There has been, in the last decade or so, a great shift in the dialogue surrounding entrepreneurship and where it stands in relation to the rest of our society. Social progress and entrepreneurship are no longer deemed antithetical, but merry bedfellows, now used more often together than apart. We see evidence of this shift that is explicit, in the rise of social enterprises, which aspire to do well to do good, and we see it implicitly with the clarifying transparency that has become a crucial element of modern businesses and with the upsurge of the purpose-led enterprise.
There have been other shifts that make the start-up scene a very different beast from the one which crossed the millennium. I have noticed, both anecdotally in my own programmes and across the wider business sector, that there has been a gender shift among new entrepreneurs; women now make up over half of the entrepreneurs I teach. Moreover, it is women of all ages, from those just embarking on their careers to those beginning new ones in retirement, that are turning to entrepreneurship for employment.
I have also noticed, particularly among young people, the great plurality of new businesses with a second bottom line that they maintain with equal fervour to the returns to their shareholders. There is a consistent and powerful undercurrent of social consciousness and responsibility that differentiates the newest entrepreneurs from their predecessors.
Start-ups today are begun more and more in a barefaced manner by a broader demographic of our society and with a stronger commitment to improving it. These can only be good things.
The challenges that entrepreneurs face are also changing. Whereas 10 years ago, the greatest challenge for any new start-up in the United Kingdom was finding access to finance, today those financing chasms are being bridged by the emergence of web-based, alternative finance providers. Mechanisms like reward-based crowdfunding, equity crowd funding and peer-to-peer lending have rendered the, previously fatal, scarcity of angels and venture capitalists of little consequence to the growth of young companies.
Of course, entrepreneurs face new challenges. With the rise of the web and the consequential lowering of borders, companies today struggle to rise above the parapet and escape invisibility. While the web allows access to a global market, it allows it uniformly and to all businesses. Companies today must be not only better than their local competition, but better than all their competition, everywhere. It has become harder to differentiate one young company from another and to stand out in an ever-expanding and noisy crowd.
This might seem a depressing shift; it is easier to start and harder to survive; simpler to find money and harder to use it wisely. Perhaps, you might say, we have not moved forwards, but only sideways.
However, despite these new challenges, I believe truly that there has never been a better time to start a business. We are at the front end of a long growth cycle, the cost of capital has never been so low, and technology has enabled new business models that open up business to those for whom it was previously out of reach. Entrepreneurship is the rope ladder to the economy of the future and it will allow us to lift ourselves up.
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Doug Richard is founder of School for Startups
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