Tech City is Five Years Old!

The first spark of the idea that would go on to become Tech City, surfaced on the last night of a UK trade mission to India in July 2010. At a British Government-hosted reception in Delhi, Matt Webb, then CEO and cofounder of design consultancy BERG, struck up a conversation with Rohan Silva, then a senior special advisor to the prime minister. Their chat soon turned to London and the best way to get the small cluster of startups that were scattered around Old Street to take off, and ultimately become a viable ecosystem. "Matt said there [wasn't] a Silicon Valley-type ethos in Old Street, where you can all come together," Silva told Wired magazine at the time. "So he asked for our help." A few months later, the Prime Minister delivered a speech in which he declared that "something [was] stirring in east London", which could one day "be one of the world's great technology centres".