The Guardian view on venture capitalism: investor profits are no industrial strategy | Editorial

Higher returns for backers do not guarantee national prosperity. Public investment should develop domestic capabilities and meet urgent social needs

Britain keeps selling its most valuable companies. The Financial Times calculates that 300 went to foreign buyers, mostly American, over the past decade. What if innovation were scaled up to serve social needs here rather than US investors’ profits? That is the provocation issued by the thinktank Common Wealth in a paper titled We Aren’t the Champions, which takes aim at the UK’s venture capital (VC) industry.

The authors say that as long as the UK is subordinated to US cash, getting startups to a heavyweight size will be a sisyphean task. Britain’s tech pioneers are often sold before they become giants. DeepMind, founded in London in 2010, went to Google just four years later. Britain’s venture capitalists might argue that they are in it for themselves, not for building up British tech.

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