As published in The Times on 3 January - by Alex Ralph.
https://www.thetimes.com/busin...
The Old Parsonage Hotel is a few minutes’ walk from the offices of Oxford Science Enterprises, so for Ed Bussey, the OSE chief executive, it’s his “go-to” place for a “nice quiet” working lunch.
We’re dining in a corner of the restaurant, which is on a site dating back to the early 1300s between Keble and Somerville Colleges, but there’s also a secluded private dining room that Bussey uses when investors are in town.
Bussey, 57, is familiar with the menu, so he opts quickly for his favoured starter of classic steak tartare. The lunch is particularly welcome because Bussey, a former member of the diplomatic service, a trail runner and an adventurer, is keen on “intermittent fasting”.
“I quite often skip breakfast to give me a 14-16 hour gap between myevening meal and my next one,” he says. “I do it for my training. So, quite often lunch is my first meal of the day.”
His interest in biohacking and the idea of being the chief executive of your own health helps him manage his schedule heading OSE, which has a portfolio of more than 125 companies spun out of the university with a combined value of £1.1 billion.
Entrepreneurialism has been a recurring part of Bussey’s life. He joined the navy straight from school at the age of 17 and, after basic training at Dartmouth, got his commission before he was awarded a place at the University of Cambridge to read natural science as a sublieutenant on secondment.
It was at Cambridge that he became president of the entrepreneur society and, as a finalist in an entrepreneur of the year competition, won a trip to San Francisco, where speakers included Michael Dell, the creator of the computer company.
“It was a pivotal moment on my journey because I found myself at this event with about 2,000 young entrepreneurs from around the world … The week just really blew my mind. It was like a Matrix moment.”
He joined the diplomatic service after graduating, where he “spent eight years working in various roles” before spending the next two decades building technology start-ups. Figleaves, an online womenswear business, was acquired by N Brown, another online retailer; ZYB, a mobile social network, by Vodafone; and Quill, an platform to help ecommerce businesses, by Jellyfish.
“There are some similarities between doing extreme sport and building a start-up in terms of resilience and staying with things,” he says.
He was approached to run OSE in 2023 following a period of upheaval in its leadership, which he concedes caused “some reputational damage”.
After some “due diligence”, what struck him was the “staggering” quality of the portfolio. “We’re genuinely building companies that are going to change the world; whether that’s treatments for cancer or electric engines for aircraft or fusion,” he says. “I mean, if you think about all the major global problems, we’ve probably got at least one company working to solve it. And so I looked at that and thought, "Wow, this is incredible.’”
OSE was launched nine years ago as OSI. Dave Norwood was the founding chief executive, alongside Peter Davies, of Lansdowne Partners, and both are Oxford alumni. The vision was to commercialise the university’s “most incredible science” to have “the maximum impact on the world”.
“We often get billed as an investor, but actually we’re building companies with our founders,” he says, adding: “The journey for our companies from the lab, where we first start talking to them, through to some form of exciting valuation inflection point, an IPO or exit, it’s ten to 15 years. We’re in year nine.”
The investment mandate of OSE, which employs 55 people, includes spin-outs from Oxford University and the innovation clusters around the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus and the Culham Centre or Fusion Energy. It means OSE is “very well backed”, with blue-chip international investors.
As well as the university, which holds a 5 per cent non-dilutable golden share, it has pension funds such as Aviva, Legal & General and M&G, sovereign wealth funds from Singapore, Qatar and Oman and corporates such as Google, as well as institutional investors including Lansdowne Partners.
More than £2 billion has been invested by 300-plus co-investors, alongside about £850 million deployed by OSE. The portfolio is now entering “adolescence”, with a new five-year strategy under Bussey to take it into its “second chapter”. There are, he says, “some things we need to prove”. OSE is building eight to ten companies a year and aims to double that over the next five years.
For our main course, Bussey recommends the roast monkfish tail, with parsley potatoes and lobster sauce, which we both order. While he recognises that delivering shareholder returns is OSE’s “number-one priority”, he believes its success is also important to the national interest.
With three of the world’s top-ten universities, the UK has “an asset which is incredibly valuable globally, which I’m not sure is really fully understood”, he says. “If I quote one of my investors: ‘Ed, you’re sitting on our equivalent of Gulf oil.’”
Ventures such as OSE and Northern Gritstone, which was launched in 2021 by the universities of Manchester, Leeds and She8eld to support the commercialisation of academic spin-outs in the north of England, mean the UK is “creating the pathways to take that science into companies — which he believes have the potential to be decacorns, private companies valued at more than $10 billion.
Yet there are “some real challenges” and “a hell of a lot more to do”. Holding back the potential of the UK is a lack of scale-up capital and risk appetite, compared with the United States, which means that, from a “shareholder value point of view, the right thing to do is to fast-track your companies into the US and list them there”.
For the UK to instead hold on to companies and for the benefit to “cascade” requires a “concerted enort” to “join up all the different arms of government and public markets”, he says.
To help push this, Bussey has been meeting influential figures in Westminster and the City. He went to see Julia Hoggett, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange and a “kindred spirit”, Varun Chandra, the prime minister’s special adviser on business and investment, and Lord Vallance, minister for science, the government’s former chief scientific adviser and a former executive at GSK, the pharmaceutical company. Vallance was “very supportive and attentive to the sorts of challenges”.
Bussey says: “Historically, there’s been a tendency with previous governments not to be interventionist and let the market decide. I don’t think we’re in that place any more. With everything going on geopolitically around us, now is the time if we’re going to really deliver growth, create jobs and protect our most valuable companies.”
The Labour government should actively support companies in “strategically critical sectors” with the “highest potential” because the UK’s adversaries are “moving at pace with directed policy approaches”, he says. The government also must be more alive to the “industrial enort to steal” new technologies. “We have a tendency to be a bit British about it and think everyone’s playing fair, and they’re not.”
He senses the government is listening to the business community, but says “we need some bold action”, warning: “Some of the things we’re talking about are existential for the UK economy and security. This isn’t make-believe; people making up false narratives. This is a real thing. We’ve shown that when we can go on a war footing in the context of Covid, we can collapse years of drug development down to months.”
OSE’s portfolio included Vaccitech, a start-up now called Barinthus Biotherapeutics and listed in New York, which was behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine.
We skip dessert and instead order single espressos. Towards the end of our lunch, the hotel’s proprietor, Jeremy Mogford, comes over to introduce himself. Bussey explains afterwards that “everyone knows each other in Oxford”, adding: “If I’m walking back, one of the professors will come over and tell me about something.” No doubt Bussey bumped into someone on his way back from lunch.
CV
Age: 57
Education: British School of Brussels; Sevenoaks School; University of Cambridge, MA in natural science; finance at Insead Business School
Career: Bussey joined the Royal Navy in 1987 and from 1992 he had national security and military appointments with the UK diplomatic service. In 2000 he was a founder, global head of marketing and head of US operations at Figleaves, which was acquired by N Brown. In 2008 he was chief operating o8cer at ZYB, acquired by Vodafone, and, in 2011, he founded Quill, which was acquired by Jellyfish. In 2023 he was appointed chief executive of Oxford Science Enterprises.
Family: Married with three children.
The Old Parsonage Hotel
1 x potted Cornish crab with chicory £118..95
1 x classic steak tartare £117..95
2 x roast monkfish tail, with samphire, parsley potatoes and lobster
sauce £56
2 x single espresso £7..90
Total £100.80