Small teams. Big companies.

There is a story repeated in every country on earth: the future is built in one valley in California, and everywhere else is a feeder. Governments copy it. Founders fly to it.

We do not accept it. Founders are made, not flown out. They are made wherever someone with conviction backs them before it is safe, in a room where the standard is higher than anywhere they have been.

In the age we are entering, a company is three to five people and the right room. What used to take a floor of staff now takes a team that fits around one table.

So the question changes. Not how big a company can grow, but how much a few people can build. That is the number Whitmont will judge itself by, and on that number London can lead the world.

A school and a fund in one building, for teams at the very start, building in the categories that are only now emerging. Not an accelerator with a logo wall. A place, with the forms of an institution:

Two intakes a year to begin with. Three when the Room has earned it.

• The Room, where the teams sit.
• The Fellowship, which a Fellow carries for life.
• The Board, whose names go on the Wall in the order they signed.
• The Number, published every year.

I do not promise a date. I do not promise money. I promise the rest of my life.

Products get sold and agencies close. This is the thing that will be left. Whitmont starts when it starts, and once it starts it never stops.

An institution has to earn the right to open its door. So before there is a Room, there is the work: research, published in the open, on the fields where the next companies will be born. Years of it, if that is what it takes.

By the time the door opens, the thinking will already be trusted, and the people who were reading from the beginning will know they were early.

Do what you can. That is the ground. Why not you. That is the wing.

The next great London company will be built by three people in a room. Why not you.