The Ledger
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Stan Boland: Supplying venture capital creates company supply, not vice versa
“The causality is that if we put capital in place here, great companies will rise to the occasion and supply of companies will come.”
Stan Boland: UK's £30B annual tech funding yields virtually no results
“This, 20, thirty billion a year that we pump in at the front end per annum in tech. So, like, a hundred and fifty billion over a parliament in university funding for science and tech, in SEIS, in EIS, in VCTs, in R&D tax credits, and patent box, and so on. All…”
Boland: Cumulative UK tax increases are 'shooting ourselves in the foot'
“Yeah, the principles have been, remove non-DOM status, change inheritance tax rules, you know, change capital gain tax, put fees on private schools, and then assume that everybody's going to be happy to stay, really. I mean, yeah, that, that, I just think that…”
Stan Boland: UK EIS and VCT fund managers are low quality
“Because the quality of investment managers is quite low and because they feel they've done a good job if they get anywhere close to just returning capital.”
Boland: UK should redirect $7.5B R&D subsidy budget into active venture capital
“In my view, it would be much, much, much better to take that same amount of money and put it into funder funds and put it into active venture.”
Boland: Jensen Huang publicly berates NVIDIA staff to force improvements
“So he will tear people apart in public on stuff that they've not got command of, or he thinks they're wrong about, and he will, like, rip them to shreds, and leave them whimpering in the corner to lick their wounds but I think he then sort of forgets it and ho…”
Stan Boland: UK VC fundraising of $3.7B trails US pro-rata target by $12B
“If you look at how much venture capital was raised by US VCs last year, it was about seventy six billion raised in the US. Pro rata to population, the UK should be 15.4 billion. The UK funds raised 3.7 billion last year, so we're short about twelve billion in …”
Boland: Even worst venture fund-of-funds outperform UK gilt yields
“The you know, the worst performing fund-of-funds generate maybe six percent IRR. The best performing generate mid-twenties. So always higher than gilt yields.”
Boland: Europe will spend €2-3 trillion on defense within 8 years
“And there's probably, what, two to three trillion can be spent over the next five to eight years in Europe, in defense, actually, and all layers, not just final product, but like components, and there's lots of layers here, I think.”
Boland: UK venture capital faces a £10B annual funding gap
“Ten billion a year is what we've got to put in additional to what we're currently doing, and that's roughly the gap in our venture.”
Stan Boland: EIS and VCT fund returns range from 0.8x to 1.2x
“And, in fact, all the returns are somewhere between 80 cents and one dollar 20 on the dollar.”
Boland: NVIDIA maintained a management buffer layer to deal with Jensen Huang
“It's just, you know, so, so within NVIDIA, we used to have a, Jensen at the top, we had a layer of people whose job was to buffer everybody else in the company, actually. And so this buffer layer would deal with Jensen, which is great.”
Boland: AI agents and APIs will outperform consumer chat models
“It's not obvious to me that the consumer chat interface is the winning interface, really. It seems to me that the API interface and the application calling agent calling might be a bigger interface, so I'd probably put the money elsewhere.”
Boland: US created $20T in decacorn value versus UK's $170B
“20 trillion dollars of value created in the last 50 years in building Decacorns in the US. The UK has created two, about a hundred and seventy billion of value in the UK.”
Stan Boland: Direct government startup investments are an absolute disaster
“It'd be an absolute disaster for government to be making direct investments in companies, I think, because there's no way they can do it, I think, successfully.”
Stan Boland: No large fund of funds has ever lost money
“Firstly, no large fund of funds has ever lost money.”
Stan Boland: UK government VC fund-of-funds allocations should increase 10x
“I think BBB puts something like four hundred and twenty four million dollars a year into fund of funds investments, which is a drop in the ocean. Compared to the 15.4 billion that we ought to be investing. So so yeah, that number needs to be like 10 X in my vi…”
Boland: Europe holds only 2% of global fabless chip market
“Chip design, which is where 75% of the value in the semiconductor space is, is what NVIDIA is, what Qualcomm is, what Broadcom is, all basically semiconductor design companies that basically sell chips, that they get them fabbed. By TSMC or whoever. So that, t…”
Boland: Sage is London's only tech company worth over $10B
“There's only one London listed tech company worth more than ten billion, and that is Sage.”
Stan Boland: Active capital doubling down or killing companies beats passive money
“Active money is, is the way to go. Passive money is not the way to go. So an active money means, yeah, when things are going well, investors double down. When things are not going well, they kill it.”
Stan Boland: UK EIS and VCT funds are largely ineffective
“Yeah, I think a lot of these EIS funds are not very effective and VCT funds are not very effective.”
Stan Boland: UK tax system propels zombie companies
“And I think there's a lot wrong, actually, with the UK tax system that is maintaining too many zombies, I think, in the UK.”
Boland: Quant funds employ too few people to be UK tech's main talent drain
“There can't be that many people, so it can't be the biggest drain on talent.”
Boland: Cambridge research quality matches Stanford despite lower funding
“Cambridge is not that different to Stanford. You know, maybe a little bit smaller, maybe a bit less funded, but the quality of research that we're doing here is as good.”
Boland: Europeans will become much more open to doing business with Chinese companies
“So I think Europeans are gonna be much more open to working with Chinese companies and doing business in China than they were even a year ago, actually.”
Boland: BYD Has Cornered Key Battery Raw Materials
“It's certainly cornered the market in some of the rare materials that are necessary for batteries and so on, and I think it's got scale, and it's got ability to compete, really.”
Boland: NVIDIA Is Re-Architecting GPUs to Optimize for Inference
“They are making a bunch of architectural changes to GPUs to make them better and better inference.”
Stan Boland: UK tech sector will reach $500B valuation in 10 years
“I think in, in 10 years time, I think we will be on, we will have achieved this five hundred billion dollars valuation in, in tech, and the UK will be seen as the magnet in Europe in which people come to kind of build these companies so that, that's what I thi…”
Boland: UK AI talent supply remains net-flat as European gains offset US losses
“If you look at where talent is being born in, like, AI across Europe, and you look at where it lands in terms of where it stays, actually the UK is minting about the same talent it's keeping but that is a net-net, actually. So we're losing talent to the US and…”
Boland: UK spends $7.5B annually on R&D tax credits across 55k SMEs
“We're currently investing about seven and a half billion dollars a year in R&D tax credits for SMEs in 55,000 companies per annum in the UK.”
Boland: Edge AI Inference Will Require High Silicon Capacity
“I mean, yeah, but with that is coming a lot more sort of chain of thought reasoning, a lot more test time compute, so the token generation is still going up, actually. So I still think there's going to be a large amount of silicon required to be able to do sor…”
Stan Boland: Rolls-Royce stock surge is just beginning due to defense demand
“Probably Rolls-Royce, actually because I do think defense is gonna be a big kicker in terms of demand so the air engine business and the, I mean, it's actually gone like a rocket this year anyway, that stock, I mean, it's gone like three X this year but I actu…”