UK Cyber Flywheel – why we must think big is best in the UK to rival other start-up nations!

Yvonne Eskenzi, Co-Founder of Eskenzi PR, writes about her experience of this year’s UK Cyber Flywheel. The event was held on the 9th October 2025 at The National Theatre.

I’ve been to many events in my time but the UK Cyber Flywheel that was organised last week topped it all!

I first met Alistair Paterson, CEO and co-founder of Harmonic Security and co-founder of Digital Shadows, in a 15 minute chat at RSA when he told me about his brilliant idea of bringing the movers and shakers in the UK together to make the UK a place that would rival the start-up and scale-up communities of Israel and the US. I immediately resonated with his vision as it’s something I’ve felt passionately about for many years after helping so many companies become billion dollar success stories and yet seen the lack of similar support and structures sadly lacking here in the UK.  

Last Thursday Alistair smashed it, by bringing his little – or should I say MASSIVE – black book of contacts together to make something magical happen. Anyone who was anyone was in the room, putting founders together with VCs, stirring up the government representatives so they felt empowered and energised to do something, CISOs were there to meet with new young entrepreneurs and those successful entrepreneurs who have already made it were also called upon to mentor and nurture and invest in our new burgeoning start-up community.  Alistair alongside his incredible team including Mariana Padilla did what they set out to do, inspire and impassion people to make a change (I hope!).   

The panel of cool UK entrepreneurs who have made it were all there and tasked with getting the room excited enough to commit to investment and change the UK landscape to one of collaboration and support and encouragement, and change the mindset from just being regional to global, a cybersecurity community of founders who don’t just want to make it big, but mega – the mantra of the day was  “let’s be the no.1 in cybersecurity and be the biggest, the best and proud to be successful.”  

The stage had phenomenal representation from the likes of James Hadley from Immersive Labs, Tim Sadler, founder of Tessian, Dave Palmer co-founder of Dark Trace and of course Alistair Paterson from Harmonic.  The room was packed with VCs, decision-makers, CISO, investors, government representatives and other important folks that can make things happen. I, for one, am committed to helping UK companies to become global brands – but it doesn’t happen in silos.  We all need to support them, share our networks and pick up the phone when someone comes knocking to see how we can help.