Future of Regulated Markets (FORM) Summit, 2024
When you ask a VC or founder about regulation and government, “f*ck the regulators” isn’t an uncommon response. If you go by Marc Andreessen’s latest screed, regulation is the enemy of tech, and vice versa.
But the real tech optimist view — and our view at Form — is that instead of wishing regulation wasn’t there while doing nothing about it, we can accept the reality of it while also being impatient about improving it.
So this morning we launched our new report, Fix the Regulators, at the inaugural Future of Regulated Markets (FORM) Summit. We’re campaigning to help startups move quickly in regulated markets and turn regulators into a source of advantage for the UK. Thanks to Lord Johnson, Minister for Investment & Regulatory Reform, Finn Stevenson (Flok Health), Ed Steele (Hoxton Farms) and Sarah Gates (Wayve) for joining us and for Atomico for kindly hosting us all.
We have spent years obsessing, rightly, about two key ingredients we need to make the UK startup ecosystem really fly: capital and talent. But we’ve forgotten about regulation: the thing that determines whether well-funded, talented teams can actually sell their product or not.
Yet today, commercial drones still can’t fly beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) at scale. Fintechs are waiting 12+ months for FCA authorisation. Singapore, the US & Israel are moving faster to approve cell-cultivated foods. And regulators in almost every sector are underpowered to manage the enormous learning curve presented by AI.
But we can and should completely reset our ambition. What if we could get authorisations in a day, rather than a year? What if the UK could be the place, globally, where entrepreneurs and investors can get deep tech to market and through the various regulators first, before anywhere else on earth?
To achieve this, we need to fix regulators’ resource, rules, and risk appetite Check out the report to learn how:
