DIG SOUTH Innovation Conference

Innovation and disruption are moving through the economy in new ways - particularly in services that can be easily socialized, such as the hotel business, the taxi industry, and the education market. As socially driven disruption progresses, companies like Aribnb, Uber and Coursera run into more and more regulatory hurdles. New entrants to many markets face ill fitting (and ill defined) regulatory structures. Investor Chris Dixon described many of the companies operating in this space as “regulatory hacks.” As Dixon described: “Sometimes the businesses that change regulations are startups. Startups don’t have the resources to change regulations through lobbying. Instead, they need to start with regulatory hacks: “back door” experiments that demonstrate the benefits of their ideas. With luck, regulators are forced to follow.” This session will explore operating as a startup in such spaces. How do you assess when to move forward in such gray areas? What do you consider? What resources do you look to?