Britain is well-placed to be at the forefront of AI breakthrough but for one thing: its deep-seated culture of risk aversion. To foster a more entrepreneurial culture, there are three things the UK should do, says Lewis Z Liu
The UK has a unique set of advantages to lead the AI revolution. It boasts world-class intellectual depth, an international outlook and a preeminent global city in London. However, it will fail to capture any of the rewards of this revolution if it does not address its deep-seated cultural malaise of risk avoidance.
Perhaps nothing illustrates this more clearly than my early experience with Eigen Technologies, the AI company I founded in London and recently sold. When Eigen won its first client, Goldman Sachs, in 2017, we were just 18 people. I worked nonstop during my honeymoon to win the deal, finally succeeding in beating out Big Tech and well-funded Silicon Valley start-ups. But instead of celebrating those last remaining days with my new wife, I faced a mutiny: 16 of my 18 employees signed a joint email imploring me not to take the deal, calling it “too risky”. Keep in mind, we didn’t have any clients at the time. As such, I called each employee individually to convince them to move forward. To this day I still owe my wife a honeymoon! Ultimately, we delivered the first banking AI deployment of its kind — a watershed moment in AI adoption.
I tell this story to highlight both the best and worst of UK tech entrepreneurship. Like DeepSeek, a small elite group turned AI on its head where Big Tech and Silicon Valley couldn’t. But unlike DeepSeek, our team was deeply international, in the full spirit of London, bringing together the best minds from around the world.
Today, the UK is an AI intellectual powerhouse. The DeepMind team built their groundbreaking work in the UK and continue to do so as part of Google. Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel Prize-winning physicist and widely regarded “Godfather of AI” is British. Two of the three 2024 Chemistry Nobel Prize winners, recognised for their AI-driven breakthroughs in protein folding, did their foundational work in London.
Don’t let AI become the next graphene
Unfortunately, despite the UK’s wealth of innovation and invention, the lion’s share of AI revenue and investment still flows to the US and China. If this trajectory continues, AI risks becoming another graphene — a groundbreaking discovery made in the UK by Nobel Prize-winning physicists in Manchester, yet today, less than 10 per cent of global graphene revenue is attributed to UK companies. The common rhetoric is that the UK needs more capital. I agree — capital is a crucial ingredient. The other talking points are geography or market size. These are all important and there are ways to address them. But the most critical missing piece is risk culture.
Last year, I attended a dinner in Switzerland with several high-profile European leaders, including chairs of DAX30 companies and cabinet-level ministers. One minister asked why it was the US that built ChatGPT and not Europe. I paused for a moment before replying, “The question isn’t whether Europeans have the intellectual capacity to build ChatGPT; you most certainly do. The question isn’t even whether Europe has the capital; you can find the money. The fact is that the same culture that built OpenAI is the same culture that built Theranos and WeWork… but also built Airbnb and Uber. It’s the same culture that elevates Thomas Edison despite his controversial business practices. See, in the US, founders are willing to break the rules first, then — if successful —change the rules. I’m not making a moral statement here, just a statement of fact. Europe and the UK have the talent and capital, but not the culture, to have built ChatGPT.”
Three ways to promote risk
Any founder will tell you that changing culture is hard — sometimes damn near impossible. If I could shift the UK’s entrepreneurial risk culture, I’d focus on a few vectors:
One, encourage global ambitions to reset the risk-reward equation. If we want to foster a stronger risk culture, we must also promote its counterpart — ambition. Higher risk demands higher reward. Since leaving the single European market, I’ve noticed that business operators have become more provincial in their thinking, either due to fears of administrative burdens or additional costs. We need to put the UK in perspective: its economy is one-tenth the size of the US, one-sixth that of China or the EU. Without recognising from the outset that the goal must be global, there’s little motivation to take on additional risk. Founders need to start with a global ambition in mind. Likewise, schoolchildren should be taught that the world — and the economy — extends far beyond the UK. The UK has inherent strengths—a legacy as a maritime superpower and London as a hub for what remains of the global elite, this needs to be leveraged.
Two, create career paths for entrepreneurial journeys. Not every founder will exit their business and some will, unfortunately, have to shut down. Not every founding engineer will scale a product to 100m users. That’s the nature of the work. However, I can tell you this: a founder who spent years building a company before shutting it down will effectively have decades more experience than someone who spent the same time in consulting or banking. They will be a far more perceptive investor or operator. Likewise, an engineer who built a product from scratch will have encountered challenges most engineers in mature tech organisations will never even see. I recently spoke with a founder who had to shut down their business and was trying to re-enter a “regular career” track. They told me their skills are far more valued in Silicon Valley than in London. That is absolutely absurd for two reasons. First, we desperately need more people with entrepreneurial mindsets in an increasingly fast-paced world. Second, this kind of undervaluation discourages future risk-taking. If we fail to celebrate the entrepreneurial journey and give it the respect it deserves, fewer people will be willing to take the leap—fearing they are walking into a dead end if they fail. I recognize that this is a structural issue and that Silicon Valley had decades to perfect it. But we need to start now, and we can start today.
In the US, founders are willing to break the rules first, then — if successful —change the rules
Three, reform and invest in our social and health programs. The common wisdom is that the US fosters a hustle culture because, in its brutal society, you either hustle or you die. The same could be said for China. Some of these hustlers get lucky and build massive businesses. Interestingly, Sweden has twice as many billionaires per capita as the US. After speaking with several prominent Swedish venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, I found a common theme: Sweden’s strong social safety net gives people the confidence to take risks and build companies. The logic is almost the exact opposite of the US and China.
The UK sits somewhere in between — we are unlikely to become as cutthroat as the US or as welfare-focused as the Nordics. However, we can leverage and drastically improve our existing social welfare system to encourage risk-taking. For example, nearly every American founder I know in the UK loves the NHS because, as employers, they don’t have to worry about their employees’ healthcare costs. This flexibility allows both employees and employers to take more risks.
Unfortunately, institutions like the NHS are in dire need of reform — both due to underinvestment and inefficiency. If we can improve our social services, we can create an environment where more people feel secure enough to take entrepreneurial risks.
One caveat: I am not advocating for the “Wild West” culture sometimes seen in the US. The rule of law must be respected, and I have spoken at length about my concerns regarding IP and copyright in relation to LLMs. However, I am advocating for a fundamental shift in the UK’s risk culture. I recognise that this requires both grassroots conversations like this one and top-down policy and social program reforms.
If we change our risk culture, perhaps this once-great island won’t just be known for forebearers of AI like Hinton and Turing, but for shaping its future as well.
Dr Lewis Z Liu is a founder, investor, and AI scientist. As Founder & CEO of Eigen Technologies, he pioneered small language models and AI enterprise adoption, drawing on his Oxford Physics PhD. He sold Eigen in 2024 and now splits his time between New York, London, and San Francisco.