Shalini Khemka Cultivates UK Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Visionary Builds Network to Support Business Growth

Shalini Khemka is dedicated to fostering the UK’s most vibrant entrepreneurial community. Her extensive career, marked by early adaptability and a passion for connecting people, has culminated in the creation of E2E, a thriving network for business leaders.

From Personal Experience to a Communal Solution

Khemka’s people skills were honed by frequent moves during her youth, a consequence of her father’s work as an orthopaedic consultant. This experience instilled in her a comfort and enjoyment in interacting with new individuals. Over a 30-year career, she has held various business and advisory positions, including co-founding the world’s first online trade finance company.

The inception of E2E in 2011 was driven by Khemka’s own entrepreneurial missteps and a desire to share valuable lessons with peers. She recognized a critical need for a community where founders could find support and solutions.

“My currency is the people I get to know, currency isn’t the money I make. It’s actually the life experiences,” stated Khemka. She aims to address the isolation many entrepreneurs face, asking, “When people are not part of this kind of community, who do they phone? How do they solve it?”

E2E: Connecting Founders, Capital, and Talent

E2E currently boasts over 24,000 members, with 80% based in the UK, and hosts approximately 50 events annually. The platform facilitates connections between founders, investors, and non-executives, crucial for raising capital and securing talent. The network primarily supports founders with turnovers exceeding £1 million, focusing on businesses in the £10 million to £100 million range.

“If they’re looking to fundraise, they’re a decent founder and we believe in their credibility of the business and where they’re trying to take it, we will support them,” Khemka added.

Born in India, Khemka earned an economics degree from the University of Essex. Her early career included a role at Coopers & Lybrand before she developed the business plan for the pioneering online trade finance platform while at Deutsche Bank.

In 1999, she joined a company founded by her former global head of trade finance, where she utilized her innovative plan for trading letters of credit online. Later, while at Lloyds TSB’s private equity arm, she identified shortcomings in her initial venture, which sowed the seeds for E2E.

Khemka’s key takeaways from her first company were the importance of raising capital on time, avoiding premature exits, and securing the right advisors. She reflected, “I had met some amazing entrepreneurs and I realised that I wasn’t so amazing and that I’d done some really poor things. So I thought, why don’t I help other people not make the mistakes I had?”

Championing Entrepreneurship and Policy Influence

Initially, Khemka sought to assist founders through her work at Lloyds Development Capital (LDC). She credits a crucial opportunity to engage Richard Branson, who eventually agreed to be E2E’s president, as instrumental in the organization’s growth.

E2E’s membership, starting at £750, now comprises 24,000 SMEs contributing £230 billion in turnover and employing over a million people in the UK economy. The platform’s technology links founders with mentors based on profiles and expertise, covering areas from tax and governance to mental well-being.

“It’s very common for entrepreneurs to go through so much stress and they can’t talk to their immediate family,” Khemka noted. “It’s actually better sometimes to talk to a CEO equivalent and how they have coped with it.”

In 2023, Khemka launched the E2E 100, an initiative celebrating top-performing British companies and promoting scale-up entrepreneurship. “We have to celebrate entrepreneurship a lot more in the UK,” she urged. “And this is one way of celebrating the people who have made the biggest impact.”

She also aims to share insights from these businesses with the government to improve access to funding. “One of the things that we need to do is make access to funding a lot easier here,” she stated. She criticized last autumn’s budget, arguing it indicated Labour was “not the government for business” due to tax changes that could hinder investment.

Khemka’s overarching goal is to solidify the UK’s position as the premier location for starting and scaling businesses. “The big thing I’d like to try and achieve is to keep building this ecosystem, keep making the UK the place to start and scale rather than to start and then go elsewhere,” she concluded.

She believes the solution lies in attracting institutional investors by making venture capital funds in the UK more appealing. With E2E nearing 25,000 members, Khemka envisions it as the indispensable resource for every founder.