Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t shy away from swearing, so they’ll be surprised that I didn’t write “Fuck the Digital Economy Bill” above since that is so clearly what I mean to say.  Search engines and news aggregators don’t like swear words so I’m tempering my title to be heard.  Who says I’m not a reasonable man?

That said . . .

Anyone who has been following the evolution of the Orwellian “Digital Economy Bill” understands that this bill is a complete travesty of rational legislation and the method by which it was passed into law after just a few hours of debate was cartoonish. In the great “wash up” before the election, both political parties conspired to let this law be passed without any due scrutiny. What was so important that Mr. Cameron was preserving that he horse-traded away our freedom of expression? I would really like to know

Why do I hate this bill so much? There are so many reasons.

Perhaps key among them is that it contains a provision which allows “Copyright Holders” to identify any IP as being responsible for the distribution of their content illegally.  Once this happens, the business or individual associated with that IP address can be penalized without the tiresome necessity of turning up in a court to present evidence.

As described in the Guardian “Earlier the government removed its proposed clause 18, which could have given it sweeping powers to block sites, but replaced it with an amendment to clause 8 of the bill. The new clause allows the secretary of state for business to order the blocking of “a location on the Internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright.”

You know . . . that’s crazy . . .

Sometimes there are good reasons for copyrights to be violated.  In the US for example, the website Wikileaks.com this week exposed what appears to be the “Collateral Murder” of many innocent civilians in Iraq by US Army Soldiers in an Apache Helicopter.  Distributing that content, and other whistle-blower content “owned” by governments and private enterprises engaged in criminal activity, is almost always a violation of their copyright.

But who cares?

I don’t want sites like Wikileaks to get shut down without due process of law. Wikileaks remains in business now in the US because in order to shut them down, the criminals responsible for the documents they distribute would have to turn up in a court to levy the charge . . . which would result in their arrest.

The Telegraph describes this new law as a “Nightmare of Unintended Consequences“.

They write “Likewise, the Digital Economy Bill, in trying to support artists’ copyright and tackle illegal file-sharing, is about to produce a new culture – in which ISPs and bewildered householders are deluged with threatening legal letters from the entertainment industry . . . These innocents will have no idea their teenage children, neighbours, or even someone parked outside their house, has been slurping their WiFi and downloading the latest Hollywood movies and Top 40 albums. In the past the lawyers had to go after the infringers, with actual proof. Remember being innocent until proven guilty? That’s out now. Now, the holder of the internet account (Mum, Dad, Granny and the small business that can’t afford the legal fees) will be held to account for what happens over their connection.”

Here in the UK we’ve invested several hundred years in creating effective courts and ensuring the protection of civil liberties. Copyright violations by a small fraction of billions on the Internet are no reason to compromise those important protections.

Most people in the UK don’t steal content, and they don’t because if they value the content they value the people that make and distribute it.  There are people who do steal, perhaps because they aretheives who won’t buy anything if they can steal it, more often because they want something they can’t afford.

In either case, I see no reason why we law abiding people need to give up our civil rights because other folks behave badly.

Its patently clear that the provisions of this poorly thought out law won’t work no matter how well intended they may be.

This “drag net” will sweep up all manner of innocent people leaving the guilty behind.  It will catch the single mom who’s thirteen year old wants to download a copy of the song “Its a Hard Days Night” on her cell phone.  It will get the neighbor of the guy who’s roommate steals a pirated copy of Avatar.  Real criminals on the Internet will never be touched by it. They are beyond its provisions.  They encrypt their content so no one knows whether it is copyrighted or not as it is transferred.  This bill does nothing about that problem.

Further it continues to centralize control in the Hands of Lord Mandelson. It is an erosian of democracy, it is an arrogant assumption that the government, in the form of Mr. Mandelson is the ultimate arbiter of fairness. It is just as deluded as his other recent notion of “credit arbitrators” that he would manage who would become a shadow judiciary determining whether loans were fairly made.

The UK is a smart country, and a tough one. I have no sense whether the House of Lords can do something to delay, stop, or otherwise impact on this bill before it becomes law. But it should, it must and we must all be aware that this will not create a digital Britain.

Related posts:

1. Startup TV Digital Magazine Issue One
2. Loudhailers, Loudmouths & Leicester – How I Managed to Embarrass Myself

Let’s first re-cap the argument to date. Last week during the Budget Festival, Lord Mandelson was on a side stage promoting his idea of a credit adjudicator. This novel idea is to create a completely new judicial system to review unfair loan denials by banks to small businesses.

This is a remedy to the asserted problem that banks are secretly tightening credit requirements or in other ways screwing around with small businesses: setting new fees for current loan holders, pulling back credit from other-wise credit worthy folk and generally increasing their monetary reserves to the particular pain of small businesses.

The banks defence, as they say in the law, is in the alternative: we are lending lots if not more and even if we are not that’s because during a downturn, the creditability of these businesses spirals down making them less credit-worthy. Furthermore the banks note, they are being asked to increase their capital reserves by the government and you don’t do that by increasing the amount of money you loan.

Well, that all sounds fine and good and there is reason to believe that the government can give conflicting instructions at the same time: this is the government that wanted to increase the uptake of university students and then began to penalize Universities for providing too many acceptances. So it is quite possible that they are asking the banks to increase reserves and lending at the same time.

But it is also quite possible that the banks are using the cover of the downturn to in fact squeeze more profits from small customers: they are the ones that have the least voice. They are the ones who do not have an effective collective voice and thus no real power.

The Remedy (ROFL)

Lord Mandelson has been hearing a lot of anecdotal evidence from small businesses complaining bitterly about how they are treated by the oligopoly of large banks that have a stranglehold on business accounts in the UK. He is not the only one. Ask the shadow minister for business, Ken Clarke, or the shadow minister for small business, Mark Prisk, or any group of small businesses and you will hear the same story: they are being screwed by their banks.

What is a good business minister to do? Well rule one of modern government is to remember that there is always something to do. Rule two is to set up something new. Rule three is to not ask anyone if the idea is completely barking mad. Mandelson has clearly followed the rules.

The credit adjudicator is an un-named person, who will be likely an ombudsman or judge. If a small business feels that they have been unfairly denied a loan they can appeal to this new judge who may, if they decide, over-turn the banks. This solution begs many questions. Who, for example, is going to be the adjudicator? I should think the most qualified people would be retired bankers. That should be objective…Or perhaps it’s people without the skills to determine whether a loan should be made? More to the point, how does this reconcile with best business practice whereby banks use credit and risk committees to manage their overall risk, not just the risk of a single loan?

Lambert also asks several pertinent questions. What happens if the loan goes bad? Who accepts the liability? Is a civil servant going to make the banking decision?

That doesn’t even address the cost to society of adding an entirely new legal framework. That doesn’t touch on the pace at which such adjudication would happen. The law and business move at different speeds. A business may well be out of business by the time the adjudicator decides they were unfairly denied the loan. Does that mean the bankrupt can sue the bank? That should be interesting.

Lambert’s criticisms were valid. Mandelson’s response was a masterful display of the ad hominem argument. Rather than addressing Lambert’s concerns, he attacked Lambert the man. He accused Lambert of being in the pocket of the “bullying banks”. I assume he was asserting that Lambert, the head of the CBI, was nothing more than a shill or lobbyist for the banking industry. Thus he neatly avoided having to answer hard questions about his typically Labour/Stalinist approach to all societal problems: Add another government bureaucracy with sweeping powers and little or no accountability.

Lambert unfortunately let himself be distracted by the utter irrelevancy of Mandelsons’ mis-direction and defended himself with a bleat that some of his best friends were small businesses: “I talk to small businesses every week…”

Well I say a plague on both their houses. The banks are, to varying degrees undoubtedly making life more difficult for small businesses. They are visibly increasing their reserves which means by definition someone somewhere isn’t getting money. A lot of that pain will be small businesses which as a whole are less creditable. The banks are almost certainly doing it by direct and indirect means which means that they are reducing current lines of credit and this will annoy good small businesses. They are increasing fees to deter businesses from asking for credit so they don’t have to turn them down and they are probably doing other ingenious things to limit credit wherever they don’t think it will be noticed.

However, they are getting away with this for one reason and one reason only: they do not have competition. The issue here traces back to the lack of competition in the marketplace. We have very very few banks compared to other countries because of the difficulty of starting a bank in the UK. And some smart players have noticed. New banks are being readied for market as we speak and they will someday roll out. But the cost and effort is great.

It’s a shame really. Banking at the level we are speaking about is not a complex activity. If I accept deposits from small businesses and pay them a modest interest on that money and then lend that money to businesses that can show serviceability and assets to back the money then I can charge a very healthy rate of interest. The current gap is considerable. The larger the gap between interest paid and interest lent, the smaller the capital base of the bank has to be to make sufficient money overall to cover its fixed overheads.  If the regulatory and administrative burden of setting banks up were reduced that capital base could be even smaller.

Some entrepreneurs are trying to do something about it. Zopa and Wonga are web-based businesses that are trying to introduce alternatives to traditional lending. But innovation as a solution to the issue has clearly not been considered by our Minister of Innovation (that’s the “I” in BIS).

This fight is not merely about Mandelson and Lambert. It is also not merely about Labour and the Conservatives. It is about the core philosophical rot at the heart of our current government and the corresponding lack of insight at its opposition.

Our government is like a carpenter: because they have a hammer all they ever see is nails. Their one remedy to all problems is to add another brick to the policing state, to add another un-elected body to look over someone’s shoulder. But, who made them king? Governments are made of mere people and therefore they are not innately more able to police than the people they seek to police. And regardless of the justice of their cause, if they do the job badly, as they inevitably will, they make the problem worse.

Government can, on the other hand, create playing fields for competition. Unbridled competition leads to winners and losers. The winners tend to become comfortable with one another and create barriers against new entrants. They collude with the government under the pretext of protecting the consumer to create oligopolies that put us where we are today: with no effective competition. To use the language of the government, we have a market failure. They simply neglect to mention that it is because they failed to permit the market.

On the other hand, if the government had said, we do not accept that banks can treat their small business customers cavalierly, and we are going to open the floodgates so that the gales of creative destruction can sweep through this tired, stratified industry, then they could have created the elegant conditions that would produce the solution, at little or no cost to the taxpayer.

If Mr. Lambert is speaking to small businesses perhaps he should also note their role in the health of economies and not let himself be distracted by the artful rhetoric of a master politician.  A plague on both their houses.

Related posts:

1. The Dirty Secret of Credit For Small Business: the Failure of the EFG Scheme
2. The Reason that this Budget Does Not Matter for Small Business
3. The Secret Good News About The UK & Business

It should come as no surprise then that CEO’s over pay themselves, or for that matter that politicians seek to use their influence after they’ve left political office to create the retirement fund they feel they deserve. (Doing so before leaving office is jumping the gun a bit).

It is not that I approve of misbehaviour, it’s just that I am not surprised by it. Well, it is the same with money. I do not expect people who have money or who shepherd other people’s money to do anything with it that does not maximize the potential for return offset by their concern for risk. Some people, generally elderly, have little appetite for risk. They merely want the interest their money will return without worrying that the capital itself is at risk. People with more capital than they need to fund their lifestyle off of its risk free income potential will frequently regard the surplus capital as being available to take some risk with. They hope in return to receive a better gain.

None of this is rocket science. But there is A LOT of money in the world. And there are a lot of people making individual decisions about how to spend or invest that money. So when the government announces a specific, narrowly described, highly constrained, narrowly targeted investment fund intended to deal with a “chronic” market failure, I tend to be inherently suspicious about the programme because I am inevitably suspicious about the failure.

If there is a gap in the funding cycle, it may not be the market failing at all. It may be the market responding rationally to the relationship of risk and reward. Or more perniciously, it may be responding to some prior intervention by government for which this “failure” is an accidental outcome.

Thus yesterday’s announcement by the government of the “Growth Capital Fund” or “Small Business Growth Fund” which is intended to “tackle what is seen as a ‘permanent equity gap’ for companies seeking to raise between £2m and £10m” by offering “mezzanine debt”, “which is a debt product that ranks below senior debt from banks, but ahead of equity and which can be partly converted to equity if certain conditions are met” is an example of hubris and folly.

It is hubris for some mid-level treasury wonk to think that they can permanently solve a problem across a broad range of businesses with a broad range of issues with a single instrument which at its heart is a debt tool and which is targeted at an equity gap. Knowledgeable people will say, “But Doug, its nothing more than a preferred convertible which is perfectly straightforward”. And I agree. But it imposes a debt: equity ratio on the investment managers who are then straight jacketed into finding those few businesses for whom this very narrow beast is appropriate. I ran across this issue last month when the primary reason we turned down the money was this very structure.

It is no surprise to me that HSBC, Standard Chartered and Barclays have said no, whilst LloydsTSB and RBS have said yes. The former are owned by the government, while the latter are looking at their own financial interest.

I applaud the relief on business rates and the increase on capital gains exemption for founders of businesses. They are going to have a small impact but a useful one.

But none of the core issues have been addressed. And the real issue is of course that this is not a budget.

A budget balances. This doesn’t. This therefore is something else. I shall let you decide.

Related posts:

1. A Plague On Both Their Houses: Mandelson vs Lambert
2. The Dirty Secret of Credit For Small Business: the Failure of the EFG Scheme
3. The Fight Against America

Yesterday I attended and participated in an event hosted by UKTI, The Prime Minister, and Lord Mandelson. The purpose of the event was to communicate directly with the CEO’s of some of the world’s most important large companies who already have a presence in the UK or who are considering inward investment into the UK.

The message from the Government was unambiguous: The UK is still open for business and intends to remain so. The Government brought out all its heavy hitters and used them liberally; Gordon Brown held a private breakfast for 25 or so key figures (and a couple of not-so-key people like me) at Number 10; the PM opened the conference, Michael Porter the celebrity Harvard business Professor was the keynote, Lord Mandelson spoke more than once, took questions and networked; unusually enough for a Chancellor close to a budget, Allistair Darling also spoke. Mervyn Davies, the trade minister, compered the event. There were panels with a variety of heavyweights including Lionel Barber who chaired a feisty group with Richard Lambert the Director General of the CBI. My panel in the early afternoon was about the Future Consumer and I admit, given my rather vocal critique of the government’s policies regarding small business support, I thought it was interesting that I was asked.

What made the event impressive, far more than the obvious display of willingness by the government to put its most senior people forward, was the attendance record itself. The attendees individually are all major players and in sum made up a display of corporate gravitas that said something itself about the day. These people run crowded schedules. For some reason, it was important for them to come.

Why is that and what does it say about the UK?

Well, I think it is good news actually. This government put on a display of competence and re-assurance for key stakeholders in its well being. It did so in a way peculiar to the UK. The UK has a manner about it that is very different than other countries and cultures. It uses its great buildings and imperial facilities in a casual sort of way that takes the formality out but keeps the seriousness of purpose in place. Republics, like the US and France, tend in the opposite direction. We big things up and in the doing so make things seem a bit imperial. Thus breakfast at No.10, a day long event at the Saatchi Galleries finished by drinks at St.James’s Palace hosted by the Duke of York who cheerfully manned the floor was a seamless piece of marketing for the UK.

And it worked. I spoke with two CEO’s of key corporations who have decisions to make and each, when asked, was characteristically, straight forward. The first, a Canadian, said “I get what they were trying to communicate, and I’m sold.” The second, an Asian, said that he had come over specifically because they had invited him. He had come because it was the courteous thing to do but he would leave reminded why he had chosen the UK before and would likely do so again.

The Government was at work yesterday doing its job. It did it well. It provided re-assurance to the large end of the real business sector that the flow of inward capital is still good for the people whose capital it is.

For me though it is a bittersweet thought. That this group of people could accomplish so much, so artfully, on behalf of the nation and its enterprise, and yet has so few comparable successes in its cap for small business, new business and entrepreneurs in general.

I can only hope they apply the same new found skill and competence to their efforts to drive entreprenurialism as they do to tending the large corporate stakeholders, who are merely the few and large, along the continuum of businesses upon which the country’s well being depends.

Related posts:

1. The Dirty Secret of Credit For Small Business: the Failure of the EFG Scheme
2. The Secret To Step Change In Business
3. A Gift for UK Entrepreneurs: The Secret of Selling Something You Love

(Download The Entrepreneurs’ Manifesto and Declaration of Rights PDF)

The Entrepreneurs Manifesto is a public declaration aimed at supporting the UK’s 4.4 million small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Authored by Doug Richard, the high profile entrepreneur and former TV ‘Dragon’, the manifesto calls for a new deal for entrepreneurs as a “recession buster” solution for the UK.

The document consists of two sections:

• The Entrepreneurs Manifesto
  A statement of principles highlighting the challenges that the UK must overcome to truly harness the potential of its entrepreneurs
• The Declaration of Rights
  A series of practical recommendations for the current and incoming Government to clear the path for an explosion in entrepreneurial activity

Doug Richard will be speaking about the manifesto at the major social enterprise conference Growing a Successful Social Enterprise at the Royal Institution, London on Tuesday 19th January 2010, hosted by the University of Essex and supported by the Transformation Fund of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

The Entrepreneurs Manifesto

And what it held
stood ready to be loosed
with all the power that being changed can give.
Philip Larkin

A spectre is haunting the United Kingdom – the spectre of Capitalism.

As a nation we fear that nothing has changed; that greedy bankers will continue to be rewarded for their failure, that amoral corporations will continue to put profits in front of people and the environment, and that the State, however bloated and costly, is not only unable to control the beast but must compete with other nations to be its servant at an unbearable cost to itself.

We have banks so large that they dwarf the very governments whose guarantees they rely upon for our trust. We have become hostage creditors to their uncoupled risk taking. And worse, as nations we are reduced to acting like market stall vendors shouting our best price louder than the adjoining shopkeeper hoping they will purchase just one more night. They are not just too big to fail. They are too big to even let leave.

The largest corporations pit our tax systems against each other. Their capital alights like a wind born leaf ready to whisp away on the slightest breeze of taxation. In the failure of a global commons their profits shoulder a fraction of the costs of the infrastructure and shared society whose foundations support them.

The environment has no voice, the consumer has no collective;  thus the largest corporations are neither charged for their cost to the world nor rewarded for building products that endure.

Yet our State continues to grow. It has devoured every pound of taxation and growls for more. Our civil servants earn uncivil wages. When the economy grew, it outgrew the economy. Despite a decade that has seen more than a 40% increase in welfare spending (i), our rates of poverty and joblessness have continued to climb.  One in four UK citizens live in poverty; nearly three million children do (ii).  Over the last ten years our index of production has fallen more than 10%. In the last two years our index of services has fallen over 5% as well (iii). Our national debt is now 60% of our GDP (iv). We are demonstrably poorer as a nation. The system does not work.

In their fear, and amplified by their impotence, our politicians rail against the excesses of the global financial system, the greed of the corporations and the system that drives it: capitalism.

Their fear reflects the real power of capitalism. It is the acknowledged force that respects no nation’s boundaries and no politicians’ calls for fairness.

But the current economic downturn, precipitated by the credit crisis in the financial system is neither proof of the failure of capitalism nor an endorsement of the profligate spendthrift ineffectiveness of our government.

It marks the first recession in a globally connected economy and the speed by which local folly is amplified into a global crisis. It demonstrates the short‐sightedness of permitting investment banks to co‐habit with retail banks thus coupling the low risk savings and loans business that underpin our citizens to the high risk and volatile business of financial inventions and speculation. And it is a vivid demonstration that much of what we call financial services adds little or no economic value to the nation.

Unleashing the wealth creators

But, the wealth of this nation, and of every nation rests on the shoulders of entrepreneurial activity. The innovators who open new markets, create new products, deliver new services and change the processes of business itself; by the very act of creation, destroy less efficient industries, create greater productivity and as a direct result create all new wealth.

The State is not our society.  It is the largest servant of our society and to the degree it intends to deliver greater benefits and services to all of its citizen’s in equal measure the greater its moral obligation to ensure that it harnesses the power of the entrepreneur  to constantly improve the delivery of its services. The size of the State, itself, is not the enemy. Thus focusing on its size will not lead us to a solution. “Societies that try to reap the gain of creative destruction without the pain find themselves enduring the pain but not the gain.” (v)

The tax receipts that flow from the entrepreneurs’ efforts pay for all the services we receive. Yet the services we receive are not beneficiaries of that gale of creative destruction. The State, often operates from the flawed assumption that if it’s the State’s obligation to ensure we are safe, healthy and educated, then only the State can deliver a fair service. That notion of fairness is the fairness of the least: that no one can benefit more than the least the state can deliver. Thus, everyone gets the least, we cannot improve until we can improve everyone and we end up improving no one.

But to the smallest degree that the State aspires to deliver more than it can afford; it has no choice at all: it must recuse itself from the monolithic delivery of all services and create playing fields upon which entrepreneurs can be unleashed. Harness the collective creative self‐interest of our entrepreneurial output for the benefit of meeting our social objectives and we can ensure that they will improve at the fastest possible pace. We will see a flowering of ideas, a manifold unfolding of new approaches and a gale of creative destruction that sweeps the Kafkaesque bureaucracy and sclerosis from the implementation of government.

Beyond the state, the promise for the United Kingdom is to lead the world, not follow. To create the economic freedoms necessary to nurture innovation and entrepreneurialism and to realise that entrepreneurs, like teachers and doctors are key contributors to the healthiest societies. That is the promise of entrepreneurship. That is the opportunity for the United Kingdom.

The Entrepreneurs Declaration of Rights

We stand at a crossroads. The United Kingdom has the potential to remain a central economic and political power amongst the world’s nations or it can sink slowly beneath the weight of its problems and the impotency of its remedies.

We are a nation that has everything it needs to enter the 21st century on a wave of growth and prosperity. But to do so we must harness the only force for growth, for prosperity and for fairness and social justice that exists: the entrepreneurial culture.

This is not about capital. This is not about the few getting rich at the expense of the many. This is not about the preservation of privilege. If anything it is the key to the opposite: the creation of ladders of social mobility, and increasing of the wealth of the nation so we can afford the services we believe are the rights of our citizens: to be healthy, to be educated, to be safe and to remain free.

But harnessing entrepreneurialism first means understanding it: an entrepreneur takes on the risk of innovating in the expectation of being rewarded for success. Reducing the incentives of being rewarded, increasing the obstacles to create new enterprises, limiting the shape and type of entrepreneurial activity and not investing in the key infrastructure upon which the next wave of innovation will depend, all combine to emasculate our nascent entrepreneurs.

Thus we call for our government to change its priorities.

We must increase economic freedom for new businesses and small businesses and all businesses that take new business risk. We must cut the time it takes to start a new business. We must radically streamline the effort of complying with government regulation and exempt the smallest businesses from many of the regulations entirely.

We must sweep clean the entire government funded industry of business support and leave behind solely an institution whose remit is to expedite and simplify the effort of small business to manage the burden that government places upon it.

We must free up the savings of our families, friends and communities so that they may give, invest or lend their own small capital into the nascent businesses of their children, their friends and their communities with credits and exemptions that radically encourage the activity.

We must stop paying people to be un‐employed and begin to share the cost of them being taught to be employed. Apprenticeship is not solely for the trades; it is for any job in any company. We face a lost generation of students and young graduates with no hope for jobs whilst employers have no means to underwrite the period they need to make those students into productive employees.

We must recognize that the largest customer in the UK is the government itself. The government must adopt a requirement that a specific percentage of all of its procurement will be through small and medium businesses. It must place the responsibility for compliance with industry and at no cost to itself drive revenue to our entrepreneurs and open the doors of government to innovation.

We must broaden the scope for social entrepreneurs by creating new legal frameworks that explicitly encourage a broad range of social businesses from co‐ownership models such as John Lewis to for‐profit businesses that seek to achieve a social bottom line as well as a traditional profit.

Finally, we must recognize the centrality of connectedness in the competition amongst nations. The United Kingdom must wire itself and do so urgently. Just as our roads and trains are a public service and a natural monopoly; so too is true broadband. True broadband is not 1MBof information trickling down to some of our homes. It is 100Mb to every doorstep in this country. It is the key infrastructure that will kindle a wave of creative destruction and increased wealth that will match the industrial revolution. It will reduce the stress on our crowded transport systems, it will re‐vitalize neglected sections of our nation, it will place the key tools in place to amplify and distribute scarce resources in education and health care. And it is achievable now.

Finally, we must understand that we do not understand. People are not empowered to step out on their own, take risk, hope for reward, and move on from failure. The corrosive impact of an overprotective State is not merely the loss of our sense of responsibility to a civil society; it is the even more profound loss of our sense of capacity to change society, to have an impact, to be, in short, an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship can be taught and must be learned.

About Doug Richard

Doug Richard is a successful entrepreneur with 20 years’ experience in the development and leadership of technology and software ventures, Doug featured in the first two TV series of Dragon’s Den. He is the Founder and Vice‐Chairman of the Cambridge Angels and Chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task Force.

Between 1996 and 2000 Doug was President and CEO of Micrografx, a US publicly quoted software company. Prior to that he also founded and subsequently sold two other companies: Visual Software and ITAL Computers.

Doug holds a BA in Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and a Juris Doctor at the school of Law, University of California at Los Angeles. In 2006 Doug was an Honorary Recipient of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion. In 2007, Doug became a fellow of the RSA. In 2009  he received an honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex for his contributions to the teaching of Entrepreneurship.

Doug has always been a champion for startups and small businesses. Even before founding School for Startups he actively mentored, coached and supported many entrepreneurs. In 2008, after teaching a one‐day class in entrepreneurship, Doug decided to found an enterprise dedicated to helping people start better, more profitable, businesses. Since 2008 he has taught thousands in face to face and online classes across the UK.

His wry, candid, practical and ultimately upbeat courses in how to start a business quickly, with a minimum of outside investment and how to market and grow a business efficiently make him a sought after speaker.

As Doug says, “Entrepreneurship can be taught and must be learned.”

Sources

i   Centre for Social Justice report ‐ “Dynamic Benefits: Towards Welfare That Works”

ii  Households Below Average Income (HBAI) survey for 2007/08

iii Office of National Statistics – Index of Production & Index of Services charts

iv  Office National Statistics – November 2009, UK public sector net debt was £829.7 billion (59.2% of National GDP)

v   Joseph Schumpeter, economist

Related posts:

1. Entrepreneurs’ Manifesto Press Round-Up
2. The Entrepreneurs’ Manifesto Has Been Released
3. Dragon says Birmingham’s Entrepreneurs can fire up economic fight back