Your weekly summary of entrepreneurship news, comment, and features. Sent by the Centre for Entrepreneurs (part of the New Entrepreneurs Foundation). Sign up here. Read the original newsletter here.
Save Our Startups
CFE has partnered with leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship groups, led by Crowdcube, to launch ‘Save Our Startups’ – a campaign to protect the future of Britain’s startups and high-growth firms.
Read the letter to the prime minister and add your signature
Covid community responses
- The Prince’s Trust and NatWest have launched an Enterprise Relief Fund to help 18-30-year olds who are self-employed and/or running their own business.
- Forward Partners has launched ‘Forward Advances‘, a revenue-based finance solution for startups
- Innovate UK has announced £20m of grant funding for businesses to help build UK resilience
- Eze Vidra (Reimagine Ventures) has compiled alternative startup job boards from several countries, including a UK list created by David Fogel (ADV)
- Francesca James writes in Fresh Business Thinking to chart how the Great British Entrepreneur Awards community is responding to the crisis.
News
- 750,000 self-employed miss out on UK Coronavirus support (Enterprise Research Centre sets out recommendations to widen support)
- Almost half of firms will furlough most of their staff next week (Fresh Business Thinking covers latest BCC survey)
- CBI calls for urgent economic relief for ‘stranded middle’ businesses (CityAM)
- Coronavirus is hurting global startup investments (Venturebeat covers Startup Genome analysis)
Opinion
- Business as usual? (Paul Lindley, founder, Ella’s Kitchen)
- What Covid-19 means for startup ecosystems and what can be done (Dane Stangler, director of policy innovation, Progressive Policy Institute)
- Imagining entrepreneurial ecosystems in a post-Covid world (Ben Spigel, chancellor’s fellow, University of Edinburgh Business School)
- Covid-19 and the implications for future innovation (Stephen Roper, director, Enterprise Research Centre)
- Why the government needs to boost EIS tax relief to 80% to save our startups (Jasper Smith, founder, Vala Capital)
- It can’t be ‘big business as usual’ after Coronavirus (Mary Herrington, columnist, Unherd)
- More like Covid-1984 (Marie Mawad, Paris correspondent, Sifted)
Features
- Venturebeat: Startup accelerators forge ahead with new virtual programmes
- New York Times: Startups are pummelled in the ‘great unwinding’
- Sifted: Peer-to-peer industry faces rocky road ahead