Simon C

Scaleup Director @InnovateUK · Chair @Chainergy · NED · Board Advisor · Cofounder bigblu, raised £42m, IPO, 33 countries · Writing about scale, capital, boards.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Start here: my CQ framework thread 👇

https://t.co/kQEKSSp7Gx

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

🧵We all know IQ

EQ was popularised in the 90s.

But it’s Gen Z’ers who’ve made it part of the culture; I should know, I’m married to one.

Now it’s time to talk about the hidden intelligence that decides if you scale or stall: 👉 CQ.

The Company / Commercial Quotient.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

@__paleologo I thought my account had been hacked, couldn't believe what a strategic weirdness this looks.

[Shay Boloor @StockSavvyShay]

Jensen Huang stopped by a local noodle shop during his China trip.

This doesn't look like someone worried about disappointing on $NVDA earnings next week.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Developed Vetting (DV) is the UK's highest tier of security clearance, reserved for access to Top Secret material and sensitive intelligence.

When DV is refused, it isn't a bureaucratic technicality.

It is a substantive professional judgement by trained security assessors that the individual poses an unacceptable risk. The override mechanism exists for genuine edge cases, not to fix a politically embarrassing sequencing problem where an announcement was made before the process concluded.

What's highly actually unusual here: Starmer had already publicly announced Mandelson's appointment before the vetting result came back, meaning the Foreign Office override wasn't a considered strategic exception, it was damage limitation for a commitment already made.

The cart was before the horse, and the security apparatus was leaned on to accommodate that.

The point no one seems to be making clearly is that
Starmer's statement that vetting was "carried out independently by the security services" is technically accurate; but it omits the rather material fact that the independent verdict was then overridden. That's not transparency. It's a true statement engineered to mislead.

That distinction between what was said and what was withheld is I think actually more politically damaging than a straightforward lie, because it reveals deliberate framing rather than error.

You can make that observation without taking sides. I feel it's a process integrity point, not a party political one.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

🇬🇧 The £500m UK Sovereign AI Fund launches today 🎉

The UK has the heritage, the talent, and now some capital!

The question was never whether we can build world-class AI.

It's whether we've finally learned to back it properly.

Many brilliant small UK businesses are ready to write their place in AI history.

Here's hoping the money follows the ambition, not just the politics.

#SovereignAI #UKTech #AI 🇬🇧

[Sovereign AI @UKSovereignAI]

Sovereign AI. Launching Tonight. 🇬🇧

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

The giveback on $LHX makes more sense when you factor in what's actually driving defence stocks right now.

It's not organic demand growth. It's headline risk premium. NATO spending pledges, Ukraine aid commitments, European rearmament, all real, but lumpy and politically reversible.

I think markets are struggling to price a defence cycle that depends on political will, rather than true commercial contracts. That uncertainty kills clean pivots.

$SMH is a cleaner story. Demand there looks structural not political.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Agreed, but the difference that keeps nagging at me is 'agency'.

Windows, MacOS, the iPhone; all of them probably amplified human intention. You still had to know what you wanted to do. The tool just made doing it faster, simpler, easier.

What's unsettling about the current releases isn't the capability. It's that the system increasingly decides what the task even is.

Vannevar Bush imagined the Memex as a tool that followed the associative trails of a human mind. What we're actually building follows its own trails and invites us along!

That's not a better tool. That's a different kind of relationship entirely.

Whether that's WarGames or something stranger probably depends on who's asking it the questions and why!

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

I think "stop trying to make money"!

Seriously.

The moment you sit down focused on P&L you've already lost. The market doesn't care what you need. It doesn't care about your rent, your ego, or your account size.

The traders I've watched blow up repeatedly share one trait — they're having a conversation with their bank balance rather than with the market.

Shift the obsession. Become a student of your own behaviour under pressure. When did you break your rules? What were you feeling? What story were you telling yourself in that moment?

The edge isn't in the system. It's in whether you can actually execute it when it counts.

Most can't and that's why many blow up.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Read that twice to make sure I hadn't misunderstood it.

We are deploying a civilian tanker to shadow a heavily armed Russian warship through the English Channel because we don't have enough naval vessels to do the job ourselves.

And the crew tracking that warship are striking over pay. Looks like a strategic assessment of exactly where fifteen years of defence underfunding has left us.

Putin doesn't need to fire a single missile at the UK. He just needs to keep sailing frigates through the Channel while we argue about wage bands and hide in embarrassment about our 'out of commission' RN assets.

The gap between our rhetoric on Russia and our actual operational capability to respond to it has never been more visible than in this one story.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

@RobLMyers 😂 I think there's a real chance he'll surprise everyone and just hang out with the Merc GT3 keep the money, he clearly hates the new car!

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Feels more like a reprieve than a bottom to me. The structural headwinds,vdollar strength, credit spreads, earnings revision cycle haven't fully resolved.

Liquidity came back before the fundamentals did. That's either a genuine recovery or the most expensive head fake of the year. I'm watching the equal weight versus the cap weight divergence closely. That'll tell you more than the index level.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Timely!

JPMorgan just restructured its entire quant group, new leadership, new mandate, explicitly aimed at competing with non-bank market makers on electronic trading.

The interesting tension at that conference will be between the buy side using AI to find alpha and the sell side using AI to extract it from them more efficiently 😂

Same tools but i suspect some opposite incentives.

Should make for a lively room!

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

The library card generation had one advantage the algorithm generation doesn't!

You had to work to find the information. I think that "friction" forced you to think about whether it was worth finding before you went looking.

Now everything is instantly available but almost nothing is deeply understood.

The secret you're describing isn't really about libraries. It's about the discipline to seek understanding rather than just consume information.

That's rarer now than it's ever been.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

We had this debate in 1938 didn't we?

The geography hasn't changed. The aggressor's playbook hasn't actually changed. The western reluctance to act early enough hasn't changed either.

The difference this time is that the countries on the front line know exactly what's coming and aren't waiting to be told to take it seriously.

The question isn't whether to move troops east. It's whether we'll move enough, fast enough, before the moment passes again.

Do we even need troops, perhaps it should be just drones?

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Your frustration is completely justified.

AI growth zones, energy abundance, copyright reform all announced with genuine ambition, all quietly suffocated by the same combination of slow planning, grid inertia, and regulatory caution that has held back UK infrastructure for decades.But the compute demand doesn't care about policy failure.

It keeps growing regardless. Which I think means the opportunity shifts to those building around the problem rather than waiting for it to be solved.

Distributed, modular infrastructure at existing renewable generation sites doesn't need an AI growth zone or a grid connection queue. It needs a generator with stranded energy and a builder with the right technology. The policy environment is disappointing.

The market opportunity it creates is not.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

The UK's grid wasn't built for this.

Gigawatt data centres need gigawatt power connections. The queue for those runs to years, not months.

But the compute demand is real and it isn't waiting.

Distributed, modular infrastructure deployed at existing renewable generation sites sidesteps the grid problem entirely. Lower capital, faster deployment, no planning queue.

The hyperscale model is stalling in the UK. The distributed model is just getting started.

Watch that space.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Everyone is framing this as bad news for UK AI ambition.
I'd frame it differently.

The hyperscale model was always going to hit this wall in the UK. Grid constraints, planning timelines, energy costs; none of this is new information. The surprise is that it took this long.

What it actually does is accelerate the conversation about distributed compute. Smaller, modular, deployed at the point of renewable generation. Lower capital requirement, faster to build, no grid connection queue.

The Stargate pause isn't the end of UK AI infrastructure.

It's the starting gun for a smarter approach.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

The real story here isn't OpenAI.

It's that the UK grid cannot support the compute ambitions of the AI economy at hyperscale.

Gigawatt sized data centres need gigawatt sized power connections. Planning, grid connection queues, and capital costs make that a decade long project in most UK locations.

The answer isn't bigger. It's distributed. Modular compute, deployed at the point of generation, where the energy already exists.

That conversation is only just starting.

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

If you're building something serious and want an honest view of where you really stand before you go anywhere near investors or acquirers that's exactly what I do.

DM me or find me through the link in my bio.

One question to finish: what's the hardest question your board has ever asked you?

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

Most founders think they're ready to be acquired.

They're not.

After 23 acquisitions across 6 countries over 6 years, I can tell you exactly why we walked away from more deals than we completed.

And it's probably not what you think!

[Simon C @Scaleupsimon]

And almost every strong management team had something else going for them.

A board that had already put them through their paces.

Not a board of mates and cheerleaders. People who'd asked the hard questions long before we turned up.

That's the difference between walking into a room prepared and walking in exposed.