Accelerating Liverpool’s tech ecosystem – Baltic Ventures CEO Claire Lewis

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Uktech, Investing, Sales, Tech, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur, Funding, Hr, Business, Technology

5.0 • 6 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Claire Lewis, CEO and co-founder of Baltic Ventures, discusses Liverpool’s rapidly growing tech scene, how there's now an understanding that tech investment must be spread across the whole UK, and some of the common mistakes that founders make.

Baltic Ventures is a not-for-profit accelerator located in Liverpool. Based in the city’s Baltic Triangle, the accelerator is aiming to address the funding imbalance for early-stage startups outside of London, with a focus on the North West. Lewis, who began her career as a chartered accountant, previously founded a sustainable ecommerce company. After it was acquired, she worked for an investment bank supporting tech for good startups, before launching Tech North, which went on to become part of Tech Nation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There is now a deep understanding that if we want to succeed as UK PLC, we have to be investing effectively across the whole country.
0:16.9	All of these initiatives are bringing tech more into the fore and making it more accessible to a wider group of people.
0:23.6	You know, we're not in the sort of the tech bros world anymore where it's like this sort of exclusive enclave for just a few.
0:32.6	One of the big mistakes that I often see founders going down is they're very solution focused,
0:39.3	but not problem focused.
0:41.3	So they've got all these great ideas about what they want to build, but where are your customers?
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1:27.4	Hello and welcome to the UKTN podcast, a weekly chat with the founders of some of the UK's high-growth tech companies and other key stakeholders.
1:37.2	In this series, we'll be exploring what entrepreneurship looks like in the UK right now,
1:42.0	as well as getting tips from some of our most innovative business
1:44.9	leaders and discussing the hot topics in the tech world. And I'm joined today by Claire Lewis, the CEO
1:51.1	and co-founder of Baltic Ventures, a not-for-profit organisation that invests in and supports new
1:57.4	businesses. Welcome, Claire. Hello, Jane. Nice to meet you. Now let's start by talking
2:02.5	about Baltic Ventures and I noticed that it's backed by a four million pound investment from the
2:08.7	Liverpool City Region combined authority. So does that mean that you're looking to purely
2:13.8	invest in businesses in that specific area? So the investment from the combined authority is over a five-year period,
	...

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