Two Londons

There are cities we visit, and then there are cities we have already visited long before we ever arrive.

I had known London through books, films, music and stories long before I stood on its streets. Jeffrey Archer had taken me through one London, James Bond had shown me another. Cinema and books had populated the city with characters, conspiracies, adventures and possibilities. So when I finally began walking through the city, places that had existed in my imagination for years acquired coordinates. Mile End and Bow Road were not just street names, King’s Cross was not simply a railway station. The real city kept unexpectedly colliding with the city I had carried around in my head!

As days passed, another London began revealing itself; not the one of fiction, but that of history. The city that once stood at the centre of an empire upon which the sun famously never set. Now that is a difficult history to look at through the romantic lens of grandeur alone. The British Empire was built not only through extraordinary ambition and organization, but also through conquest, exploitation and immense human cost. Its legacy cannot be separated from those realities.

Yet there is something undeniable about the physical evidence of what was built. You see it in bridges that have carried generations across the river, in buildings and institutions that have survived centuries, in the streets and docks that were built for one era and repeatedly adapted for another. Standing at Greenwich and looking across the Thames, with history behind me and the modern skyline of the financial district rising ahead, gave me a completely different perspective on the word 'empire'.

Building something significant is one thing. Sustaining it is another.

It is easy to be fascinated by the moment of creation, the breakthrough, the invention, the founding and the first big success. Entrepreneurs are particularly susceptible to this. We celebrate the idea, the launch, the funding, the first major client and the first breakthrough. But London, standing on the accumulated foundations of centuries, made me think about what comes afterwards. 

I have spent years building my own small corner of the world through entrepreneurship. There have been ideas, experiments, reinventions and countless decisions that seemed enormous when I was making them. But when surrounded by things that have existed for hundreds of years, I found myself looking at that journey through a different lens.

Entrepreneurship is often measured in the language of growth: revenue, clients, employees, markets, valuations, milestones and exits. These definitely matter, but there are other questions too.

What happens when the original idea has to survive changing technologies, markets and generations? What does it take to build something that does not merely become successful, but also durable? Can what I am building survive me, become systems and maybe institutions, and continue to create value for people I may never meet? That is a very different ambition from simply building a successful business.

The London I imagined gave me stories. The real one has given me perspective. 

Perhaps that is the greatest difference between creating something and building something. The first is an act of imagination. The second is an act of time.