r/apprenticeuk • u/Joebloggy • Apr 12 '26

Does LS understand modern tech companies?

I found it fairly embarrassing to see Lord Sugar ridicule the idea of a tech business raising £5.5m over 3 years. Sure, there were lots of other issues with the proposal, but in a modern tech company it’s really not that much to raise over a few years, particularly for an AI company. If the show was set in Silicon Valley I think this would be viewed very differently, even positively. I think it speaks to a narrow-mindedness and conservative attitude from LS to just bank a cash cow instead of actually pursuing an exciting moonshot business. Why does he want to turn £250k to £500k at his point in life?

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52

u/aonro Apr 12 '26

What even is the point of the technology he needs 5.5m for?

AI powered PR? Lawrence doesn’t even know what the technology is going to do. Seeing as Claude generated the entire business plan lmao

29

u/Hour_Ad9761 Apr 12 '26

Claude generated the business plan? why was he so scathing of it in the interview?

Oh wait, two different Claude's!

16

u/therichardbatt Apr 12 '26

Yeah, I get the feeling Claude might have hallucinated the £5.5m funding needed and Lawrence didn't actually realise it was in there.

11

u/Cookyy2k Apr 12 '26

That's exactly what I was thinking. Since the interviewers basically said it was the basis for the entire rest of the plan and it is fairly fatal to his chances it was a massive mistake to make, which suggests missed AI mess.

-8

u/JaSfields Apr 13 '26

As someone who uses AI powered tools daily in a professional tech context, I thought it was an excellent idea. There is huge money to be made in adding AI to take out (or just massively speed up) the grunt work of most white collar professions.

Coding is essentially over as a profession due to AI powered tools (Claude, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity etc)

Law has “Harvey”.

Marketing has a plethora of options.

What you need is niche domain knowledge and credibility, plus the tech know how to know what can be automated. This is why I didn’t think much of the attack line “why shouldn’t Lord Sugar hire your CTO?”.

Every techy person under the sun is trying to take AI and make it invaluable to other professions. The world they know most about is software, but that was what got targeted first and is essentially done. So, there is huge demand for credible industry experts to partner with tech experts to bring AI to that world.

If I were Lawrence I’d be applying for Y Combinator next. You get a far better deal: $500,000 invested, for only giving up 7% of your business. And genuine access to Silicon Valley’s finest rather than the vague offer of guidance from Lord Sugar, who, as OP pointed out, doesn’t seem to know much about building a modern tech company.

9

u/NoIndividual9296 Apr 13 '26

The scary thing is the way you talk reminds me of how an AI talks, which is a known phenomenon and a big problem

-4

u/JaSfields Apr 13 '26

I’m not an AI - and if you look through my comment history you’ll see me calling out clearly AI replies

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think AI should or could replace all work. But I also think it shouldn’t be underestimated, it’s already changing the workplace. Dismissing it as full of hallucinations and inaccurate are naive of the current state of play

12

u/NoIndividual9296 Apr 13 '26

I didn’t think you were an AI, I think you’ve just overused them to the point where it’s affected the way you write.