Welcome to the Smart Startup English Podcast!
Our goal is to help startup professionals take their English from intermediate to advanced in just 10 minutes a day. In each episode, we’ll talk about a topic related to the startup world, and we’ll learn some vocabulary that you can use to sound more natural in your day-to-day business interactions in English.
In this episode, we’re talking about the challenges that startups face in a slow economy, and we’ll focus on the Italian startup scene.
What comes to mind when you think of Italy? You may be thinking about delicious food, sunny days and a beautiful language.
But how is the startup world doing? In other words, when it comes to friendly startup ecosystems, how does Italy compare to the rest of Europe?
The startup environment in Italy doesn’t look very promising. Italy has the fourth largest population in the European Union and its fourth biggest economy, but the startup ecosystem doesn’t match these numbers.
One of the major challenges faced by young Italian entrepreneurs is poor access to capital. To face a challenge, the theme of this week’s episode, means to have to go through a difficult situation or to deal with a difficult problem.
Another challenge that founders have to overcome is the infamous Italian red tape. Red tape is another word for bureaucracy. And to overcome a challenge means to deal with the challenge successfully.
In this lesson, we’ll teach you 13 Business English terms you need to know if you want to talk about facing a challenge.
A few words we’ll talk about are:
- red tape
- to get off the ground
- soaring (taxes)
Here’s the episode audio. To get our episodes for free, you can also subscribe to the Smart Startup English podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud and Spotify.
If you want to keep practicing the words you’ve learned in this lesson, sign up to get access to a free worksheet based on this episode. Doing the exercises in the worksheet will help you transfer the knowledge from your short term memory to your long term memory.
If you want to keep learning, here’s another episode you can listen to:
Episode 2 – Getting funding for your startup
Let’s keep in touch! You can find Smart Startup English on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook.
Image credits: Julia Solonina via Unsplash
