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Michael Holland was a banker in the Middle East, New York and London. He became a serial entrepreneur in the financial services sector and is now an angel investor in small companies.
He read Politics, Philosophy & Economics at Lincoln College, Oxford.

Dr Paul Goldsmith, MA BM BCh MRCP PhD has a background in founding and building life sciences companies across both the drug and digital therapeutics space, and has extensive experience in frontline clinical medicine and complex systems strategy. His special interest is evolutionary biology and applying insights from this field to the challenges of modern life. He has held NHS Clinical Networks, Vanguard and Senate roles. He is currently also President of Closed Loop Medicine and a Director of MDU Investments and the MDU. He has authored policy papers in various areas and is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies and at Radix.

Dermot is a Financial Technology entrepreneur with over 25 years’ experience working in Financial Services. He founded the investment platform Kuber Ventures where he was responsible for the financial management.

Sally was born and went to school in Liverpool. She is a Labour peer, worked for eight years in 10 Downing Street and was Minister for Women and Equalities.

She has always been very involved in education, and since 2005 has been Chair or advisor to charities serving disadvantaged young people including ARK, Ambition Institute and Frontline. She is currently a trustee of the Education Policy Institute and is also Chair of the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust.
She served on the Olympic Delivery Authority board for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and is a former Chair of Ofsted and vice-chair at King's College London.

Founder of the civic renewal campaigns MindTheGap! (2002) and PositivePolitics (2004), before his election to Parliament in 2010 after a 15 year career helping launch, finance & manage high growth start-ups in in technology venture capital, George founded Big Tent in 2017 as an antidote to the divisive partisan politics.

Former Minister for Life Science in the Coalition Gov, Chair of the Prime Ministers Policy Board & Minister of State for Decarbonisation and Digitisation at DfT, he left the front bench in 2020 to focus on the politics of regeneration & renewal.

Laura Round is Associate Director at freuds where she works on purpose campaigns and the SDGs. Laura was Special Adviser in the Ministry of Defence, the Department for International Development and the Cabinet Office where she advised the Secretary of State on the Department’s policy and communications strategies. In government, she helped put the environment and climate change at the heart of the aid budget. She was also a strong advocate of the role that the private sector can play in sustainable development, including through ESG and purpose-led strategies. Laura sits on the Advisory Council of the Coalition for Global Prosperity.

Mark has a strategy and policy background. He has spent the last four years analysing domestic policy and global megatrends. He then translates the impacts of such trends on consumer behaviour, the workplace, supply chains, infrastructure and public policy. In his new role as Director of Skills, Mark assesses how those changes will affect the demand and supply of skills. His work now involves helping places, businesses and government to develop strategies to improve their future skills gap.

Mark is a disruptive thinker. He edited KPMG’s “Reimagine Public Policy” programme, contributing ideas on how to build more homes, make social care better and more productive, eliminating the need for food banks and boosting life long learning. And in Reimagine a Digital Society, Mark’s film presents a future in which AI makes many more of our buying decisions; and then explores the impact that will have on consumer facing businesses including the 'human' skills needed to educate the bots in how to meet our needs.

Always happy to submit his ideas to challenge and debate, Mark is an experienced writer, thinker, keynote speaker, and live broadcast panellist and presenter. He is a regular panellist on KPMG’s “The Business of Brexit” podcast, BBC’s “Wake up to Money”, and “Business Briefing”.

Rory is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy in the UK, an attractively vague job title which has allowed him to co-found a behavioural science practice within the agency. He works with a consulting practice of psychology graduates who look for ‘unseen opportunities’ in consumer behaviour - these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make. He has variously been President of the IPA, Chair of the Judges for the Direct Jury at Cannes, and has spoken at TED Global. He writes regular columns for the Spectator, Market Leader and Impact, and also occasional pieces for Wired.

Don Boyd is a film director, producer and writer. He began his career at the BBC after graduating from the London Film School in 1970. In his early twenties he directed over 40 commercials and two feature films both premiered at the London Film Festival - Intimate Reflections (1974) and East of Elephant Rock (1975) which starred John Hurt. In the 1980’s after a 3 year stint in Hollywood working for Paramount and Universal, he produced several celebrated British films: Alan Clarke's Scum, Derek Jarman’s The Tempest, Julien Temple’s The Great Rock’n Roll Swindle, Lindsay Anderson's Look Back In Anger, the Palme D’Or nominated opera film Aria, and War Requiem with Laurence Olivier and Tilda Swinton.
In 1988 he returned to his directorial career with Goldeneye starring Charles Dance, Twenty One written by Zoe Heller which was nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and followed that with 3 independent feature films - Kleptomania, Lucia and My Kingdom written by the Guardian’s Nick Davies starring Richard Harris and Lynn Redgrave. He then directed several celebrated documentaries including Andrew and Jeremy Get Married for BBC’s Storyville, nominated for IDFA, and 19 films with Ruby Wax including their BAFTA nominated film about Imelda Marcos.
He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter in the College of Humanities (where he is an Honorary Doctor), was a Governor of the London Film School for 30 years and Artistic Director of www.hibrow.tv, an online platform for the arts where he directed and/or produced over 200 hours of original programming including several feature documentaries premiered at several major festivals - Sundance, Telluride, London, New York, Melbourne, Karlovy Vary.
He has written for The Guardian, Times, Sunday Times and The Independent. His first novel Margot’s Secrets published in 2011 has been optioned to be produced as a television series. His latest directorial project Beatrice and Her Father, developed by the UK Film Council (BFI), is scheduled for a late 2021 start date.
He has lectured at a broad range of academic institutions globally, most particularly a roster of master classes on filmmaking for The Guardian in 2014/15 and has moderated Creative Dialogues a series of in conversation events hosted at the University of Exeter featuring prominent personalities in the cultural spheres. He is on the advisory board at the department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media at the University of York.

Dermot is a Financial Technology entrepreneur with over 25 years’ experience working in Financial Services. He founded the investment platform Kuber Ventures where he was responsible for the financial management.

Suzie has extensive experience organising large scale events for private sector, public policy and charitable organisations. Before joining the Big tent, Suzie's previous roles include Head of External Affairs at Demos and Head of Events at the Behavioural Insights Team.

Georgie has for many years worked in sales, fundraising and events; in 2012 she sold an events business. Immediately prior to joining the Big Tent in 2018 she was Head of Events at a military charity with responsibility for corporate fundraising as well as sponsorship and managing budgets.

Trin moved over to London from Australia five years ago and has volunteered and worked in the charity/community sector in the UK. She has previously worked as a policy analyst at the Department of Treasury in Australia and as a research assistant at KPMG.

Eve recently graduated with a First Class degree in Political Science and International Relations. She has a particular interest in policy making, especially in education and social policy, having achieved a First Class in her Dissertation, titled: ‘Absences and Silences: An investigation into institutionalised racial prejudice within the curriculum policy of the English Education System’.