Tech Nation - Non-Executive Director

Non-Executive Director - Tech Nation

Tech Nation is seeking a Non-Executive Director for its highly experienced Board of Directors. This is an exciting opportunity for a digital tech leader to help shape and guide the next stage of development of this successful tech industry catalyst.

About Tech Nation

Tech Nation is the growth platform for tech companies and leaders. It fuels the growth of game-changing founders, leaders and scaling companies so that they can positively transform societies and economies, providing them with the coaching, content and community they need for their journey in designing the future.

Tech Nation brings together a network of purposeful founders, leaders and philanthropists, progressive enterprises and policymakers, influential funds and institutions, collaborating in building the technological innovation that will improve the future for the UK and beyond. To its members, it provides learning and content, insights and analysis, coaching and research. Laser-focused on delivering powerful outcomes and impact, Tech Nation wants to create a world in which anyone with vision and drive can access the skills and support needed to scale and succeed as a game-changing leader.

With alumni featuring a quarter of the UK’s unicorns, including Babylon Health, Monzo, Checkout.com, SkyScanner, DarkTrace and Swoon, among others, Tech Nation has already become integral in shaping the UK's technology landscape, delivering over $547m to the UK economy, and has ambitious plans to unlock the growth potential of 1,000 scaling tech leadership teams across the UK, generating over $880m to the UK economy by March 2022.

Joining the Board, just as the UK looks to the tech sector to lead our post pandemic recovery, provides an exciting opportunity for a game-changing digital tech founder/leader to help shape and guide the next era of tech scale-up support, as well as helping the organisation grow commercial revenue.

About The Role

Tech Nation has built a Board of world-class calibre, to act as a model both for the companies within its network, and the wider tech industry as a whole.

Tech Nation’s Board is made up of ten Non-Executive Directors and one Executive Director (CEO Gerard Grech). The Board is now looking for one new member, to replace an end-of-tenure appointment, specifically with founder scale-up experience and from outside of the SouthEast region. This is an opportunity for a digital tech and business leader to help guide the next stage of development of this successful tech industry catalyst at a time when it’s never been needed more.

The Board of Tech Nation is responsible for the long-term strategy and success of the organisation and maintains prudent and effective controls to assess and manage risk, ensures that resources are in place for the company to meet its objectives, and reviews management performance. The Board also sets Tech Nation’s values and culture, and ensures that its obligations to its stakeholders and others are understood and met.

Non-executive appointments to the Board are based on merit and with full regard to the benefits of diversity.

Person Specification

Tech Nation is seeking a Non-Executive Director to join its Board in Summer 2021. Tech Nation lives and breathes the sector it serves; it therefore seeks a Board member with experience as a founder, ideally with a digital product development, product strategy or product commercialisation background, and a deep understanding of entrepreneurship and digital ecosystems. In addition, they are already influencers in the tech scale-up community and highly visible in their own local tech ecosystem. Experience or exposure of working with grant-funded organisations would be an added benefit.

Board members are expected to have strong ties to one or more regional UK tech clusters, and specifically for this role this should be outside of London and the South East. International connections, such as Japan, Australia or Singapore, are also desirable. Prior Non-Executive experience is not required.

Additional Information

Board composition

• Stephen Kelly, Chair, former CEO of Sage, Micro Focus, Chordiant and COO of UK Government
• Annette Wilson, Global Adviser & Chair Europe, Antler VC
• David Richards, Co-Founder and CEO of WANdisco
• Eric Collins, CEO & Founder Member, Impact X Capital Partners
• Gerard Grech, Executive Director, Chief Executive of Tech Nation
• Hussein Kanji, Partner, Hoxton Ventures
• Jo Johnson, Chair Tes Global and Access Creative
• Lesley Eccles, Co-Founder of FanDuel, Founder & CEO at Relish
• Sarah Wood, Author of Stepping Up & Co-Founder Unruly
• Trecilla Lobo, SVP People, BenevolentAI

Time Commitment and Terms of Office

The expected time commitment will be approximately 6-8 days per year, to include scheduled quarterly Board meetings, quarterly operational updates, any emergency meetings and meetings of any governance committee to which the selected candidate is appointed, as well as appropriate preparation time.

The appointment is for an initial term of 3 years, which can be renewed for a further 3 years.

Legal Structure

Tech Nation Group Limited (formally Tech City UK Ltd ) was incorporated on 14 January 2014 as a private company, limited by guarantee, without share capital (company number 088437778). It generates private income and secures grant funding through public bodies such as Her Majesty’s Government in the UK. Tech Nation’s financial year runs from April to March. Its UK government grants are administered through various departments including the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Department of International Trade (DIT).