Venture capitalism not politics was the brains behind Britain’s vaccine success
The largely unsung hero – and perhaps the unlearnt lesson – of Britain’s vaccine success is venture capitalist turned government adviser Kate Bingham and how other venture capitalists like her can create the agile, entrepreneurial policies that ‘Global Britain’ needs.
It was not politics as usual that allowed Britain to have the fastest vaccine rollout of any large country. It was Bingham’s mindset where she, like any venture capitalist, spread her chips across different bets, minimising her downside and maximising her – and the nation’s – upside.
This is exactly the sort of mindset we should adopt as we secure trade deals, tackle climate change, forge new partnerships and rebuild our economy.
Bingham’s background is the opposite of the typical civil servant in Whitehall or bureaucrat in Brussels or DC. Venture capitalists understand the value of placing diverse, evaluated bets in order to receive the best outcome. Their priorities are risk management and return on investment – not cost reduction or process-driven box-ticking.
Unsurprisingly, Bingham’s first move was to insist on the streamlining of every decision-making process. Nothing was going to get done quickly “when you have 58 people cc’d”, she has said of her role.
This allowed her to place multiple orders for the most promising, yet unapproved vaccines – exactly how a venture capitalist invests in startups who often have nothing more than a promising business plan and a credible management team. Sometimes that is enough to create a unicorn – a billion dollar startup. The value of Britain’s vaccine success in saved lives and livelihoods will run to several billion.
This is about more than just opening up government to established business people who often have a corporate, top-down, risk-averse mindset. The differences are stark if we compare our vaccine success with our Track and Trace failure, which was headed ex-TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding.
Large corporates tend to follow the same model as government bodies, with monolithic process-driven, rather than agile and results-driven, structures. As a result, Britain has a Track and Trace system where, at some points, up to 80% of infected people could be going untraced – at a cost of 22 billion GBP.
We would be wise to ask what a venture capitalist would have done in charge of the fledgling contact tracing system.
As opposed to building one large track-and-trace organisation, they would likely have offered seed funding to a variety of promising, competing software development players. Competition would have driven innovation, and the final product would likely have been a system that actually worked.
The successful system would have likely been more effective than we can imagine, notifying users when they were heading into a particularly infectious area, allowing them to book tests, and giving them the latest government advice. It could have given users information on which tier they are currently in, rather than just that of their home address. And this could have been delivered in multiple languages, allowing minority communities to not be left behind.
In short, this hypothetical Track and Trace app would have been as broadly effective and intuitively usable as any of the Venture-backed apps we use every day in our lives.
These lessons should be learned and applied across government policy. Think of the food parcel fiasco which left struggling families with inadequate amounts of food.
If venture capitalists were in charge, we might not have needed footballers (no matter how admirable) forcing embarrassing U-turns out of the Government on social media.