People are underestimating how AI is disrupting the classic startup funding model. Founders no longer need large development teams and significant venture funding to go to market. AI enables entrepreneurs to build, test and iterate rapidly with minimal cost and small teams, allowing the best ideas to gain traction before major investment is needed.
Russ Shaw spent two decades inside technology before founding Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates, turning his experience of the industry into infrastructure for others.
Russ Shaw arrived in London from the US in 1992. What was meant to be temporary became a thirty-year relationship with the city and its technology sector.
His executive career took him through businesses including Mobileway and Skype, giving him a front-row seat as digital technology moved from specialist industry to everyday infrastructure.
By 2013, however, he could see something London’s growing technology community did not have.
It had founders, investors and rapidly expanding companies. What it lacked was an independent voice capable of connecting them and making their collective case.
Tech London Advocates began as a grassroots response. Global Tech Advocates followed, taking the model internationally.
Shaw had spent years building companies from inside organisations. He chose instead to build the connective tissue around them.
That perspective now shapes how he reads the next transition: AI changing not just what companies can build, but who can become a founder and how much capital they need to begin.
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