The Role of The Government in Your Startup

This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Turkey.

Evan Burfield is the Co-founder of 1776, a technology firm that has since the past 5 years set up a venture fund and an incubator for startups, whilst also hosting thousands of startups from over 75 cities in the world in a competition called the challenge cup. Evan shares his ideas on how working with the government can be of great importance for a startup.

Silicon Valley, the region is located in North California of the United States of America, is seen as the global centre for technology and innovation, most startups springing up from other regions of the world aim to replicate and become part of a “silicon valley” in their respective regions, but the culture of silicon valley and most of the other technology communities in the world teach startups to shy away from working with the government, reasons including government being “slow” and “complex”. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to focus on solving problems that depend less on the government and allow them to move and scale quickly.

In much as it is important to strive to do things quickly as a startup, it is important to not forget that the government tends to regulate the things that are most important to citizens, things like food, electricity, healthcare, education are handled by the government in one way or the other. So, it’s hard to solve the big problems as a startup without having to deal with
the government, even the projected future of technology which is tending towards concepts such as artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, autonomous vehicles to mention a few, are all concepts which will be applied in sectors which are greatly controlled by the government.

Now that we know just how much the government plays in the sectors startups focus on, its important to understand how the regulations set by the government can affect your startup. Take for example the healthcare sector, as a startup delivering a healthcare service, there are regulations that determine certain factors of your service and product, a good instance of this is the 23ANDME startup which does genetic testing, 23ANDME started operations successfully until they received a letter from the drug administration threatening to arrest its executives if 23ANDME’s services do not start conforming to the rules of the drug administration. Another instance is the one of Uber, Uber was able to find strategies that align with the transportation regulations of each city they operate in, this helped build the Uber success story we all talk about today.

As an entrepreneur, government regulations are capable of giving your startup good boosts as well as being the sole reason for a great decline in your progress, it is up to you to find and pivot your ships to sail in the same direction as the regulations of the government.

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