Alys Key // London 🌤️ 16°C // April 2

Prynhawn da. It can be easy to get caught up talking about London on this beat, with occasional cameos from Cambridge and a few others. But today, we look west – in more ways than one. 

Kanishka Narayan, Labour MP for the Vale of Glamorgan, thinks there is a unique opportunity for Wales in the technological revolution triggered by the development of AI tools. 

“I think Wales can completely outdo a bunch of places and it can do so for two reasons,” he tells me. The first, he explains, is the importance of energy to power the computing that will be needed in the next phase of AI, a point where he thinks Wales – a net exporter of electricity – is well-placed. But the other reason is, counterintuitively, the nation’s size. 

“When you think about so much of what we’re trying to do as the UK government here on planning reform, on regulatory reform, on being able to move faster as the state as a great partner to startups in the technology sector, Wales can just do that at like 10x the pace, by virtue of its size and by virtue of a number of the powers that we have in Wales.” 

An interesting image: Wales as a nimble startup, able to make change quickly. You can tell that Narayan sees things with an investor mindset. Prior to entering Parliament, he was an investor for a US venture capital firm and led its European presence, with a focus on climate tech, AI and fintech. 

Whether Wales can really embrace that ethos given it faces the same issues holding back other parts of the UK’s growth machine, as well as some quirks of its own, remains to be seen. This week, however, Narayan’s focus is on his own patch. And that’s where we start looking a little further west.  

Riffing on the legendary California-based startup accelerator Y Combinator, the MP announced on Monday the launch of what he calls a YC for Wales, the Vale Startup Accelerator. Participants in the Vale of Glamorgan will receive mentoring, training, networking opportunities and exposure to investors. Like the famous startup programme, everything will culminate with a demo day. Unlike YC, the event will be held in a Welsh castle. 

“The fundamental thing, I feel, is we should have the level of ambition people have when they go to YC,” he explains. “We should have that level of ambition for every person growing up in the UK and wanting to start a business in the UK.”   

He is realistic about the kinds of companies that are likely to join the programme – not all of them will be frontier AI labs and future unicorns that just happen to have a South Wales connection. As long as early-stage founders are working on a business that is tech-related in some way, they can be considered. Whatever their goal might be, he wants them to have “the highest degree of encouragement”.  

“So the absolute level might be different in some places, but the change that Y Combinator drives in people’s ambition trajectory, that’s the change I would love to be able to drive in every individual’s trajectory.”

While this effort focuses specifically on his own constituency, Narayan has a broader philosophy about ensuring that the whole country feels the benefits of the current tech revolution. That’s the thrust of his All Hands on Tech campaign, of which the accelerator is one prong.

The wide proliferation of AI tools sets the stage for this sharing of opportunity, in his opinion, possibly even offering an answer to the UK’s long-discussed productivity puzzle. 

“In the last wave of technology and software, a lot of the productivity impact felt very concentrated in specific areas: London, Silicon Valley,” he says. “I think this next wave – if we really want it to play the role we want it to, which is a role on productivity overall – it’s got to be much more widely shared.” 

And again, we come back to infrastructure and energy. He mentions climate tech, life sciences, defence tech and robotics as important sectors for the UK in the coming years. They are areas where home-grown companies could be leading the way, but also industries that often have what he calls “spillover effects”, where innovations end up benefiting other industries too.  

But ambitious industries will need computing power. They will need energy. That can’t all be done from London. Narayan envisions a national effort to take full advantage of the opportunity. 

“This whole thing relies on the country pulling together.” 

If you are a politician, or work for one, and would like to discuss the UK’s place in tech, get in touch. I'm all ears alys@digitalfrontier.com  

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

• I enjoyed this Unherd piece by Aled Maclean Jones about the quiet success of Rolls-Royce. It raises the question of whether the UK really struggles with ambition, or if the real issue is a lack of attention paid to its own wins.
• Some of us from the Digital Frontier team will hopefully be at this Long Now London event at the RSA, ready to learn more about the practice of long-term thinking.
  
• Freshly published this morning, here is the TBI’s take on copyright and AI. I’ll be diving deeper into this issue in the coming weeks – it’s certainly one that isn’t going away.
• There are several new positions listed on Cracked.London, including at Recurse.ML, Neuphonic and Multiply AI.
• Former MP Douglas Carswell is the latest guest on the Anglofuturism podcast.
• I had the pleasure of editing this Digital Frontier feature by Tasmin Lockwood about Bristol-based Astral Systems, a manufacturer of next-gen compact fusion reactors. 
• Given a lot of the chat about “abundance” recently has had a US lens, I was glad to read Archie Hall’s analysis of what this new economic buzzword could mean in a UK context.