This week, our CEO Luke Loveridge sat down with our lead investor Ying Tan to get his view on the current market situation regarding new ventures and venture capital as a successful founder and angel investor.
After becoming one of the youngest VPs at Goldman Sachs, Ying created a substantial property portfolio before founding Dynamo in February 2006; he exited in May 2021 having grown the company to become one of the leading and largest mortgage brokers in the UK. Since his exit, he has also become the non-executive chairman of Knowledge Bank – a multi-award-winning mortgage criteria search system.
Luke: How do you see the outlook for start-ups in the economic climate we’re currently in?
Ying:
We’re entering an interesting and possibly challenging time with the wider economic outlook.
That said I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for start-ups; good strong solid starts with powerful leadership teams and strong foundations can really thrive because of that agility and the ability to really adapt to change far easier than maybe big oil tankers.
So, I think you know it’s certainly a good time for good ideas, for good start-ups to really thrive in a downturn.
I think there’s also the opportunity to evolve and pivot with the market if that needs to be done.
Again, you know a start-up has that agility. They don’t have any legacy systems, legacy data.
So I look back on my own experience with the business that I built at Dynamo, you know we really grew out the depths of the credit crunch in 2008.
And I think that was a reason why we were able to be as successful as we were. Because while others were licking their wounds and wondering what to do with potential challenges which the financial brought, we were able to really grow, build our infrastructure our systems and develop procedures to really give us a strong foundation for growth. And that boded well for the future.
And I guess the other aspect is investment. Investment will keep flowing.
You know there’s a lot of funding out there and those people, start-ups with good ideas, and good businesses will absolutely still get supported by the capital that’s out there at play.
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