Tech and politics now the honeymoon is over
You can’t open your news app of choice without seeing the next story about tech colliding with politics. Whether it’s a call for in-game…
You can’t open your news app of choice without seeing the next story about tech colliding with politics. Whether it’s a call for in-game loot boxes to be regulated as gambling, the latest fight about autonomous vehicle safety or concerns about biased algorithms unfairly profiling individuals, it’s easy to think that the honeymoon is over and the divorce lawyers have been briefed.
But this is only half of the story. Policymakers are looking beyond the ‘growth and jobs’ benefits of tech innovation to its ability to solve complex challenges. In the UK and the EU, for example, regulators see fintech as the core of the solution to entrenched oligopolies in retail banking and payments. In turn, they have prised open, through law, incumbents’ monopolies over customer data to facilitate competition from new providers.
The reality is that the relationship will become much more nuanced, intertwined and sophisticated as each ecosystem is forced to re-shape around the other. Heuristics like “policymakers don’t get tech” and “ask for forgiveness, not permission” will be left behind. Smart founders are beginning to realise that politics, policy and regulation are variables to be optimised for like any other, and that doing so can be a huge source of competitive advantage.
That optimisation strategy will depend on the market and jurisdiction you are in, the product or service you are developing and a bunch of other factors. But even at seed stage, the decisions of policymakers can have massive impacts on startups’ ability to get to market, secure early traction and begin scaling.
Unfortunately, the guidance needed to optimise for policy and regulation is virtually absent from the early stage ecosystem in Europe. It is this gap that Form is filling — backing early stage founders with capital and support to understand the changing regulatory landscape, mitigate the risks it generates and seize the opportunities it offers.
We also think that policymakers could benefit from better understanding of the innovation that is happening at early stage in the markets they are trying to regulate — so they can make regulation in light of disruption, not in spite of it. Form is building out a community of policymakers, researchers and academics to forge better conversation about how to regulate these markets.
If you’re a founder, VC or policymaker we’d love to hear from you — send us an email .
Originally published at https://formventures.vc on September 30, 2019.