Merryn Somerset Webb

The businesses we know...

are the wellspring of job creation, of value creation, of productivity generation.

If you rank the UK on the absolute number of those cults and thoroughbreds, short of unicorns, but nonetheless with the potential to grow wings, we rank third behind the US and China in numbers.

And on a per capita basis, because guess what?

A lot more people in China and the US than there are in the UK.

We are towards the top of the pops.

So when it comes to potential scale-ups, the unicorns prospectively of tomorrow are

We are an innovation nation.

We are smashing the lights out relative to the rest of Europe and arguably even relative to the US.

The key, Merrin, is, of course, to nurture those cults and thoroughbreds.

to enable them to grow the wings.

Well, this is slightly the problem, isn't it?

That we can be first in terms of exciting companies and still 27th in terms of GDP per capita.

How do we keep those companies here?

I mean, 20 years ago, companies of that size that you're talking about would already have listed and the wealth would already have been shared around.

That's not the case now.

So how do we keep those companies here?

How do we encourage more of them?

And crucially, also from our point of view, how do we get those companies to list and make the UK stock market part of the equation?

Yeah, yeah.