Happy weekend and welcome to February. We’re still in the throes of British Winter but with small signs of spring - let’s take it as a sign of better things to come all around.
Heads up that Resilience Media will be at the Munich Security Conference later this month. Please contact us if you want to set up a meeting to talk about what you’re doing, or if you want to hear more about what we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you.
Here’s a short recap of the week:
“Lite” at the start of the tunnel
The UK Ministry of Defence is all too aware that some of the most interesting development is coming from small groups of innovators and startups, but that it can be crushingly hard for startups to get their foot in the door to work with it. This week, the MoD announced two initiatives to improve that effort: £20 million allocated for ‘accelerated’, ‘lite’ deals with startups and small businesses that have never previously done business with the MoD; and a new Dragons Den-style pitching event to find the next unicorn among defence tech startups.
No, £20 million is not that much, especially when you consider that the wider budget for the MoD is £62 billion and that “SMEs” — which for the MoD includes startups? — are being allocated at least several billion pounds of that budget. The point of this is not to court more business from Anduril, Helsing, or Frankenburg Technologies (the counter-drone startup very much aiming to join these as the next unicorn: read our scoop on that here).
Rather, it’s to find the new versions of these — hopefully founded and run out of the UK this time around. Startlingly, the country has no verifiable name to throw into the ring among those movers and shakers, which seems like a huge opportunity, but an even bigger miss, given the UK’s position as the capital of startup venture in Europe.
Then again, can it be that a shift is afoot? Witness established names coming out of the woodwork, suddenly ignited to talk publicly about how important defence and sovereignty are to the future. Tobias Stone’s recap and mood-take at Davos and St Moritz sums it up nicely.
The MoD wants to work more with startups, but in the meantime, are startups cannibalising prime ministry talent? I met someone that had just had their last day of work at the MoD. The person is due to start a job in the private sector very soon, not at a prime, but a startup. Why did you decide to make that leap now, I asked?
The answer felt familiar: the person was senior, and, with money and operations being tight at the MoD, didn’t feel that there were many opportunities for next steps. Startups are all too happy to gobble up public-sector defectors: bringing in more talent with MoD pedigree (and the connections that come with that) is a tried-and-tested formula for business development. Is this just par for the course, a temporary moment, or a bigger trend? You can’t help but wonder what ministries will look like in the next decade.