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The European startup ecosystem arrived

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Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#51

Post by eftpotrm »

ladon86 wrote: post #2

The first comment is correct - this is the UK scene more than the european scene. My real problem with the UK scene is the relative lack of talent available to startups. Where do talented graduates from the UK want to work? Banks, consultancies and accountancies. How much do they want to be paid? About £40k starting, please. With the cost of living being so high in London, why wouldn't they? Unless you can raise enou…

How much do they want to be paid? About £40k starting, please.

Best of luck to them. I know few (non-contractors) who pull in even 90% of that with substantial experience.

Idle wandering of mind a while back, I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to do a startup I'd base it in Northampton. Relatively cheap area by UK standards but livable, hour by train to both central London and Birmingham/West Midlands (about half the size of London so a substantial catchment area in its own right), good N/S and E/W road transport links and if I advertised for experienced devs at USD50k (equivalent) I'd be beating them away with a stick. I don't have any plans in that direction mind you, but it's that sort of thing that makes me wonder why anyone bothers setting up in London.

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#52

Post by barrkel »

ig1 wrote: post #42
barrkel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume about 1000 GBP/month if you want somewhere half-decent to live. If you want accommodation to be 30% of your before-tax salary, then you need to make 40K per year. If you're willing to compromise - live in a room in a shared house, almost like a student, or somewhere dodgy (e.g. tower block with lifts that smell like piss) or with poor transport links, you'll be able to reduce that by 50% or more. Between mysel…

You say that as if living in a shared house was some sort of social stigma. Most single young (under say 35) professionals in London share flats, and I'm including lawyers, investment bankers, doctors, etc. One reason is that price drops disproportionately with the number of rooms, for example for a 1-bed flat you might pay £200/week but for a similar 2-bed you'd pay only £240/week. You could pay 1000/month for a "ha…

Living in a shared house (assuming no relationship with co-sharers) is a massive PITA, especially if you're as misanthropic as me. Sharing bathrooms, kitchen cleaning protocols, awkwardness / potential conflicts having guests stay over, ugh; it sucks. It's like living at home with your parents; better in some ways, worse in others, but a huge step below having one's own place.

But if you have a significant other, then I agree, sharing is a whole heap better.

We live in a 3-bedroom, two-story house with a back garden that runs down to the canal, and a view directly onto Victoria Park past the canal. It's about 25 minutes from almost anywhere in central London by scooter (to my mind, the best way to get around London). The house runs to only slightly more than 1000/month.

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#53

Post by barrkel »

narag wrote: post #46
barrkel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume about 1000 GBP/month if you want somewhere half-decent to live. If you want accommodation to be 30% of your before-tax salary, then you need to make 40K per year. If you're willing to compromise - live in a room in a shared house, almost like a student, or somewhere dodgy (e.g. tower block with lifts that smell like piss) or with poor transport links, you'll be able to reduce that by 50% or more. Between mysel…

Thank you and of course also to the rest of people that answered. It seems I'll be sensibly better than now. Madrid accommodation is shockingly expensive (~900€ a decent flat half an hour from the centre, I live now much farther), considering the much lower salaries... I can't find anything above €30k right now, with 15 years experience! A funny thing is that yesterday I was thinking of emailing (or should I say spam…

Email away, but given that I work for Embarcadero from home, and my coworkers are located in California, I don't have much advice specific to the software industry locally; just generalities about London from the perspective of an Irishman, and thus the culture, frankly, is not terribly foreign.

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#54

Post by axod »

zeemonkee wrote: post #6
ladon86 wrote: post #2

The first comment is correct - this is the UK scene more than the european scene. My real problem with the UK scene is the relative lack of talent available to startups. Where do talented graduates from the UK want to work? Banks, consultancies and accountancies. How much do they want to be paid? About £40k starting, please. With the cost of living being so high in London, why wouldn't they? Unless you can raise enou…

I do get a fair amount of job offers from startups in London, but they are very inflexible about remote working (I'm in Scotland). Want me to move to London ? Sure, double whatever salary you're offering and I might consider it. Otherwise it would be a big drop in my standard of living - nice big apartment up here for cardboard box down there. There is a lot of good talent in the UK, the problem is we have a massivel…

There's plenty of affordable housing a stones throw away from London on the train if you're prepared to commute.

I did it for a couple of years (1 hour each way).

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#55

Post by roel_v »

notahacker wrote: post #38
roel_v wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. 40k ~= 29k / year after taxes? That's 2400 / month (I'm not sure what health care coverage you get for that, it's been 10 years since I lived in the UK, but let's assume it is fully covered). A 1 bedroom is what nowadays, 1600 / month if you're not picky? Add public transport fees (100 euro / month?), above-average cost of food (depending on where you go and what you eat, obviously - 250 euro a month for 1 perso…

You can get a perfectly decent furnished flat in a normal inner-suburb area of London on little more than half the suggested £1600, and if you plan your flights in advance the cost on a low cost carrier is negligible. £40k per annum isn't going to offer you the same kind of luxury in London you might get in other cities, but it's a perfectly adequate salary to enjoy the city on.

OK I guess it depends on how you define 'live in London', I guess. I used to live in Staines, but I hardly believe that moving to Staines represents the ambition of people saying the want to move to London because that's where the action happens. I admit I don't know that much about actual rental prices right now, but a cursory web search shows to me that my 1600 pounds is closer to the average for a 1-bedroom apartment than 800 pounds. 700 pounds is what an average apartment (nothing fancy) costs in my rural hometown in Belgium.

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#56

Post by lsb »

barrkel wrote: post #30
narag wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been planning to move from Spain to London for some months. You're scaring me. Is £40.000 not enough for a decent flat and once a month flight back home?

Assume about 1000 GBP/month if you want somewhere half-decent to live. If you want accommodation to be 30% of your before-tax salary, then you need to make 40K per year. If you're willing to compromise - live in a room in a shared house, almost like a student, or somewhere dodgy (e.g. tower block with lifts that smell like piss) or with poor transport links, you'll be able to reduce that by 50% or more. Between mysel…

I was living in Stoke Newington 3 years ago with a couple, paying £585/mo for a first-story rowhouse flat with a backyard garden and a piano and an open invite to the older gentleman's main home in Seville, and was 2 blocks off of the A10, right on multiple rail lines to Central London. It's all in where you look.

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#57

Post by zeemonkee »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #19
zeemonkee wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do get a fair amount of job offers from startups in London, but they are very inflexible about remote working (I'm in Scotland). Want me to move to London ? Sure, double whatever salary you're offering and I might consider it. Otherwise it would be a big drop in my standard of living - nice big apartment up here for cardboard box down there. There is a lot of good talent in the UK, the problem is we have a massivel…

I totally empathise with this. When I'm looking for work I see lots of firms in London hiring, but I have no interest in moving there, and although commuting is just about doable for the very short term, it totally ruins my out of work life. I would happily work remotely, but no one ever offers this. I'm not sure I quite understand the obsession companies have with London. There are plenty of talented people around t…

I can understand the obsession. As pointed out, the UK is massively centralized around a single city. Media ? London. Finance ? London. Politics ? London. And so on. There may be local centers of excellence elsewhere - and devolution has been an improvement - but if your startup relies on, for example, shmoozing clients or investors in the media or finance sectors, then London is where you want to be.

Personally, I think that's one thing (well that and our antiquated infrastructure and class system) that's holding the UK back, and it didn't used to be the case. But that's the situation we have.

However, there is no reason why people who don't need to shmooze with clients need to live in London or the Home Counties. If your job is coding, then remote working is a viable - and cheap - option, with the occasional company meeting every other month. A lot of companies have a lot of success with this model and, well-managed, it works well.

I think a lot of startups are still attached to some "Social Network" romantic ideal of a hackers' playground where we sit in Aeron chairs and eat pizza doing all-night coding sprints in between Nerf gun fights. However that has absolutely nothing to do with success or failure of a software project. A startup needs to adapt and economize and a huge office in central London is hardly the best way to do either. First, you are paying through the nose for office space you don't need, and second, it's hard to get people to work for you.

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#58

Post by jacquesm »

In my opinion one thing that is very different from the US compared to Europe is that labour laws here are pretty favorable to employees. This has the downside (from a start-ups perspective) of having a workforce that is mostly happy.

Happy people are in a strong position to negotiate and will also not easily go and leave their happy well paying jobs in order to be 'repeatedly punched in the face' (that's not mine).

So besides the obvious advantages that an ecosystem like Silicon Valley offers you can bet that if you see a European start-up that the people behind it are extremely well motivated and probably have some funding. As opposed to the 'throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks' strategy employed in Silicon Valley. Typically European start-ups have a higher rate of success than their American counterparts but the magnitude of the individual successes is lower.

This is all from my limited perspective so apply salt liberally.

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#59

Post by dkersten »

patrickk wrote: post #41
dkersten wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding Stockbyte, I never said there wasn't any other successful Irish startups besides Havok, just that they are few. We can hope that this is improving though. Thanks for the links, though. Very useful. Hopefully the two funding programs are better than EI and the other ones I've seen in the past. I definitely see the startup situation improving here, its just happening very slowly and I think a greater focus on…

"....though I don't know what more can be done to help that along" Both my parents are secondary level teachers, yet I hold the controversial opinion that we should put a huge emphasis on teaching the basics of computing and programming to children at the primary school level. I remember doing some light programming in BASIC on a toy VTech "computer" when I was about ten, but I would have progressed far quicker and l…

I agree, that would be a very beneficial thing for science and compsci in general, not just startups.

Actually, I was EXTREMELY disappointed with our second level computer education (in relation to computers). Out of my class, only one other person went on to study something computer related (and not a computer science degree). The school made little effort in trying to promote such things and instead focused on the usual (mechanical) engineering and business type things that are (or were when I was in school, anyway) so popular. Yet those are industries (as far as I see, anyway) badly affected by the recession. Schools, in my experience - I'm sure some are better than others in this respect, put much too little emphasis on computer education, even though it has become such an integral part of most peoples lives and certainly of business. I think some solid computing and programming education for primary level children would be a great advancement for our country, but honestly, second level education is so lacking in that area that I think any additional computing-related education would be beneficial.

In fact, it should be a mandatory part of education for everyone. Even if most people are disinterested and do something else, the problem solving and analysis skills would serve them well whatever they do. It would also expose people to computers and programming who would otherwise have overlooked them. For example, all this hype about getting women into computing could, in my opinion, be tackled by introducing everybody, male and female, at an early age.

Re: The European startup ecosystem arrived

#60

Post by kgutteridge »

eftpotrm wrote: post #51
ladon86 wrote: post #2

The first comment is correct - this is the UK scene more than the european scene. My real problem with the UK scene is the relative lack of talent available to startups. Where do talented graduates from the UK want to work? Banks, consultancies and accountancies. How much do they want to be paid? About £40k starting, please. With the cost of living being so high in London, why wouldn't they? Unless you can raise enou…

How much do they want to be paid? About £40k starting, please. Best of luck to them. I know few (non-contractors) who pull in even 90% of that with substantial experience. Idle wandering of mind a while back, I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to do a startup I'd base it in Northampton. Relatively cheap area by UK standards but livable, hour by train to both central London and Birmingham/West Midlands (about h…

I am in Northampton for the transport links you mention, the reason to setup in London is however simple the majority of good people in Northampton are commuting to London. As you say its about 50-70% of the cost of living in London but still accessible
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