Welcome to a special edition of The Spectator podcast. I'm Fraser Nelson. A few weeks ago, a company called Dark Trace, put together by computer programmers in London and Cambridge, floated on the London Stock Exchange and was

valued at over £2 billion. It was a pretty striking example of British tech success,

and the shares jumped by 44% on the day of flotation, in stark contrast to Deliveroo,

perhaps a better-known name, whose shares sank by 26% when it floated. So what does the Dark

Trace success tell us about Britain's ability to nurture tech companies and float them here in

Britain rather than sending him off to America? I'm delighted to be joined by the man behind

Dark Trace, Mike Lynch, the founder of Invoke Insights, which is kindly sponsoring this podcast.

Mike, it's great to have you here at the Spectator offices.

So tell me about Dark Trace.

What did it do and why, given that it's not making any money, is it worth more than $2 billion?

Well, what Dark Trace does is cybersecurity.

So you probably come across the fact that everyday businesses and governments are under attack from around the world.

And the approach that people have taken in the past is to try and build a wall to keep everyone out.

It doesn't work because in the modern world everything is open and people are in.

You have employees in every day.

You have customers connected to your systems.

And so the question was, how do you actually defend something when you assume that the bad person is already in?

So the wall doesn't work anymore.

And once the attack has been in, you can never clear them out.

And that's actually no different to our bodies.

Our bodies don't work on the basis our skin is going to keep every infection out.

That's why we have the immune system which walks around,

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