Dame Stephanie Shirley, one of Britain’s most inspirational entrepreneurs, has some bracing advice when it comes to Brexit. “Just get on with it, my friends,” she told a tech crowd at Google’s London headquarters last week.
As a child refugee who arrived in Britain in 1939, the founder of a pioneering all-female computer software company in the 1960s, and an active philanthropist to this day, Dame Stephanie has overcome far bigger challenges than Brexit during her lifetime.
And, for the most part, Britain’s tech community has been following Dame Stephanie’s advice. After the UK’s Europe referendum result, which few in the industry expected or welcomed, tech entrepreneurs have been trying to make the best of it. Those who love nothing better than talking about how to inflict disruption on others are learning to embrace a little of it themselves.