I’m delighted to share that today we’ve launched our Young Entrepreneurs Forum. It aims to connect and empower young people building incredible things across the world, and influence governments to create better enabling environments for young entrepreneurs.
For the Forum’s inaugural year, we will focus primarily on identifying solutions to barriers preventing a greater culture of entrepreneurship among young people here in the UK. We will do this by hosting meetup events for young entrepreneurs to gather their thoughts and insights, which will ultimately feed into a policy report and be launched later this year in the Houses of Parliament.
Needless to say, this won’t be headed by an old-timer like myself. We’re grateful to Sean Kohli for chairing and supporting us on this project. Sean is an undergraduate student studying at UCLA and also a General Partner of an early-stage fund spun out of the Why You Should Join newsletter, which highlights early-stage startups on track to becoming generational companies. He also manages a growth and opportunity fund in Luxembourg, backing transformative later-stage startups, and serves on the board of Team Vitality, Europe’s leading esports organisation.
Sean’s involvement stems from a deep-rooted commitment to elevating the UK’s startup ecosystem, shaped by his experiences as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist in the US. In the wake of a new AI-driven epoch, he believes that the UK must accelerate its pace of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit by empowering our brightest and most ambitious minds to build this country’s future. We wholeheartedly agree.
Young people can join the Forum here. By joining you’ll be invited to our meetups, be invited to share your views to shape the final report and be invited to the launch in the Houses of Parliament.
To be clear, this isn’t just for those who have registered a business. We also want young people from the UK and around the world who have built tech, started charities or run campaigns. This is all about ambition.
If you take nothing else from today’s newsletter, forward this onto the most ambitious young people know.
Our country needs them!
Down to Business
Our country also needs more companies exporting and more innovators procuring. We know both these areas of business are replete with hurdles.
That’s why we’re hosting two online meetings with the Department for Business and Trade on Overcoming Barriers to Procurement and Overcoming Barriers to Exporting. If you have experience of either, request a place today.
Data with Destiny
Last week, our joint paper with the Tony Blair Institute set out a delivery roadmap for the National Data Library (NDL).
Now it’s your turn to tell us how to make the NDL as useful as it can possibly be. Are there existing but inaccessible government data, or new datasets that should be created that would advance your work? What supporting services would help you work effectively with these datasets? What bottlenecks most limit your progress?
We want to understand the real barriers you face. If you work with data in academia or the private sector, and think that the NDL could help your work, tell us.
No More Monkeying
As many of you will have spotted, we’re doing a lot more on Substack. As of next week, this newsletter will come to you via Substack (currently it’s delivered via MailChimp).
Apart from a couple of design changes, you won’t notice the difference. Nevertheless, it’s good manners to let you know, so if you would like to be taken off the list or have any questions or concerns please let me know.
Community Pillars
With a healthy dose of trepidation, we’ve created our first open group on our WhatsApp community. It’s to discuss “how to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business”. You can join here. Just to note, your phone number will be visible to others in the community.
Separately, Advisers and Patrons should join this private group, and Supporters should join this private group. Find out more about becoming an Adviser, Patron or Supporter here. If you’re unsure if you’re one, drop me an email.
If this is all too confusing, you can just join the Community here. Within the community, nobody else can see your number unless you are already in their contacts.
ChatEMA
Finally, our good friends at Enterprise Nation have recently launched Ask EMA – an AI-powered personal business assistant, designed to provide instant, personalised business support whenever you need it. Play with it here.