Earlier this year, The Duke of York launched Pitch@Palace 3.0, the third version of his entrepreneurial endeavour that focuses on Technology within the Creative Industries. His Royal Highness, who was in Cambridge to launch the new Entrepreneurship Centre of which he is patron, spoke to Cambridge News about Pitch@Palace in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
“It’s dead simple,” he said. “I felt that venture capital was not investing in early stage activity. It comes out of mitigating risk rather than looking at the individual and the idea, and accepting that the idea may change. I called in a few people from the venture capital world – yes, quite a few from Cambridge – the idea was for a member of the Royal Family to be an accelerant.”
Pitch@Palace invites 42 budding entrepreneurs to take part in events that will help them build their ideas into start-ups that are strong enough to grow into large businesses in the UK.
When asked about the unusual number of competitors, Prince Andrew said: “It’s from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I just needed to come up with a number.”
Indeed, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams’ science-fiction novel, the number 42 is said to be the answer to life, the universe and everything. However, in the case of Pitch@Palace, 42 is just the initial number of participants. The Duke of York personally gets involved in whittling them down to just 14 young entrepreneurs. Those chosen take part in a boot camp before giving three-minute presentations to 350 to 400 potential investors who are invited to St James’s Palace.
“Pitch@Palace is an enabling device to bring small businesses and entrepreneurs in contact with these people,” Andrew added. “I take no cut. And they don’t always ask for money, sometimes it’s access they want. I have asked that every one of the 400 people who come make one follow-up with an entrepreneur; and some of these follow-ups go on late into the night.”
The logic behind this effort is to keep new and innovative businesses in the UK, rather than outsourcing them to Shanghai or Silicon Valley. According to The Duke, “In the US they think work, sleep work, whereas our entrepreneurs go from work to the pub, go to bed at 3am and get up again at 7, and this eat, sleep, play routine means they are all playing off each other.”
Featured photo credit: The Duke of York 2015
While he’s using the fun wisdom hidden in the satire of that series, it would also be helpful to use the part in which it talks about the elite erroneously thinking they have no need of the working class ( namely the telephone cleaners in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, in the book the elite deport all of the lower classes to another planet and said elite eventually all die from a disease contracted from a dirty telephone), the message in that is that the wealthy should remember ALL are important and need to be able to provide for their families. We are all an equally valid member of the human race and that concept needs to be honoured especially when governing over the welfare of the working class and the impoverished. The wealthy would likely have things alot worse if the rest of us died off because we couldn’t afford to live. I am speaking of the cuts to the programmes that help the poorer classes make ends meet. The wealthy can afford to live on less means,the poor cannot.