E co n om i c i nd i c ators
Entrepreneurs don’t accept the odds: we believe in miracles and magic Jon Medved, OurCrowd
startups can buck any short-term issues in the UK market by looking globally,” says Rathour. Since the Brexit vote, for instance, the entrepreneur has seen UNiDAYS’ partners invest more in opportunities across the pond in the US. Now that made-in-Britain clothes are slightly cheaper thanks to the lower pound, they’re witnessing even more demand. Meanwhile, Medved believes that startups tend to have a global customer base anyway so they’re not catastrophically affected by the fluctuations in domestic economic data. Perhaps that’s why so many appear to be feeling upbeat. According to the recent Aldermore SME Future Attitudes report, 82% of SMEs are optimistic about their business
performance in 2017 and a large percentage expect their revenue to grow. There’s also the fact that in a world where Brexit and Trump have left many pundits red-faced, some skepticism of expert opinion is setting in. “‘The word ‘pundit’ is almost a synonym for clueless so I’m not sure I’d want to believe what a pundit has to say,” says Medved. “Nobody can really tell you what’s going to happen in the overall economy.” But Sentance still believes caution is in order. “It’s important that startups don’t get caught up in any sort of euphoria or make overly optimistic assumptions,” he says. “You’ve got to be conservative.” So when the director general of the British Chambers of
Commerce warns of “a bumpy road ahead” and slower GDP growth, it may be worth startups heeding his warning and applying that pinch of salt to the rim of a tequila shot instead. However while some indicators are of value, startups are rarely put off by doomsayers and it’s for this reason that Medved describes himself as “mildly bullish” about Britain’s future. “Entrepreneurs don’t accept the odds: we believe in miracles and magic,” he says. “You don’t start a business because you read from a pundit that GDP growth is going to go up. We couldn’t care less.” Instead, Medved believes most startups are concerned with a mixture of sector-specific indicators and long-term metatrends, which he says look “maybe ten times further ahead than economic forecasts”. So is it perhaps time we added a few extra indicators in there, like innovation indexes? “If you look at the innovation cycle, we’re in the midst of a huge boom and, with technology like big data, the cloud and the internet of things, every industry has been or is about to be disrupted,” says Medved. “If you look at that stuff, how are you anything but bullish?” JANUARY 2017 ELITEBUSINESSMAGAZINE.CO.UK
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