Common Path launches to connect low-income graduates with UK startups

Today marks the public launch of Common Path, a programme created to get graduate talent from low-income backgrounds into startups, and to challenge an industry that prides itself on meritocracy to prove it.

Graduates and employers alike can register interest in being involved at common.ventures/talent.     Common Path is backed by a coalition of the UK’s most influential names in social mobility and venture capital: the Sutton Trust, The Hg Foundation, Atomico, Phoenix Court, as well as support from upReach. 

For all the talk of disruption, UK tech has a social mobility problem. Just 9 per cent of the country’s tech workforce comes from a low-income background. In financial services, the figure is 29 per cent, and in law, it is 26 per cent. When it comes to the people hiring this talent, only 18 per cent of startup founders come from working-class backgrounds, compared with 45 per cent of the UK population.

Private school startup founders are approximately 500 per cent overrepresented compared to the wider population. The sector that most loudly promotes modern workplaces, diversity of thought, and low barrier to entry is actually one of the hardest to break into without the right schooling, the right network, or the right postcode.   

That gap is exactly what Common Ventures (formerly Social Mobility Ventures) is built to close and is now the UK’s most active community of state-educated founders, operators and investors. F

or generations in Britain, “common” has been a quiet insult: shorthand for being ordinary, working class, or somehow less worthy. Common Path turns that on its head, treating a less affluent upbringing not as something to play down on a CV, but as the source of the qualities that are fundamental for successful startup operators: resourcefulness, resilience and the instinct to make something from nothing.

The programme is built on the belief that talent is everywhere, but opportunities are not.  

Applicants will be selected not on where they went to school or who they know, but on demonstrable drive, resilience, self-awareness and mental agility.

Each cohort of 15-20 will undertake four intensive week-long sprints, covering the realities of early-stage company building, from product and growth to operations and culture. Throughout this, Common Path will match talent with programme mentors and then into roles at leading UK startups.  

David Houghton, Co-founder of Common Ventures, asserts that tech likes to tell itself it’s the great meritocracy, that a good idea and a laptop are all you need, but the data says otherwise.

“We named ourselves Common Ventures because for too long that word has been used to put people down, and we’re reclaiming it.

Common Path is about proving that the talent, instinct and drive it takes to thrive in a startup are spread evenly across the country, even when the opportunities aren’t. We’re not asking founders to lower the bar. We’re asking them to stop recruiting solely from the same postcodes, schools and networks.”

Startups keen to hire from the first cohort, as well as prospective applicants, can register their interest at: common.ventures/talent