I've been doing a lot of thinking out loud today about the UK's lamentable state with regards to its technology industry today without much disagreement in my back channels – perhaps HN will have more interesting things to say?
It feels like the UK's failings in the technology space are entirely cultural. Looking back at the 70s and 80s when the UK punched above its weight in the microcomputer space, UK tech companies remained very insular and the people who got rich tended to just retire or move on to other industries. This seems to happen wave after wave in the UK. The big names of any decade are no longer around in the next one because they got rich and quit.
The US seems to have a culture of building up business communities in a way the UK doesn't through investment and people staying in the game for multiple decades. There are thousands of paper multi-millionaires who continue to work 40 hour weeks in the US in a way you'd never see in the UK. It's also far less common in the UK for people who got rich off tech to reinvest back into the nascent companies in their space rather than retire. And who's giving multi millions to CS institutions like Imperial or St Andrews in the same way US billionaires do to Stanford and MIT? Where are the charismatic titans of UK technology?
Maybe I'm being unfair, but I can't put my finger on any of it with any clarity because I don't have my head in the UK tech space too much (I live here but virtually "work in the US", so maybe I'm part of the problem) but something smells funny about British culture when it comes to tech and I'd love to know what the cause of that smell is.
The UK is certainly capable of great things. We've seen this in the biomedical, pharma, finance, and energy spaces – how can we be punching above our weight in sectors like those but still have most of our population flocking to American sites like Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram because the local alternatives either don't exist or are terrible?