This is What Brexit Means for You and Your Startup
The media is abuzz with the biggest news of the year — UK is leaving EU, and how this will change everything. I have some advice for the founders, engineers, retirees, marketers, cab drivers on what they should do.
Nothing. No-op.
Unless you are an investment banker, or someone actively involved in currency trading — chances are this move will have minimal impact on you here in the USA. In the world that many of the readers of this blog post live in, your life is determined far more by things like your gross margin model, free cash flow, and days it to takes to close a lead. Very little of this, if any, will change meaningfully for you.
Charts are Worth a Thousand Words
First, let’s start with basics. What was the impact of UK joining EU so you can assess the downside to leaving it? Compare here economies that are in EU and not in EU and see if you can spot any patterns — I cannot.
Next, look at the GDP of the world and how it correlates to all that happens in countries like UK. This will give you an idea of the impact.
You will not need a PhD in economics or statistics to see that the world is much bigger and that its really hard to see how one of these relates to another in any simple way.
Startup Advice from ’08 Crisis
I was at Salesforce when all kinds of economists started telling us how the world was ending — and at that time, it was real. The world economy did slow down.
But here is what happened to our numbers — we sold as much as the number of sales people we hired. Nothing changed except we slowed down hiring a bit and that was a huge mistake.
In retrospect, it was clear — a secular shift such as move to the cloud when cloud adoption is still single digits of total spend is not meaningfully impacted by macro. When you are going from 2.3% of IT spend to 3.4%, your limitation is sales execution not world GDP.
In other words, growth comes from secular shifts. This is what I presented to Storm Ventures limited partners (investors) a month ago to illustrate what drives us, silicon valley and the fund returns.
So, focus on hiring great people, closing more deals and making your customers happy. The rest is noise. When you get to the size of Oracle or IBM and are growing at global GDP growth rates (or worse), you can worry about the GDP then.
(This was originally pubished on Mattermark.)