London Mayor Boris Johnson Wants More 'Kickass' Tech Entrepreneurs

The first London Technology Week just launched in the capital today, bringing a lot of buzz about how the city is set to rival its US counterparts in New York and Silicon Valley. Or at least, that's its ambition.

Tech Week will see over 200 events taking place across the city. It’s a clear attempt to show off London’s reputation as a tech forerunner in Europe, but also to look stateside in its ambitions. I’ll be covering some of the highlights throughout the week.

The conference kicked off this morning with a press launch that saw Mayor of London Boris Johnson joined by former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and some local tech personalities to cheer on the city’s tech industry. According to an Oxford Economics report (commissioned by London & Partners, which does the Johnson’s promo for the city), London’s tech sector is forecasted to generate £12 billion (US$20 billion) of economic activity and 46,000 jobs over the next decade.

But at the conference, Johnson admitted that there are still some things that London needs to do to reach the success of places like New York or even Silicon Valley. In his words, the UK hasn’t yet produced the kind of “knockout” business we’ve seen in the US; we haven’t incubated a Google or a Facebook. Johnson suggested this could be down to “British diffidence,” a lack of “kickass” entrepreneurs, or funding obstacles, but he didn’t think the overall forecasts were overly optimistic.

One area in which the city really is excelling is finance. Separate research by South Mountain Economics found that London employs more workers in FinTech than New York or Silicon Valley. At the launch today, Swedish online payments firm Klarna—which provides payment services for e-commerce—confirmed a high-profile UK launch. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said that politicians in the UK were particularly involved in the tech scene compared to the rest of Europe. They’d been to Downing Street three times, he said, but had never had a similar invitation in Sweden.

Bloomberg drew a parallel between London and New York as challengers to Silicon Valley’s tech throne: “Ten years ago, no one thought of New York or London as a competitor to Silicon Valley—but today, more and more tech companies are looking to our cities as places to launch and grow, because they offer such diversity, creative talent, and high quality of life,” he said in a statement.

The link between the two cities is further echoed in plans to establish a “Center for Urban Science and Progress” in London, like the one in New York. It will be established in partnership with King’s College London, Warwick University, and New York University.

In a brief Q+A session with Johnson, Bloomberg responded to more specific current tech issues. On the recent European “right to be forgotten” ruling, which means individuals can ask Google to take down irrelevant links about them, he said he didn’t see how it would be practically possible. There were worse fates, he suggested, than having a few inaccuracies on your Wikipedia page. (Of course, whether the ruling would ever apply to someone well-known enough to have a Wikipedia page is another matter.)

It didn’t take long for one reporter to turn the conversation away from tech week to Johnson’s recent comments on the situation in Iraq, which are currently making headlines across the UK. Writing in The Telegraph yesterday, he called former Prime Minister Tony Blair “unhinged” over the latter’s comments that the 2003 Iraq invasion wasn’t a cause of current unrest in the region.

Johnson sportingly tried to find some sort of tech angle with which to answer the question, and said it was thanks to the wonders of technology that so many people had been able to read his column. He stood by his comments.

As for a question of when driverless cars would hit London’s streets, he joked some were already there—parked.