I have been in London long enough to start reading it as a system, and not long enough to stop being surprised by it. Two Monday evenings at Granola's Made in the UK series gave me a fresh way to look at both. The full stories from those talks live in a companion piece, Made in the UK: two founders, the full stories. This one is my take on the series itself, and on what it says about how Britain builds, from someone who learned the trade in a different ecosystem.
Made in the UK is a simple idea done well. Granola, a London-founded startup, is currently inviting founders of homegrown British businesses to sit down and tell the real version of their story: the journey, the learnings, the things that went wrong. So far that has meant Anne Boden of Starling Bank and Cameron Leslie of fabric, with Corin Mellor of David Mellor Design to come on 8 October. Two industries that could not look more different, one recurring lesson about what it takes to build something that lasts.
Why a founder-first room is worth walking to
I go to these as a designer, and I go because they put the founder on the stage, where most events would put the CPO or the VP of Engineering. I want the story from the people who built the thing through blood, sweat and tears. That is where the useful stuff lives: the macroeconomics and the microeconomics, the relationships, the tragedies you cannot plan for, the COVID-shaped events no roadmap survives. Sometimes it is luck, sometimes it is effort, sometimes it is the connections you happen to have, and a lot of the time it is riding a wave you only half control. You do not get that from a case study.
It matters to me more now than it would have five years ago. A product designer already has to hold three things at once: the user side, which is our home turf, the engineering (technical) side, and the commercial side. I came in with a coding background, and the AI tools I now use every day, Claude, Codex, and Cursor (now owned by SpaceX), have quietly collapsed the distance between describing a solution and shipping it. As that build gap closes, the commercial understanding is the part that separates good product people from great ones. So an evening spent listening to a founder explain how a business actually survived is the training.
The logistics help. Granola hosts these 7 minutes from my office, after work, so there is no hauling myself across the city to a venue in zone four. I had been missing rooms full of people for a while. This is an easy yes.
Granola is facilitating something
A company running a series like this is, of course, partly looking for talent and partly looking for customers. I do not begrudge them that. What I like is that for those of us who are not job-hunting and not buying, the door is open anyway. Granola is facilitating a connection and a chance to learn, and it costs the attendee nothing but a walk and an evening. That is the exact thing I spent years trying to do in Nairobi, so it reads as familiar to me. It feels like home.
The thing that keeps hitting me: the state is a player
The sharpest difference I notice, coming from an emerging market (here's a 2-min brief history you'll enjoy about the term), is how large a role the British government plays in whether a company lives or dies. It is a major stakeholder. It lists a whole family of tax-relief investment schemes meant to encourage ordinary people to back young, higher-risk and social ventures: the Enterprise Investment Scheme, the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, Venture Capital Trusts and Social Investment Tax Relief. Add equity crowdfunding through platforms like CrowdCube, and someone with a bit of spare income can take a real stake in something they believe in. Since moving here I have put money into a few companies I would never otherwise have reached, some I knew and some I did not.
The support is not only financial. There are bank-run spaces and labs set up to incubate founders, which in Silicon Savannah tend to be run by private firms or VCs like Antler instead. There is Tech Nation, there is Founders News, and there are think tanks and committees shaping the rules, exactly like the nightlife taskforce Cameron chaired, working out how to make an industry fairer and lower the barrier to entry.
Silicon Savannah, the name for Kenya's tech scene, is ripe and full of the same entrepreneurial spirit. What it has less of is this scaffolding. Our wealthy investors tend to put money into property and physical assets rather than high-risk startups, which leaves founders raising from a shallower pool. That is changing, and fast. Safaricom's Ziidi Trader now lets you buy as little as a single share, at whatever that share costs plus fees. And in August 2025 the Nairobi Securities Exchange scrapped its 100-share minimum and moved to single-unit trading, so one share of a blue-chip like EABL or BAT Kenya is suddenly within reach. I like that direction, because lowering the barrier to entry is both fuel and hope. It means a sustainable future is not reserved for people who already have a lot of money, and it means an ordinary saver can back an idea they believe in.
Media works differently too. When I was at Safaricom's innovation lab (Safaricom Alpha), TechCrunch wrote about our work, and that Western coverage opened doors and partnerships in a way local press could not. We leaned on it because it carried the weight of Silicon Valley. In the UK the ecosystem increasingly tells its own stories, through its own newsletters and companies and rooms like this one, and does not have to import validation from California to be taken seriously.
London as a preview
When I look at London, and specifically at this scene, I see a version of what Nairobi could become if we head in the right direction. I want to be careful with that, because every ecosystem carries its own weather. People point at the US and its funding and forget the challenges that come with it. The UK has the support and the infrastructure and still has plenty that is hard. Silicon Savannah is ripe for disruption and full of its own obstacles. I will leave East Asia out of this, since they are waaaaay ahead and carry their own challenges. Nowhere is solved. What the UK has, that I would want for home, is the infrastructure to get things done, and a financial system that is slowly letting ordinary people in, to empower entrepreneurship and to let small-time investors power their own growth.
I should say plainly what this is and is not. I am a foreigner here, still learning the system, and I am not a founder. This is one designer's perspective from the audience, shaped by curiosity and by my own gaps in research. It is one view.
What I keep coming back to is a wish: more homegrown companies, in London and in Nairobi, giving busy builders a stage, and giving the rest of us a way in. That is worth writing down.
Thank you to the Granola team, Eva Greneveckyte and Isana Barr, and most of all to Shreman Shrestha, for making it feel easy.
