Miss the Mark

This week our friends at the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), in partnership with the OECD and EU, released The Missing Entrepreneurs.

GEN’s report finds that if everyone were as active in business creation as men between 30 and 49 years old, there could be an additional 9 million people starting and managing new business in the EU, and 35 million more across OECD countries. About three-quarters of these so-called “missing” entrepreneurs are women and one-in-eight are under 30 years old.

The young are less entrepreneurial than the old. One quarter of the 18 million people involved in starting or managing a new business in the EU are over 50 – even more than the proportion aged 18-30.

It’s not that the young don’t have ambitions. As the report finds, 45% of university students intend to start a business within five years of graduation, yet only 5% of youth aged 18 to 30 are actively working on a start-up. Along these lines, we found with Octopus that 51% of young people in the UK have thought about starting a business, yet 70% of them don’t know where to start. Let’s not let the UK’s equivalent of Whitney Wolfe Herd or Mark Zuckerberg go to waste.

The report also finds that women are less likely than men to be involved in starting and managing new businesses: “Over the period 2016-20, less than 5% of women in the EU were involved in creating a business or managing one less than 42 months old relative to 8% of men. A similar gap appears in OECD countries where 9% of women were starting and managing new businesses relative to 13% of men.” Our latest on this ongoing battle for equality can be found in our Female Founders Forum report.

Finally, the report finds that the share of immigrants among the self-employed in the EU has nearly doubled over the past decade, increasing from 6% in 2011 to 11% in 2020. A lot of this is driven by immigration flows, so any policy interventions designed to improve the quality and longevity of businesses need to account for the fact many immigrants will be less able to navigate their new country’s bureaucracy. We’ve tended to focus on the immigration of high-growth entrepreneurs rather than those starting out – an omission that we will need to fix at some point.

Be Animated
As I’ve written about before, we’re concerned that the trajectory of competition policy is damaging the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. In both Conflicting Missions and Better Together, we spoke out against misguided and unclear rules around mergers and acquisitions that are spooking UK entrepreneurs and investors.

We are one of the few public voices on this vital issue. This week Sam Dumitriu criticised the CMA’s decision to retrospectively block Facebook/Meta’s purchase of Giphy, as well as speaking more broadly about competition policy on a TechUK panel. His succinct speech, which neatly sets out our concerns, can be read here.

A Word on Advice
We’re cautiously planning in-person events for next year, including a host of dinners for our Advisers (we switched to wine and Zoom during the lockdowns). As well as our tried and tested format of dinners led by leading politicians from across the spectrum, we’re planning some with just entrepreneurs.

Now would be a great time to become an Adviser – not least because we’re putting the price up next year (while freezing the price for all current Advisers). Also, as the number steadily grows we will have to cap the number we have. Find out more about becoming an Adviser here and drop me an email if you would like to chat about what’s involved.

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