Kirsty Styles has teamed up with TechforGood.TV to answer the question “what is tech for good?” and she’s written up her experience of London Tech Week trying to answer that very question…
The Capital just closed the doors on its second ever London Technology Week, which promised to be bigger and better than… well, the first one.
At the opening of proceedings, London & Partners, the Mayor’s branding agency, highlighted that there’d be some 210-plus events taking place, with more than 1,000 people joining us from abroad to “shine an international spotlight on the cluster”.
Since Tech City was officially anointed by David Cameron five years ago, the public-private partnership has produced some impressive, accelerating, good* results.
Research from investor GP Bullhound found that 2014 was the most successful year for creating billion-dollar tech companies since 2000, declaring the UK the “undisputed home of unicorns in Europe”. That’s tech unicorns, which is less exciting than the imagery implies, when you really think about it…
The UK is now home to some 17 of those unicorns, the report said, with fintech’s eight companies, including Transferwise and Funding Circle, making up the largest sector.
Tech City UK joined the celebrations, revealing that its Future Fifty grouping of fast-growth startup companies are increasing their staff numbers at more than six times the national average and now employ some 17,000 people worldwide.
But if the PM thought his work was done, Manish Madhvani from GP Bullhound said we now need to “reset our ambition level” if we are to have any hope of creating the next Uber, worth tens of billions, or even the next Facebook, worth almost 10 times that.
Yes, London’s tech leaders are now on the hunt for dragons, the scale up companies that can create multi-billionaires out of their humble founders, nothing to do with the mythical beasts, sadly.
But, along with mapping startups CityMapper and What3Words, given fintech and proptech are the darlings of the tech scene in 2015, it doesn’t quite feel like good, the morally excellent kind at least, is the first thing on founders and investors’ minds.
Sustainable?
So #LDNTechWeek certainly created some good headlines, and gave people like me a pretty crazy schedule for a humid week in June, but is any of this tech for good?
Behind closed doors, several tech leaders suggest the unicorn headlines aren’t all they seem, if your measure of good is about creating sustainable companies. Payday lender Wonga, for example, has suffered under the weight of its fairytale tech startup status.
With eye-watering loan repayment rates of up to 5000%, it could hardly be accused of being a ‘tech for good’ firm. But after ‘disrupting’ the money market, for good or ill, the regulators have finally caught up and it has had to pay £220m of compensation to customers, and shed more than 300 staff.
Despite good employment and investment figures, London’s startups appear to have some way to go in their bid for building good, global firms. One investor told me that truly sustainable startups should never take on investment “beyond their human capacity to manage the risk”.
In a bid to support those attempting to create sustainable scale ups, tech veterans Sherry Coutu and Reid Hoffman announced the creation of a Scale Up Institute during London Tech Week.
Diverse?
Along with ‘scale ups’, the word of London Technology Week may well have been diversity. Whether that’s gender, race, disability, class or even regional diversity, everyone acknowledged it’s certainly positive that these conversations were front and centre.
Accelerator Wayra set a disappointing tone with the launch of its StartupDNA survey results, finding men are still almost twice as likely to get VC funding than women. Not to be easily defeated though, they also found that women were opting to self-fund instead.
Echoing these figures, Tech London Advocates revealed soon after the findings from its membership survey that said 23% of startups have no women on their board.
Tuesday saw TechCrunch’s Europas welcome some 40% female speakers across its day of events, demonstrating the kind of results that can be achieved with, no doubt, lots of asking, asking and then asking again.
And topping off a mixed week for equality, Innovate Finance hosted its inaugural Diversity Challenge Awards to celebrate those working in financial innovation who are committed to extending opportunities to the unusual suspects. During his keynote at the event, Tech London Advocates founder Russ Shaw emphasised: “Diversity goes further than gender, it’s ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability too.”
The diversity discussion, although getting a little old, has a handy link back to the creation of ‘good’ companies. Time and again, good figures on diversity lead to positive productivity figures too. “The future of your company depends on it,” Natalie Campbell, entrepreneur and board member of Wayra UnLtd said.
Where next?
I took a breather from the London Tech Week madness to visit JustEat’s HQ with a class of 70 eager A Level computer science students. Yeah, so what?
The students were from a school based in Tech City and the teacher told me that she had approached every single local tech brand you could imagine asking them for a look around, using the area’s handy startup map, but got almost no response.
I was shocked, after all, you can find a tech leader a week shaking their fist at the digital skills gap.
Sure, tech for good sounds, well, good on paper, but when it gets down to it, it’s not clear whether London’s techies, leaders or workers, yet buy into good industries, good workplaces or good hiring policies. We may celebrate being better than Silicon Valley on areas like diversity, but that’s hardly good, is it?
So, for me, I hope London Technology Week 2016 is the year of tech for good, with a refocusing of headlines and investment towards good sectors – cleantech, edtech, assistive tech, perhaps – real progress on diversity, because we all believe it’s a good idea, and good attempts to look at what’s right in front of you, something I hate to call ‘talent’.
As my dad says at the end of every phone conversation I ever have with him: “be good” tech folk. And I assume he means both kinds.
* adjective, better, best.
1. morally excellent; virtuous; righteous; pious:
a good man.
2. satisfactory in quality, quantity, or degree:
a good teacher; good health.