Wish you were here… tech boss wants to attract foreign talent
NO MATTER who wins the Election the next Government must invest in the tech industry and allow it to attract foreign talent, says the boss of a photo-sharing start-up. The UK is facing a digital staffing crisis, with a skills gap costing the economy an estimated £63billion a year, according to the Science and Technology Committee of MPs.
Oded Ran, chief executive of TouchNote – which was founded in 2008 in what has become East London’s ‘Tech City’ district, and has just made its first profit – said: ‘We’ve got skilled workers from the EU and we want to make sure we are able to retain them and continue to attract new ones.
‘We’re keeping all our staff in the UK, but to do that we need to be sure we’re still able to not only retain our non-UK talent but attract the best talent.’
TouchNote uses an app to create postcards from customers’ holiday pictures and memorable moments and has sent 9 million cards so far.
Ran added: ‘Small firms and scale-ups are the ones that create growth.’ But he complained: ‘From everything we’ve seen in the world in the past few years, not only are people unable to predict what will happen in an election, they’re also unable to predict what policies will be put in place.’