ONS figures showed Britain's GDP rising as spending fell, and a San Francisco fund now wants to scale John Healey's economy to zero customers.
Official figures showed UK GDP grew 0.1% in August even as consumer spending fell, ahead of John Healey's first budget. A San Francisco venture fund has taken this as proof that Britain should stop shopping entirely, and has a nine-phase plan to get there.
A San Francisco venture fund said on Tuesday that it will help Britain remove consumer spending from its economy altogether. The plan follows official figures showing the UK grew in August even as households spent less.
The Office for National Statistics said gross domestic product, the total value of what the country produces, rose by 0.1% in August. That followed 0.4% growth in July. City economists had expected the economy to shrink by 0.1%, according to The Guardian.
Most analysts called it a modest surprise, two weeks before chancellor John Healey's first budget. Hyperloop Capital Partners called it product-market fit.
"Consumers spent less and the number went up," said Brayden Kessler, the fund's founding partner. "You don't need a PhD to read that trend line. You need a pitch deck and the courage to extrapolate."
Shoppers are a legacy dependency
The fund has drawn up a nine-phase roadmap called Project Zero Basket. The goal is a Britain where nobody buys anything and growth goes up forever.
Kessler explained the thesis from a standing desk he has never sat at. Every great platform outgrows its users, he said. Britain is simply the first to do it at nation-state scale.
"Think about it," he said. "Customers complain. They want refunds. They want the bus to come. A post-consumer economy has none of that churn."
Taryn Holloway-Price, the fund's chief vibes officer, called the British high street "tech debt". She means old, clunky systems that slow everything down. "We're not closing shops," she said. "We're refactoring them into pure GDP."
"Every pound a Briton doesn't spend is a pound of pure, unlocked growth. That's not a recession. That's a moat."
Phase one rebrands the weekly shop as a "friction event". Phase three swaps supermarket tills for QR codes that open a waitlist. Phase six asks pubs to pivot from selling pints to selling the idea of pints.
Phase nine is called the Exit. The fund declined to say what Britain exits into. Holloway-Price would only describe it as "a liquidity moment for the whole island".
Reaction in the City
Not everyone has bought in, which Kessler counts as early evidence the plan is working.
Fenella Okafor-Wright, chief economist at the fictional Bishopsgate lender Thimble & Grout, pointed out that growth rarely comes from people buying nothing. Other parts of the economy can carry a month, she said. They tend not to carry a decade.
"That's exactly what Blockbuster said about streaming," Kessler replied. Asked how Blockbuster related to household spending, he said the connection was "directional".
A rival fund, Synergy Rocket, has launched a competing product called Consumption-as-a-Service. Britons would pay a monthly subscription for the right not to buy things. Early users report it feels very similar to having no money.
Hyperloop says it has requested a meeting at the Treasury ahead of the budget. It was sent a general enquiries form. The team has since spent a nine-day sprint "disrupting" the form, which has not yet been submitted.
Holloway-Price was unbothered. "Governments are slow," she said. "That's why the best founders just ship the policy and apologise later."
The burn rate question
Some investors asked how Hyperloop itself makes money if nobody spends anything. Kessler called that "a very 2019 question".
The fund's own revenue comes from fees on consumer apps, he confirmed, then said it was out of scope for this funding round.
He wrapped up the interview to grab an oat flat white from the café downstairs. At the counter, he paused with his phone over the card reader for a long moment.
Then he put the phone away and told the barista he was "long on not paying". He walked out with nothing, beaming, and described the walk back upstairs as "the most bullish thing I've done all quarter".
