Today’s newsletter comes from our Research Director, Eamonn Ives. Normal service with Philip resumes next week!
While I’m hardly the world’s most sentimental person, there are a handful of things I routinely look forward to each year: that first sunny day of spring, the return of Premier League football, and Patrick and John Collison publishing Stripe’s annual company letter.
If you think you have better things to do with your time than read some corporate musings, think again. Far from the inane platitudes that give ‘corporatese’ its deservedly bad name, their annual stocktake is always worth your full attention.
In their latest letter, the pair examine several trends that should interest each and every entrepreneur. Among other things, they show how income concentration among top firms is approaching record levels, how stablecoins are already reshaping B2B payments, and how agentic commerce might transform both professional and personal life.
Like all good writers, the Collisons save the best for last. Invoking the work of Joel Mokyr, one of the winners of last year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, they note:
“In The Political Economy of Technological Change, Mokyr also observed that new technologies have in the past often failed, despite their economic superiority, because technological decision-making implicates not only suppliers and customers, but also a broad variety of nonmarket “aggregators” (regulators, committees, courts) that influence what is adopted. As AI and the internet expand the scope of what’s possible, synthetic impediments to adoption and adaptation will become increasingly costly. Our bifurcating economy shows that growth is contingent on the application of useful knowledge and not some preordained result of its abstract availability.”
The point is worth dwelling on. It’s not enough to invent something better. Whether it actually gets used — at scale, and quickly enough to matter — depends just as much on permission from regulators as it does on consumer demand and entrepreneurial guile. We’ve seen this play out already with nuclear energy and drones — and we’re watching it unfold again with advances like AI and GLP-1 agonists. An increasingly pertinent question for innovation policy now is not whether we can invent miraculous new technologies, but whether institutional environments will give them the oxygen they require to breathe.
Here at The Entrepreneurs Network, we can’t promise to crack cold fusion, engineer room-temperature superconductors, or invent any other technological marvels. What we can try to do, however, is to ensure that when society’s innovators make progress, the policy landscape stands ready to facilitate rather than frustrate them.
After decades of relative stagnation, it’s patently clear that we are now at a juncture in human history. Readers of my Big Idea this week will know that new technologies appear to be diffusing into the economy at an ever-quickening pace. It is incumbent on policymakers to ensure that regulatory barriers to socially useful innovation do not put that trend into reverse. Before us awaits an abundant society — if we can permit it.
On the Hunt
On Tuesday, we hosted Sir Jeremy Hunt MP for a fireside chat, adeptly chaired by our Patron, Steve Rigby. In the audience were around 50 entrepreneurs, all armed with incisive questions to pose to the former Chancellor.
As it was held under Chatham House Rule, I can’t divulge exactly what was discussed, but we covered a lot of ground. I mentioned on LinkedIn how one of the most interesting parts of the evening was Sir Jeremy’s reflection on the similarities between being a top politician and leading entrepreneur.
Since then, I’ve also spent more time thinking about his observation of how we need to get better at embracing risk — both in business, and, perhaps more importantly, in politics. This wasn’t a paean for recklessness, but to acknowledge that too often our political system rewards ‘not doing wrong’ far more so than it rewards ‘actively doing good’.
Many of Britain’s thorniest problems have festered for decades. Rather than always trying to stave off the worst-case scenario, perhaps civil servants should be empowered to experiment more boldly with novel solutions. When venture capitalists allocate investment, they do so in the hope that a handful of winning bets cover many multiples more losing ones. Gains may stand to be made if we could develop a similarly healthy tolerance for failure in policymaking too.
We’ll be organising more fireside chats with other political leaders in the near future. To receive invitations directly, you can join as a Member for free here. If you’re in a position to support us financially, you can use the same link to join us as a Supporter or Adviser (for those who already do — thank you).
Last Call
If you haven’t got around to it yet, there’s still time to respond to our latest Entrepreneurs Survey. Whether you’re optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between — we want to know what founders really think about Britain’s current state of affairs. It only takes 10 minutes to complete, and you’ll be joining hundreds of fellow founders who have made their voices count.