“I like pain.” An angel’s view of start-up life

When Vicky Brock won Europe’s Golden Aurora Award at the SIM Conference in Porto last month, she was probably the only person in the room who had once charged fellow students £40 a time to type up their essays. She had never thought of this early endeavour to make beer money as a business, but perhaps that reveals a natural talent for entrepreneurship and an attitude of humility towards success.

“It’s probably the most profitable business I ever had,” she jokes, reflecting on her past while talking by the banks of Porto’s famous Douro river. She is clutching her award, fresh from the conference stage at one of Portugal’s leading start-up events. 

Brock grew up in Norwich, was the first in her family to go to university, and arrived at King’s College London with no exposure to business, no family capital and no roadmap. She has since founded five technology companies and now lives in Estonia and invests as an angel, primarily in the UK.

And her timing, she argues, could not be better. The UK is one of the best places in the world right now to start a company and back one, she says.

“I think we probably don’t realise what a special thing we’ve got,” says Brock, pointing to the EIS and SEIS tax relief framework (and specifically the loss relief within it) as a genuine competitive advantage that most founders and investors fail to fully appreciate. It is not replicated anywhere else in Europe.

But the tax environment alone won’t build a deep tech ecosystem. For that, she argues, the UK needs to fundamentally rethink how it turns research into companies, and universities have a big role to play here.

Her reference point for what a university ecosystem should look like is MIT in Boston. She points to the work of Bill Aulet at the MIT Sloan School of Management, whose disciplined entrepreneurship framework has shaped how a generation of founders and universities think about turning research into companies. It was a direct influence on Brock, and how she approaches the founder role. She learned from Aulet during several entrepreneurship development programme workshops he ran in Scotland.

At MIT, labs, business school, and accelerator sit alongside each other with no institutional hierarchy between disciplines.

“There’s none of this snobbery about who is really the most important,” comments Brock. “Arts people, business people, engineers all working together.”

The result is a culture where commercial thinking and deep research are treated as equally serious disciplines, and where the person who spots the market opportunity is as valued as the person who made the discovery.

A UK enterprise zone

It is a model the UK has been slow to replicate. The University of Bristol’s Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, a 38,000m² building next to Temple Meads station, could change that. Due to open in September, Bristol Innovations is putting the Business School, innovation centres, science research, and spinouts physically under one roof.

“I didn’t know anyone in the UK was doing that,” says Brock.

Whether physical proximity translates into the kind of cultural integration she is describing is the real test. Buildings don’t automatically dissolve institutional boundaries, but in a city building serious capability in quantum, robotics, and advanced materials, getting the structure right at this stage is important. It sets a tone.

The structural problem Brock keeps coming back to is that university spinouts routinely ask one person to do two fundamentally different jobs simultaneously.

“The inventor, the academic, the PhD, the researcher does not have to be the founder. They don’t even have to be the CEO. Almost certainly shouldn’t be the CEO.”

It sounds blunt but Brock is talking from experience. She says that the commercial instincts required to identify a market, build a financial model, run a pitch process and manage investor relationships are not the same ones that produce groundbreaking science or product innovation. Asking someone to park a decade of research expertise and reinvent themselves as a start-up operator is, she argues, both unrealistic and unnecessary.

“It’s so much to ask of any individual, that they’re super brainy, incredibly good at the research, come up with groundbreaking technology, and then park that for five years while they learn everything they need to know about raising money, pitching, financial models, cash conversion cycles, IP protection.”

The value of having so many different disciplines in close proximity is this idea of matching complementary skills and learning through recommendation. Brock says that there are people who are genuinely excited by the commercial challenge, so why not “buddy them up”? It’s also a key element of creating businesses, she says, to ensure spinouts are not built for the sake of a technology looking for a solution.

“I like pain,” she says. “I much prefer pain-led businesses.”

By that she means businesses that solve problems. It sounds obvious, but to her point about research-led firms, it’s easy to see how a clever invention in a lab can remain just that. The questions Brock applies to every start-up she comes across are simple: what pain does it ease, and will people pay for a solution that is just a little bit less problematic than what exists today?

Most deep tech spinouts, she says, can’t answer it because they started with the technology, not the problem.

“They just don’t give me a real-world story or a real-world problem. It’s almost like if they do enough R&D and come up with a good enough solution, they can retrofit it to a problem.”

She has seen this happen repeatedly, where genuinely smart people with serious science behind them never quite get to the point where the technology becomes a viable business.

“They throw enough shiny possible solutions into the world and hope somebody else will do something that makes it a business. But when you’re raising money, this isn’t an R&D grant application. This is money to build a replicable business.”

Brock learned most of this the hard way. She spent the first decade of her career in data analytics and web measurement before founding her first company at 30.

“If I’d joined all of those dots at university, I’d have done it at 18,” she says.

Five companies followed, including Clear Returns, named top tech start-up in Europe by the European Commission, and Vistalworks, which uses AI and risk-scoring to identify illicit online trade. Each one taught her something the previous one hadn’t.

What she brings to the founders she now backs is that accumulated experience, not just the capital.

“The least important thing I bring is my money,” she says. “Other people can bring more. I can bring a complete career of experience and contacts.”

She invests the smallest amount a founder will accept, gets in as early as possible, and then, by her own admission, “bugs the hell out of them.”

For deep tech founders working in quantum, robotics, and advanced materials, finding an investor who actually understands the territory is as valuable as the capital they bring. The data illustrates why. CB Insights analysed more than 400 VC-backed companies that shut down since 2023 and found that poor product-market fit was the leading root cause of failure, cited in 43% of cases. Running out of cash came first at 70%, but, as the report notes, that is almost always where the story ends, not where it begins. The money runs out because the market was never really there.

For Brock, that means knowing enough to call it early.

“I need to feel I know enough about it to be able to dismiss bullshit bingo,” she says. AI has increased the volume of pitches, not the quality. That human judgement, built from five companies, two decades and a lot of hard lessons, is precisely what she brings to the table.

The Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus opens in September 2026.