Do large corporates do more harm than good by donating to the “In” campaign? | Philip Salter argues NO in City AM

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The Entrepreneurs Network’s director Philip Salter argued against the idea that Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were wrong to get involved in the EU debate.

“Companies have a single overarching responsibility: to deliver for their shareholders. How they do this will vary buy ativan cod from one company to another.. but some will think it reasonable to back organisations they see as aligned with the interests of their business. This is all well and good in a democratic state.”

Read the article in full here.

Female Founders Forum: Our new group to boost women entrepreneurs

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While news that UK businesses raised $3.6bn in VC funding in 2015 is encouraging, it is important to note that women still face far greater difficulties scaling up their businesses than their male counterparts.

As I write the Huffington Post this week, male entrepreneurs in Britain are 86 per cent more likely to be VC funded, and 59 per cent more likely to secure angel investment, than female entrepreneurs.

Which is why we’ve set up our Female Founders Forum – a group of some to he UK’s most inspirational female entrepreneurs, including Kathryn Parsons, Sara Murray, Rita Sharma OBE, Laura Tenison MBE and Julie Meyer MBE.

Find out more about the project here, or read my HuffPo article on the group here.

In conversation with Unruly founder Sarah Wood

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ideo ad tech company Unruly hit the big time and the headlines in September when it was sold to News Corp for a reported £114m. The deal will mean up to £68m in proceeds for the company’s co-founders – Scott Button, Matt Cooke, and Sarah Wood.

While the tech startup scene is often dominated by male-led businesses, Sarah says that for the first six or seven how to buy ativan online years in her startup, gender wasn’t even something she considered. She speaks to our programmes director Annabel Denham about balancing her home life with running one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech companies, her role as a London Tech Ambassador, and seizing every opportunity to promote (women’s) entrepreneurship.

Read Annabel’s Huffington Post interview with Sarah here.

The entrepreneur behind a Revolutionary new fintech startup

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In his latest Forbes column, The Entrepreneurs Network’s director Philip Salter interviews Nikolay Storonsky – who founded global money app Revolut.

The app, connected to a multi-currency card, has over 55,000 active users and has processed more than $140m, equivalent to $1.3m a day since its launch in July. It has the backing of Venrex, Point9, SeedCamp and Balderton Capital.

Find out more about the ex-Credit Suisse trader and his mission to tackle foreign transaction fees here.

In conversation with the entrepreneur giving kids credit

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Alick Varma – Osper founder and member of the Leap 100 – speaks to our programmes director Annabel Denham about his mission to change the world.

In her Huffington Post interview with the inspirational entrepreneur, Annabel writes:

“Investors are showing a growing interest in the double bottom line. As Mishcon de Reya partner Charlotte Davidson points out, ‘Entrepreneurs have to demonstrate not only the financial efficacy of their business model but also the social impact they will deliver’.

“While even social impact businesses do need to be businesses first and foremost… If they fail to deliver on their initial mission, they fail to validate their existence. 

“It could be a tough pill to swallow for the most archetypal profit-driven entrepreneurs: you might have to put bettering the world ahead of making money.”

Read the interview in full here.

Experiences of a female entrepreneur

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It’s interesting being asked to talk about “Trailblazing Women: Challenges Facing Female Entrepreneurs,” because for the first six or seven years working at Unruly gender wasn’t something I considered. I wasn’t really aware of the broader context because I was just getting on and building a business.

I had come from a career in academia, where there were lots of successful female lecturers and at school, I was taught by female teachers – including for maths and science. So it never really occurred to me that gender might be an issue. 48 per cent of our team at Unruly are female, including half our senior management and half the board. It was only in 2011, when we were securing a Series A investment round to help us expand and diversify our product, that I realised something was different. Until that point, I had been buried in work, building out the publisher network, building an ad operations team, design team and marketing team. When I resurfaced, I saw that other companies weren’t like ours. And it was only then that I thought gender might be an issue because our team, with a female founder, looked very different from other teams in tech.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time with other female entrepreneurs – who are incredible and hugely inspirational. They recognise how difficult it can be, especially when it comes to funding. It was during our funding round, when we met many venture capitalists, that I realised that, as a female, you are looked at differently, and unconscious biases come into play, but it highlights one of the great things about running your own business: people underestimate you at their peril. So there is a lot of unconscious bias.

Since then, I haven’t let stereotyping affect me. I speak a lot within the advertising industry about gender issues facing women as they move through their careers. In advertising you see so many talented women at the start of their careers, but when they leave to start a family they often don’t come back. There isn’t the flexibility of working buy real ativan online hours, childcare is perceived as being too expensive, there are too few female role models, and there aren’t enough supportive managers.

I always recommend the benefits of getting networked with other women and this has been an important part of my own perdonal journey. Some of my best friends are female entrepreneurs and businesswomen who I respect and learn from – I was lucky enough to meet Divinia Knowles of Pact Coffee back in 2010 at the London Tech COO Roundtable. Edwina Dunn has been a huge inspiration and the brilliant Deborah Wosskow, CEO of Love Home Swap, joined me on a panel just yesterday for City Unrulyversity – a pop-up university for entrepreneurs, which I run with Cass professor Caroline Wiertz. We bring academia and business together to help the next generation of tech entrepreneurs.

Which brings me to another point: people sometimes struggle to grasp my transition from academic to entrepreneur. It’s not the traditional path they expect from a tech entrepreneur. So it turns out I’m the wrong gender and from the wrong profession – but that just goes to show that anyone can help to build a successful tech company if they have the right team around them.

And this would be my message to anyone setting up a business: have a good team around you – both the team without and the team within. Work to make your team as diverse as possible, because then you can connect with as many different people as possible. Diversity is a highly strategic and under-rated business asset. If Scott, myself and Matt were all alike, we wouldn’t have the same impact. When you have a diversity of people, of styles, ages, backgrounds and skills, it makes you more powerful.

Sarah Wood co-founded video ad tech company Unruly in 2006 with Scott Button and Matt Cooke. It has since grown to become one of the world’s most innovative ad tech businesses and in September 2015 was acquired by News Corp. This article is a transcript of her speech at a Leap 100/The Entrepreneurs Network breakfast on 3 December 2015.

Experiences of an impact entrepreneur

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When I was 11 years old, my parents sat me down and said: “Alick, we’d like to talk to you about the P&L of your life”. I responded by asking what a “P” and an “L” were. They explained how much money was being brought into the household, how much was being spent on me, and they said they wanted to give me as much responsibility as possible for the money I needed to survive.

Whereas the average teenager gets pocket money of £5.36 a week, I was given £250 a month from the age of 11. With that, I had to buy my own clothes, pay for my own travel; I even bought a new tennis racket. At one point my parents suggested I pay my own school fees! But apparently my bank account had limits which prevented that from happening.

When I arrived at university, I was handed a £3,000 loan – the second largest loan we are given in our lives. Because I had been managing my own money for seven years the first thing I did was get out a piece of paper and write out a budget. It wasn’t until then that I realised no one else had been taught to manage money. Similarly, when I went to work at McKinsey, my colleagues – people who were incredibly intelligent and earning a good salary – had the same problem. I even had analysts offer to buy my Excel spreadsheets, because they’d never set a budget before.

We are living in a world where over 75 per cent of 18-30 year olds say they have made at least one major financial mistake in their lives by the time they reach 30. This is a big problem, worsened by the fact that we have financial systems which benefit from those mistakes.

I realised that the way to help people manage money was to start young, because it’s in childhood that our habits and confidence around money are built. So I started working on the business in 2012 and launched 18 months ago. Our belief then, as it is now, is that the best way to empower young people to manage money is through learning by doing. So we decided to look at a children’s bank accounts and try to rebuild them in a way that is both educational and empowering.

The first bank account we get is often the start of a lifelong banking relationship. It’s probably the longest standing relationship that humans have with an organisation during their lives: I set up an HSBC account when I was 12, and 20 years later I still bank with them. That’s not a reflection on HSBC’s performance, it’s because there’s nothing better out there.

Setting up a first bank account is an opportunity to empower and delight children, but as with a lot of things with banks today, they were missing out on an opportunity. So we built the children’s bank account with our own orange debit card, which parents order online and attach to their own bank accounts. There’s an app for parents and an app for children.

It’s the start of a bigger journey we’re on to transform financial services from the ground up, from a very young age to university and beyond.

Since our June 2014 launch, we’ve grown at around 20-25 per cent every month. We are shipping hundreds of debit cards every day and are set to become one of the largest banks in the UK for children – without actually being a bank. Over 60 per cent of children who use Osper log in every day, which is exciting as it shows how engaged they are with the service.

Interestingly, unlike high street banks which offer a free account, Osper is a service which is paid for. It’s fascinating to see parents sign up to something that costs £1 a month when they could get it for free, but I think they see value in what we’re doing.

In our early stages, we were approached by a couple of social impact funds, which were excited about what we were doing. And we are excited about having a social impact. But our belief at Osper is that the way to achieve a social impact is to start with the individual. If you can get a service that children and adults love and use, and which builds good habits, then that will amplify itself to a social level. At Osper, we think about having social impact by having an effect at the individual level which then scales to the masses, rather than having social impact which is entirely separate to the individual.

People often ask what came first: the bottom line or changing the world. Our starting point was how we empower children around the world to manage money responsibly. With a mission like that, you undoubtedly have social impact. But we then started to identify the business and revenue channels which support that mission. We have the largest breakdown of the spending habits of children, by age, gender and postcode, in the UK. We could collaborate with retailers tomorrow, but that doesn’t fit into why we set up the company. When you’re building a business with a social impact and specific mission in mind, the mission has to come before profit if you’re to get where you want to be in the long term.

Alick Varma was keynote speaker at a Leap 100 Power Breakfast on 1st December 2015.

Meet Jeff Lynn: The disruptive entrepreneur behind crowdfunding platform Seedrs

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In her latest Huffington Post column, Entrepreneurs Network programmes director Annabel Denham speaks to the charismatic Seedrs founder Jeff Lynn about Andy Murray, GQ, and why he set up here rather than in sunny Silicon Valley.

“Lynn saw the concept of people putting their personal money behind businesses that interest them as the future of finance. Perhaps such vision is necessary if you’ve made it your mission to shake up the finance industry. Disruption, after all, is all about risk-taking, trusting intuition and rejecting the status quo.

“Crowdfunding can certainly help entrepreneurs raise funds when they need it most. Let’s hope it continues its rise from a niche to the main financier of small businesses. With over 500,000 new companies being started in Britain every year, our entrepreneurs need all the support they can get.”

Read the article in full here.

The rise and rise of crowdfunding

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Following on from a Power Breakfast with Seedrs co-founder Jeff Lynn earlier this month, our director Philip Salter has addressed the role crowdfunding plays in creating a society where more people feel the benefits of capitalism.

“The UK arguably has the best regulation in the world around crowdfunding. It’s light clear and the Financial Conduct Authority it known for being open and consultative. Lynn himself can be credited with helping create a decent buy ativan online overnight delivery regulation landscape, after making Seedrs the first regulated crowdfunder.

“Of course, investing directly in companies isn’t a one-way bet and there is nearly as much money to be lost as made. But crowdfunding isn’t just, or even predominantly, about trying to make money: it’s about investing in a person or product that you believe in. It’s an act of faith; the ties that bind people together.”

Read Philip’s article in full here.

Devolution of business rates: A welcome announcement

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Philip Salter Director of The Entrepreneurs Network, comments on the devolution of business rates announced in today’s Autumn Statement:

“The Chancellor’s decision to give local councils full control of business rates is a welcome surprise announcement. Devolving rates will stimulate competition between councils and encourage local government to be more responsive to business needs. However, business leaders will need to be better buy brand ativan online engaged with local government to ensure councils are fiscally responsible. For example, city-wide mayors will be given the power to levy a business rates premium for local infrastructure projects, and as such businesses will need to make sure their views are properly voiced through their Local Enterprise Partnership.”

For more information, please contact:

annabel@tenentrepreneurs.org

07919 355290

Osborne’s Autumn Statement: Good News for Entrepreneurs

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I felt sorry for Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell when he approached the dispatch box today to respond to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement, our director Philip Salter writes in his latest Forbes column. Many of his planned rebuttals – on tax credits or police spending, for example – were dud.

“But entrepreneurs and business owners in general can breathe easy. Before the Chancellor stood up there were fears that Entrepreneurs’ Relief would be cut. There were also concerns that the Chancellor would try to force contractors and consultants onto payrolls if they work with a company for over a month.

“Instead, bolstered by an unexpected fillip of £27 billion in the underlying forecast, the Chancellor announced a hoard of new spending commitments.”

Read Philip’s article in full here.

Should you prioritise style or substance when pitching your business?

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In his most recent Forbes column, our director Philip Salter asks whether style or substance matter more when presenting a business.

According to India Ford, body language expert and director of Talkbodylanguage, investors will be “unconsciously picking up on non-verbal communication,” searching for indications of confidence, credibility and trustworthiness. “These important traits can only be projected through your body language – it’s not what you say, but how you say it that matters,” she explains.

On the other hand, Elena Shalneva, a communications consultant, thinks content drives style. “If you get the message right, then confident and assured delivery will follow,” she tells Salter.

Both have plenty of advice for entrepreneurs preparing for the pitching stage. Read the article in full here.

Experiences of a disruptive entrepreneur

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My business partner and I started working on Seedrs in 2009. Our mission then – as it is today – was to build a platform that would make it simple and straightforward for people to invest in businesses they believe in. These were primarily start-up, early-stage, and growth-stage but pre-public companies. At the time there was plenty of access, and plenty of ways to gain access, to public markets. But the private market of investing in growth businesses had traditionally been very opaque, exclusive and clubby, and had changed little since the Victorian era: i.e. groups of rich people getting together and writing cheques. That was the case in 1870 and it was the case in 2005.

We felt that there was a great opportunity to open the process up and make it a democratised asset class. At the same time we wanted to give entrepreneurs a new source of capital, so that they wouldn’t be entirely dependent on the very limited available friends and family or angel money. But we could also use fundraising to drive value for their business by building networks – by providing entrepreneurs with 200 or 300 people with a vested interest in their success. They could then leverage those networks commercially.

But getting to where we are today has been a long and complex process. We were the first regulated equity crowdfunding platform in the world, and being the first regulated business in an industry is not something I would recommend! But we did it. My background as a lawyer has helped – especially with things like nominee structures. But we’ve also tried to create a balance where investors and entrepreneurs get all the benefits of this sort of mass participation, while all of the admin is streamlined through us. For example: if you raise finance through Seedrs, you only face us as a single legal shareholder. You have full interaction with investors but we sign consents.

We’ve funded almost 300 deals to date, having finally launched in July 2012. We’re growing very quickly and are seeing anywhere from £3-£6 million invested every month, which is constantly growing as well. We’re providing great opportunity for a wide range of businesses to seek capital, and for investors to invest in them. These businesses range from the classic Shoreditch, techy, fast-growth, first stage onto VC backing type businesses, but also include consumer products plays, finance plays, retail, and entertainment assets.

As an aside, I want to mention that when we started working on this in 2009, when we started putting out the idea, there were two types of real push back. One was from the lawyers – greatest respect to my brethren here – who said we’d never get regulatory approval. But the other, more fundamental challenge was the suggestion that this was niche: that there was only a handful of startups out there at any given time and that we’d only wind up funding a proportion of them. So fine, people said, we might do 10 or 20 companies a year – but that’s not a business, it’s a hobby.

They based this on statistics around the number of companies receiving VC funding each year. That, they thought, was the entire market of businesses we could invest in, and we’d only be taking a proportion of it. But we rejected this instinctively and on the basis of the data. We knew that one popular view said that there were only two kinds of businesses in the world: the first was super high-growth tech businesses that were shooting for £1 billion plus valuations. Everything else, people thought, was a lifestyle business that would only provide an income for the founder.

But that wasn’t true. There were a wide range of ambitious growth businesses which sat across the spectrum, and we had data to show it. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor is a very comprehensive study put out every year by a consortium of academics across the globe and it surveys entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours in many different countries. From that data, we could extrapolate a number of things.

We looked at what they defined as a growth business, and specifically looked at businesses that were aiming within the next five years to employ 20 people or more. That’s an equity fundable businesses – if it goes from zero to 20+ employees, it has done something of interest. We then asked how many of those were seed and early stage across Europe? And the answer was around 1m. That shows just how vast the entrepreneurial ecosystem is, and that huge numbers of these businesses may not be boom or bust, but instead have a risk/reward profile that can be very interesting to equity investors.

That got us thinking more broadly about the dichotomy between tech and non-tech, and this brings us to the idea of stagnant industries. Around 2009/10, government and others classified businesses into tech and non-tech. But we realised that the distinction didn’t make much sense anymore either. There are very few businesses that do not use technology in a way to drive their growth. And those that do exist may not have much future ahead of them, bar a few service industries. We’re in a world 20 years after the digital revolution where the effective use of software and technology is a core part of the business. People are starting to say that there’s no such thing as a tech business, there’s just a business.

That, I think, is one of the most interesting and powerful ways that the entrepreneurial world is evolving. If we think about the late 90s, the dotcom boom and the emergence of Silicon Valley, there was a niche called a tech company, and then there was the rest of the business world. Now, we’re seeing a spectrum, seeing more opportunities for businesses that don’t think of themselves as classically tech plays to take advantage of all the value creating potential that comes from tech plays. You talk about different types of revenue having different value – the brilliance of software: I can barely turn on my computer, I have no great technical knowledge, thank heavens my co-founder understands all this stuff. But one basic thing I understand is that if you think of a traditional factory, you manufacture a widget, you sell a widget, you make a widget, you sell a widget. With software, you write some code once and you sell it 1,000 times. And that is fantastic. Being able to leverage those economic realities is so powerful for so many businesses that if you can get it right, your ability to grow very substantially – far in excess of the way businesses used to grow in the 20th century growth model – is brilliant.

As a final point: when we started working on Seedrs, a book called The Lean Start-Up by Eric Ries had become really hot. It had a whole lot of thinking around concepts like building a minimum viable product (MVP) for your business and how you do things in a super lean, agile way. You try, you test, you iterate. Now, in the way that techies often do, they co-opted this for themselves. They said it was their way of doing business, and people started thinking about MVPs as something purely for tech products.

What people forgot was that the whole basis for the Lean Start-Up and the whole Lean methodology wasn’t an original thought had by Eric Ries, but rather an adaptation of the Toyota lean models going back to the seventies. It was a set of ideas derived from the most classic, traditional industrial company you can think of, and taking those concepts and adapting them into tech. It comes full circle. Thinking built for the industrial world was brought into the tech world, and now we’re seeing it be repurposed again for the full range of companies. I see businesses across the board, including even Companies House [of which I am a non-executive director], which are focused on lean methodology. It’s fascinating to watch.

It’s been a very interesting and entirely encouraging experience for me these past six years. I walked into a world that seemed very dichotomised between investible/non-investible, growth/lifestyle, tech/non-tech into a world that’s much more fluid and into a world where businesses in such a wide range of industries have been able to take advantage of the techniques and experience the kind of growth that used to be the preserve of only a limited sector.

Jeff Lynn is co-founder of Seedrs. He was keynote speaker at a Mishcon de Reya/Entrepreneurs Network Leap 100 Power Breakfast on 19 November 2015.

Why Britain needs High Growth Small Businesses

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In a column for the Huffington Post, programmes director Annabel Denham points out that, more than setting up a company, the ability to scale is where the real value lies.

A new study from our founding supporters Octopus Investments reinforces this analysis. It identifies a group of 22,000 businesses, which have an annual turnover between £1m and £20m, and which achieve more than 20 per cent average turnover growth over a three-year period. Annabel writes:

“The employment figures alone buy ativan overnight delivery should be enough to make the government open its eyes: High Growth Small Businesses last year created one in three new jobs, despite forming less than 1 per cent of the 5.3 million companies in the UK. Almost 20 per cent of economic growth in Britain, measured as an increase in Gross Value Added, was from goods and services produced by HGSBs.”

Read more about the report’s findings here. Read the report in full here.

The UK’s first National Mentoring Day

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There is a day to celebrate or commemorate almost everything. In the UK, for example, we have a national bean day, national potato day and national button day.

It’s easy to be cynical about these creative holidays, but today we have one to truly celebrate: Britain’s first National Mentoring Day, put together by Bircham Dyson Bell and the Rockstar Mentoring Group.

The day existing, however, is perhaps less important than what goes on around it. It will see a summit of mentors coming together to learn and celebrate. As The Entrepreneurs Network’s director writes in his Forbes buy ativan australia column:

“Mentoring is by its nature informal, so would benefit from more coordination, both for disseminating best practice and forming connections between mentor and mentee.

“Despite depictions to the contrary on shows like The Apprentice, starting and running a business involves significantly more cooperation than competition. Many of the best businesses are built on friendships with customers, suppliers, fellow entrepreneurs and mentors. I wish it every success and will raise a glass later to those who are helping guide the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

Read the column in full here.

High Growth Small Businesses are vital to our economic growth

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In recent years, entrepreneurship policy has shifted its focus from start-ups to scale-ups, writes our director Philip Salter in Forbes.

There is logic to our latest obsession: unlike the US, the UK has a steadily growing stream of start-ups, so it makes sense that policymakers are glancing enviously at Silicon Valley’s giants, wondering when the next Google or Facebook will be created here in Britain. He writes:

“This new focus on scale-ups, gazelles and eventual unicorns seems sensible, but there is a stage between start-ups and scale-ups that I think might be even more important. In High Growth Small Business Report 2015, Octopus Investments identifies High Growth Small Businesses (HGSBs) – companies that are achieving over 20 per cent average annual growth in turnover quotecorner.com/online-pharmacy.html over a three year period, and with an annual turnover between £1m and £20m.”

Based on a survey of 500 HGSBs, the report comes up with a suite of solid policy proposals with the aim of getting 25 per cent more HGSBs within the next five years:

“If this government were to implement just half of the policy suggestions outlined int he report, it would go a long way to achieving its aim of ensuring the UK is the best place in Europe to start and grow a business. I’m going to push for the government to adopt them all though – after all, there is no reason the UK couldn’t be the best.”

Read the column in full here.

MassChallenge UK: Five leading entrepreneurs from the 2015 cohort

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In his most recent Forbes column, the Entrepreneurs Network’s director Philip Salter speaks to five ambitious startup entrepreneurs to find out about their business, challenges, and plans for the future.

Read his interviews with Marco Del Lago (co-founder and CEO, CLARA Swiss Tech), David Hellard (co-founder, Zipcube), James Poulter (co-founder and CEO, Pronto), Weerada Sucharitkul (co-founder, FilmDoo), and Udi Liberman (co-founder, PayBox) in full here.

Singapore: Still the best place in the world to do business

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The World Bank’s annual Doing Business report has again placed Singapore in top position for doing business.

The UK came in sixth place, the US in seventh, but Blighty isn’t the best place to do business in Europe: that honour went to Denmark. Doing Business 2016 presents quantitative indicators on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 189 economies – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – and over time.

In his most recent Forbes column, The Entrepreneurs Network’s director Philip Salter writes:

“It gets to the nitty-gritty of issues such as dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property and trading across borders.

“The world is getting easier for entrepreneurs who want to start and grow a business. As consumers we will all benefit in countless ways, and this is what will eventually end the absolute poverty still plaguing this planet.”

Read the article in full here.

Is successful entrepreneurship genetic?

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In his most recent Forbes column, our director Philip Salter writes on the role of genetics in the likelihood and success of entrepreneurship.

Speaking to Nicos Nicolaou, Professor and the GE Capital Chair of Mid-Market Economics at Warwick Business School and a world-leading expert on this subject, we learn first that:

“The heritability estimates for entrepreneurship are around 30-35 per cent. This actually means that environmental factors are actually much more important than genetic factors in recognising entrepreneurial opportunities and starting new businesses.”

And on the subject of whether buy ativan online australia entrepreneurial success is determined by genetics, Nicolaou tells us:

“Entrepreneurial success is not determined by genetics. It is crucial to emphasise that a genetic predisposition to entrepreneurship should definitely, unequivocally, not be confounded with genetic determinism. While genes may influence the likelihood of engaging in entrepreneurship, we are merely talking about likelihoods, and nothing more. Genes do not determine entrepreneurship.”

Read the article in full here.

How to ensure Britain’s night time entrepreneurs flourish

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When I consider some of the changes that have happened in Britain recently, I am reminded of the Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times”.

Why a curse? There’s an idea now that anyone can start a company, that there are countless opportunities. There’s an idea of an “entrepreneurial spirit” taking over the country, and this is a positive thing. From Thatcher onwards, many people have been supportive of that idea; now that the Conservatives are in power, the public is generally pro-business. As a result, I think many people believe there are plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs, and that regulation is fading away, and they see that as a good thing.

There is, however, a very strange paradox at the heart of society at the moment. It’s to do with the much bigger philosophical question of who we are and where we’re going. When I think about the night time, I wonder about what kind of country we want to live in and what kind of cities we want to participate in.

But first, I’d like to give a little snippet about me to offer an insight about the inspiration behind the Night Time Industries Association. I spent around a quarter of a century putting on events around the world and about 20 years ago I co-founded The Old Truman Brewery, a 25-building, 11-acre site in Shoreditch. At the time it was considered an “Objective Two” area in terms of employment, social issues and housing – issues that were very problematic at the time. We had been promoting and doing events all over the West End and people would tell us we were crazy, that no-one would ever go there, that they’d stay in Soho and that we should forget it.

You might think this was great news and a good story, especially when organisations like the World Bank started citing it as an example of urban regeneration. And you’d think that everyone had participated in the great news, that everyone valued the businesses and creative industries that had contributed towards the great regeneration. But instead, we found ourselves under fire in a really significant way. And then we realised that some very weird things were happening in areas like licencing and policing – things that weren’t normal. It was almost like the police had been instructed to come and find issue with what we were doing. There we were thinking: we’ve created hundreds of jobs, paid an enormous amount in business rates and created a great brand value for the area. Tower Hamlets were keen to be associated with all of the positive PR value of the new activity of creative enterprises. So what’s happening here?

In fact, we spoke to some of our colleagues in the industry in London and across the UK, and people everywhere – except for Manchester – were experiencing similar things. What we begun to understand was that the problem was with policy and the relationship between politics and the state. It was having a significant effect on entrepreneurs and regulation.

What’s happening is that the “night time” is being talked about in the context of crime. There’s a “fear of the night” in policy, of bad behaviour and a rise in crime. But it’s an old-fashioned script, one that associates many of the problems that do arise – and some that don’t but could – as deriving from and being created by night time entrepreneurs.

Up until quite recently, the night time economy – drinking, going out – was often seen in the context of silly pictures of women with mini skirts round their head, heels dangling. Or you’d hear a discussion about drunk tanks or crime spikes. But we need to take a step back and understand the situation.

Around a decade ago, when the new 24-hour licensing for bars and nightclubs was put forward, there were scare stories of binge drinking, crime and people behaving out of control. In fact, as Christopher Snowden of the IEA revealed recently, we’ve actually since seen A&E levels stabilise and people spreading their drinking patterns across the hours. Around 40 per cent of young people today describe themselves as teetotal. Unless you’re in the business of just selling alcohol, you might see this as fantastic news.

None of the nightmare visions have come true, and we’ve become a more interesting society, one with huge variety in how it is entertained. However, this isn’t the view of the police. Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe came out around the time of all this good news and said: “You can make money from bars and restaurants and nightclubs, but the reality is councils around the country and particularly London are saying if we want to get crime down then we’ve got to get rid of 50 per cent of them”.

Everyone gasped. No one could believe he really said that. But I actually saw it as a good thing: it got everything out in the open. Here was a senior police commissioner saying we need to cull a British industry – one which generates £66bn per annum and 300 million visits a year from 8pm onwards from people who are coming in on EasyJet and the Eurotunnel into Manchester and Gatwick; not just to see Madame Tussauds or the theatre, but to go to Fabric, the Sub Club, XOYO. Night time industries have become a really significant part of what Joseph Nye called soft power and the UK’s brand internationally.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe’s comments were a real shock to many in the industry, highlighting a disconnect between policy and thinking. Here we were being viewed as borderline criminals, as creators of crime rather than stakeholders in a community that employs a lot of young people (at a time when one in four young people in London were unemployed), which provides a lot of secondary and tertiary employment and which has created regeneration. We all realised it was good thing that it was out in the open, but it was also a problem.

There needs to be a conversation in Britain about what the role of police should be. The police are having 20 per cent of their resources cut, stations are being closed and resources removed. It’s an unenviable position, but we’re now seeing many police authorities becoming increasingly statistics-obsessed. In conversation just recently, home secretary Theresa May asked: “Why are you spending so much time on burglaries and not on child paedophilia?” And the police responded: “OK, now if you want us to do burglary, you have to send us an email, because we can’t do that”.

Policing has become based on stats. The police are now pointing to performance and have created a rod for their own backs. It’s had a huge effect on entrepreneurs and the night time economy.

For instance, if someone loses their mobile phone, they’ll need a crime reference number to make an insurance claim. To get that number, they’ll have to call the police and say where that phone was lost or stolen. At one of our venues, for example, I had 80 passports in my office. They hadn’t been stolen: people had mislaid or lost them, possibly because they’d had a few drinks. But giving out all these crime reference numbers means borough chiefs across the country are unfairly linking venues with a spike in crime.

The increase in crime hotspots is being completely influenced by people losing things. Now, if I were to put it to the British public, I suggest that they wouldn’t think lost or even stolen phones were a big crime issue today. But even if theft were a big issue, even if there was suddenly a sharp rise in armed robberies at banks, in muggings or shoplifting at Westfield, in car theft at Ascot or in violence at Lord’s, no one would suggest closing banks, shopping centres or sporting events. If a haulage company knocks someone over, no one will close them down (assuming they’ve conducted their business properly and have done due diligence).

The night time industry is one of the most creative and innovative. It has had an effect not just in terms of how we make drinks or how we entertain people, but has played a part in every cultural phenomenon from The Beatles through to Wiley. We’ve got London Fashion Week here at the moment, but imagine fashion without the dance floor, without bars and clubs. The frisson, the sense of possibility, DJs, management companies – think about how they all interrelate with one another. Without the night time industry, all this would have been very difficult. The industry has had an enormous cultural contribution and an enormous economic contribution. And yet there’s a call for it to be culled. So one of the key goals in the Night Time Industries Association is for us to be treated as an industry. We want people to be held personally responsible when they commit a crime.

It sounds like such a normal, obvious thing to say, but if someone today commits a crime near or outside a venue, they’ll be asked where they had their last drink. This has worrying implications – it suggests that we’re not autonomous, rational decision-makers, but we’ve been programmed by the venue to act in a certain (criminal) way. It says nothing for millions of decent, ordinary citizens who don’t commit crimes. It says that entrepreneurs are responsible for individuals’ behaviour. And, as a result, we’re seeing greater regulation and intervention.

Yet the issues and responsibilities that are being increasingly imposed on many of our members are limiting, even stifling, businesses. According to Resident Advisor, people are now choosing Berlin and Barcelona over London, because being searched, having your biometrics taken, being surrounded by security guards and constantly told, nudged and pushed to conduct yourself in a certain way is a deterrent. In Cambridge, venues like McDonald’s now have breathalysers; Police Scotland has initiated a system where people are being swabbed at random while they wait in club and bar queues.

British serious crime has decreased and diminished significantly over the last decade, people are drinking less than ever before, people are tweeting about non-alcoholic drinks and we’re not seeing street fights all the time. Yet there’s this idea of British citizens and visitors as an out-of-control mob that needs to be constantly regulated. And that puts an enormous pressure on entrepreneurs, because some, quite rightly, don’t want to have an ID scanner in their establishments, it makes it feel like a prison or airport. Despite the British public never voting for compulsory ID, these days if you want to go out you need an ID to get into most places. And of course, most of the people that are really the problem get round such things. It’s the ordinary people that have to go through this rigmarole, and meanwhile it puts multiple impositions on the industry to the extent that we’re now seeing nightclubs and bars close.

There needs to be discussion around the importance and value of the night time. It’s when we make great friendships, when we get inspired, when we take in what people wear and how they dance. There needs to be discussion about how we organise our cities. We need to think about reversing the knee-jerk approach to policymaking today – the temptation to regulate, regulate, regulate – and to ensure there’s a more relaxed attitude towards allowing businesses to just get on and do what they do.

Let’s not forget that in the end, businesses and residents and visitors all have an interest in reducing crime. Everyone’s a stakeholder – and everyone can work together. Ultimately, we need to realise that people aren’t criminalised for the idea that they want to go out after 10 o’clock at night.