Amid accusations that Brits don’t work, BrewDog co-founder James Watt is starting a game show to fund British entrepreneurs.
ADVERTISEMENTBrewDog co-founder James Watt has announced a reality show that will give out the largest cash prize in UK TV history.
The craft beer businessman who stepped down as CEO of BrewDog last year wants the show ‘House of Unicorns’ to promote entrepreneurialism in the UK with a £2 million (€2.37 million) cash prize.
Watt wants to “double the number of Unicorns in the UK by 2030”, referring to start-up companies valued at over $1 billion (€0.95 billion) but not on the stock market. Of the UK market’s 400,000 start-ups, only 86 are Unicorns.
“Building a world-beating company is no longer just about innovation, technology, or even scale; it’s about fame, it’s building a brand that captivates the hearts and minds of an audience,” the show’s website explains.
Companies that take part will be on a “journey to not only scale their businesses but also build brands that evoke emotion, inspire loyalty, and become famous.”
The six-week experience will act as a “crash course” to become a Unicorn.
Of the £2 million cash prize, half of that sum will be allocated to a winner based on an audience vote.
Balancing act
Watt has recently claimed that the current Labour government, elected in June 2024, has made it harder to start a business in the UK. He’s also recently heavily criticised the UK public’s appetite for working and productivity.
“The whole concept of work-life balance was invented by people who hate what they do. So if you love what you do you don’t need work-life balance, you need work-life integration,” Watt said in a much-derided and now-deleted social media post.
In a recent interview with LBC radio, he also said: “I spend a lot of time in the US and in the US, if someone’s successful, you find people cheering them on, you find people celebrating that success because they’re so inculcated with the American dream is they’re thinking ‘that could be me’.”
“Whereas in the UK we don’t have that. So there tends to be a kind of inbuilt cynicism, bitterness sometimes, a kind of resentment towards people who are successful – because people don’t believe they can go out and do that themselves,” Watt added.
Watt founded BrewDog in 2007 in Aberdeenshire with Matt Dickie. Before he stepped down as CEO in 2024, he was accused of creating a “culture of fear” within the company by former employees in 2021.
A 2022 documentary by the BBC saw several ex-BrewDog employees accuse Watt of inappropriate behaviour. Watt’s lawyers have denied all allegations.
He also oversaw the company cutting employee wages from the real living wage to the national minimum wage in 2024. BrewDog claimed the pay cuts were “necessary” after making a £24 million (€28.42 million) operating loss the previous year. The 2023 losses were later amended to an even greater figure, £59.2 million (€70.11 million).
Following the mistreatment allegations from 2021, the Punks with Purpose campaign group then-criticised the pay cuts for proving “there is no principle too dearly held for them to abandon and is directly opposed to BrewDog’s previous claim that their ‘crew are their most important resource’ and giving them fair pay for the work they do is one of their ‘core beliefs’.”
