George and Ian catch up on news around the UK small and mid-cap listed tech space.

Picking up on concerns about the challenges AgenticAI from our last podcast, George highlights Forrester’s forecast that next year 40% of AgenticAI projects will be cancelled.

On UK companies we have Dotdigital and Advanced AdvT contrasting growth by acquisition styles, with a quick reflection on GBG. (Platform vs management impact vs random name based)

Trainline and the impact that AI can have to add value, with a nod to the ‘it’s just APIs’ issue.

Closing with Ian’s thoughts on attending the SETsquared Investment Futures event – the partnership of six of the UK’s leading universities for the development and funding of spin-offs. Very positive, plenty of innovation and a great session led by the LSE on finance. Most notable was the recognition that the space has challenges and that participants are solving these for themselves, creating new solutions and changing the way they work - in marked contrast to the public markets approach.

The big, big question facing everyone is how do you make an original comment about the AI bubble.

Ian and George tack away from Cisco vs Nvidia and nonsense PE comparisons and revisit ‘F’d Companies spectacular dot-com flameouts’ - the basis for Ian’s recent blog, looking for real lessons and how not to avoid post-bubble mistakes.

Key points are:

Dotcom was lots of relatively small things and a bit random. Much of the headline grabbing nonsense was for ventures with only single digit $m of funding. AI is big money spend in a relatively few areas.

Much of the nonsense worked eventually – webvan, Pets.com and furniture.com – but maybe not Ocado. Beware of throwing away things that don’t work first time around.

Key parallels – Application Service Providers, short term fail but long-term success (as it morphed into SaaS) – will AgenticAI follow this path when it’s just too difficult at the first try?

George and Ian catch up on events in and around the UK small and mid-cap listed tech.

Big Beautiful Trade Prosperity deal – George tries to put in it some kind of context vs the scale of what is happening elsewhere. Has the UK sold its soul or did that really happen years ago? Look to the positive and question Germany’s and France’s position.

Then Oracle – the big jump. The whole world now knows what it’s like to be a UK small-cap fund manager. The big ego tech boss with a track record of missing results declares that he has HUGE committed revenues ahead of him with limited visibility on both the final customer and the funding, sounds all too familiar What does Larry Ellison understand by commitment anyway – probably depends on which of his six wives you ask.

Feels a bit like Jan 10th 2000 AOL – Time Warner. But it’s different this time – why? Because the internet needed funding and so the bankers and brokers had been seeing the big dollar signs for several years by that point. This time Wall Street has been restrained, and analysts have frequently asked tricky questions, but all that could change now.

Looking at UK company news George highlights SThree’s concerning results, Tinybuild’s recovery, whilst Ian ponders Judges Scientific in the light of Spectris and asks why UK fund managers and analysts seem to be stuck in an analog world.