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Julie Meyer On Building An Entrepreneur Country
17/06/2009
Julie Meyer, one of Britain's most successful entrepreneurs, outlined her plans for an Entrepreneur Country at a lunch jointly hosted by Smith & Williamson and FBT Media yesterday.
Building an Entrepreneur Country
By Julie Meyer, Chief Executive of Ariadne Capital
1. Individual Capitalism has come of age
When I founded First Tuesday, a network of entrepreneurs which many credit with igniting the Internet generation in the UK, in 1998, there was a niche group of digerati who came on the first Tuesday of the month to talk about building their Internet start-ups. We were a "digital island" of sorts. Today, I don't know a single person under 30 who wants to work for someone else. They view themselves as their own P&L, their own brand, and are initiated into business through programs like Dragon's Den and The Apprentice.
The rise of the serial entrepreneur, the micro entrepreneur, the young entrepreneur, the portfolio entrepreneur and the lifestyle entrepreneur has been unmissable over the past decade in the UK.
This trend has arisen due to "Individual Capitalism", a form of business where the basic unit is the individual rather than the corporation. The Internet opens up opportunities in how people work - remotely or from home, from their phone, as a small firm looking much bigger than they are - so that this shift away from "Company Man" to "Individual Capitalist" has gained enormous momentum. The recession has created many Individual Capitalists in the form of freelance consultants, but even more are corporate refugees of their own choosing.
So while not all of us will make millions upon a tradesale of our firms to a multinational, and we may not call ourselves entrepreneurs, we are actually all becoming "Individual Capitalists."
Those of us who have run our own... continued on page two >
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