silicon Catalyst.UK | Cascoda Chairman | Contribution to industry award '22

4mo

All of the areas Hermann Hauser is highlighting are fundamentally hardware constrained. The greatest opportunities lie in the third most profitable industry in the world and the one which has already created the most valuable company in the world today. It is of course semiconductors. The ChipStart UK programme funded by DSIT has already released over 20 potential decacorns out of the UK semiconductor research base, which is the third largest in the world outside of the US. Silicon Catalyst.UK #ChipStartUK

Claire Enders, CBE

Founder, Enders Analysis

4mo

I completely agree that Life Sciences-led AI applications will transform the creation of IP that solve some diseases and create billions of value in new drugs. Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold is the transformative set of tools used amongst others by Dundee University Life Sciences and 2,100 other Life Sciences research centres across the world. Dundee University Life Sciences is « spinning off » dozens of new companies a year. The problem is holding onto enough IP given the protein development funding comes mostly from drug companies. The estimate used by Dundee University Life Sciences is that British university innovation in this area has created over $70 billion of new drug sales primaimiy in the USA over the last 5 years alone.

Nazo Moosa

Technology Investor

3mo

Hermann was the seed investor in my first ever deal! I was soooo honoured to attend a board meeting with him Chairing it. The Founder of that company became a serial entrepreneur and one of the most successful tech CEO's in Europe ....John Bates. Hello Claire - long time!

Amy Weatherup

Cambridge i-Teams Programme Director & "super-connector" (!)

3mo

Some of the most exciting opportunities lie in the overlaps - AI applied to healthcare for example. How do we encourage our startups to enter inter-disciplinary spaces?

Like
Reply
Riccardo Zacconi

Co-Founder King.com (developer of Candy Crush)

3mo

👍👍👍! Would add robotics to AI and Quantum C

Like
Reply
Zotea Zorinmawia

Farmer at Self Employed

3mo

❤️❤️❤️

Like
Reply
Steve Jarrett

Chief AI Officer at Orange. Making people’s everyday lives better through AI.

3mo

Hermann rocks!

Like
Reply
See more comments

To view or add a comment, sign in

Explore topics