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I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

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Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#111

Post by [deleted] »

jgrahamc wrote: post #28
KaiserPro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London does sales well, if you want a sales office you open it in london. What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea. Even less so to someone with a crap idea. Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else. They also had to do much more…

I mean, good luck to him moving his HQ to NYC etc. but if I were an employee in London HM The Queen's tea cup in Windsor would be shaking from the sonic boom after I lit the reheats on my CV.

[deleted]

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#112

Post by fennecfoxen »

KaiserPro wrote: post #27
goldcd wrote: post #18

I work for a company head-quartered in one continent, listed on another and I work in a third (the UK) - and sales are based all over. Not for one moment saying there aren't local issues/idiosyncrasies - but I'm unsure how moving your company solves them, and article seems to overlook all manner of problems: Aren't you going to lose staff when you move? Is everybody going to have to get up really early to talk to Eur…

Well precisely Moving to NYC/silicon valley is going to mean fishing in a very over fished pool. There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour. Even if you don't loose staff, operating an engineering team over large distances is a challenge unless you know what your doing. Given that he's blaming the engineers for conce…

> There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour.

Yeah, I moved from London back to NYC after Brexit and literally got a 100% raise. And London is well above the European average.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#113

Post by barry-cotter »

KaiserPro wrote: post #22
jgrahamc wrote: post #6

Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively. The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from…

London does sales well, if you want a sales office you open it in london. What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea. Even less so to someone with a crap idea. Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else. They also had to do much more…

>Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else.

> They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised.

With supporters like this the UK is in no need of enemies. It would be difficult to more pithily explain why the US is a better place to build a startup as a founder, or to explain why US startups have more money and so can pay their staff more.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#114

Post by hogFeast »

Veen wrote: post #56
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #43

Sounds like the author is upset that Brexit has closed the valve on the pipeline of cheap labour from EU workers. There's no shortage of talent in London trust me, it's just that you're going to have to start paying more than a pittance to get it. Brexit so far has been a positive thing for tech workers' salaries.

Yes, I voted remain but I suspect the businesses yelling that they can't hire really mean they can't hire for what they were accustomed to paying before Brexit. It's particularly prevalent in lower paid areas like transport, coffee shops, and agriculture. If the success of your business depended on low wages Brits won't accept, you're likely to be in trouble.

The issue isn't pay itself but companies not knowing how to operate with higher wages (i.e. how to economise on labour usage) and not knowing how to deal with tight labour markets.

In agriculture, you have farmers complaining about no labour whilst they are failing to use machines that could replace the labour (and, unf, agriculture in the UK has turned into one massive IHT avoidance scheme...so most of the operators are clueless). In retail, you still have companies doing multi-day interviews with logical reasoning tests, team-working tests, problem solving exercises for shelf stacking positions (which, btw, they are getting people to do for free with no training on welfare-to-work programs).

I am not sure if I agree with the original post. Is it completely off though? No. Not at all.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#115

Post by hogFeast »

jgrahamc wrote: post #6

Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively. The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from…

The commercial culture in the UK is, generally, nothing like the US. You have companies with great products that refuse on principle to hire lots of salespeople. I actually can't think of a SaaS company that is as aggressive in investing in sales and marketing as you see on average in the US. And this is rational because the return on investment is usually very poor (fintech in the UK is probably the best example, supposed to be the "best of the best"...pretty much unanimously weak results/growth from companies that are largely British). Autonomy/Darktrace is a possible exception (they have a lot of US people tbf) but given what happened to Autonomy...the jury is still out.

And CS courses in the UK have a very academic bent. This is a rather complex cultural point but, ultimately, it comes down to the teaching. What kind of things are prioritized, what kinds of things have value, and teachers in the UK value complexity for it's own sake (to give you an example, I studied somewhere that was doing AI research back in the 60s, was offered huge grants from military and corporates...all turned down, research stagnated, grad students all leave...the uni is feverishly trying to connect professors with funding now, all totally non-commercial nonsense...once this starts it is very hard to reverse).

Also, using the example of a US-based company opening an office in the UK isn't very helpful. The UK has lots of US investment banks doing very well in the UK but only one home-grown investment bank (and that one has been taken over by people from the US, and isn't doing very well). There is a reason why this is the case. Companies that are based overseas in the UK tend to be different in fundamental ways from ones that aren't. In tech, the big problem is that the UK is largely used as an outsourcing hub (particularly in development) because there is no real commercial expertise (this isn't obvious to people in the London tech bubble, most of the tech industry in the UK still exists that bubble).

The rest of the article is total nonsense but Britain has had these problems for decades. You see it in every industry, every part of the UK. Attitudes are slowly shifting but it is a very deeply embedded cultural thing (you actually see this in some British colonies, that is how deep it is).

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#116

Post by spiralx »

thow-58d4e8b wrote: post #60
IdiocyInAction wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language barriers, legal differences between countries, etc. Also less availability of capital in general.

More underappreciated aspect is variety. US tends to be very copy-paste - once you solve someone's problem well, it's quite likely your solution is universally applicable to large swaths of the market. EU varies not only country-to-country, but often even between departments of the same company in the same building. It's not just technology, even markets for beer or coffee are likely more varied in your average EU co…

We provide documents and services for startups and this is spot on. Once you've got past the idea of "getting investors to invest in a funding round in exchange for equity" and the obvious differences of i18n and l10n, there are real differences - in France you need to have a lawyer to be able to operate at all, and in Germany investors participate through holding companies instead of directly. And it gets more complicated when you start talking about options or convertible notes.

The complexity of getting our platform to work with all of this is as big a consideration as market size is when we're looking to expand abroad.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#117

Post by laurencerowe »

agent008t wrote: post #53
mvc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And therefore, why cannot the UK fund PhDs more effectively than the EU? I always assumed the whole raison d'etre of Brexit was that Conservatives wanted to avoid the obligation of paying into funds like this. Sounds lovely in theory but leaves less government money available to companies with social/professional connections to the cabinet. Funny to see the red wallers finally realizing that too now.

I still think the whole divide over Brexit was less about the principle of it, but more about whether you are more aligned with the current EU political leanings or with those of the current UK ones (reflected in its Tory leadership). If you are more aligned with the EU political leanings, you would want them to be able to force the UK government to do what you believe is the right thing. If you are more aligned with…

> For example, if the UK wanted to have more funding for science, but the EU frowned upon that regarding it as unfair competition, or something along those lines.

The UK wasn't practically constrained by EU rules on state aid or industrial policy. Most other EU countries had substantially higher levels of state aid. Rather it was the policy of successive British governments to leave it to the market. The EU was a useful scapegoat for deflecting blame.

The current Prime Minister even promised to stay in the single market while campaigning for Brexit, professing himself a 'Fan'. The single market was after all in large part the creation of Margaret Thatcher. Promising a hard Brexit was the way to win the Tory leadership contest.

I think the vote for Brexit was more an expression of identity than a political programme as such. Much like the rise of Trump, but with the UK tabloid press playing the role of Fox News.

The divide is young/old, socially liberal/authoritarian more than economic left/right. Historically the left had opposed EU membership seeing it as a capitalist project. But with the UK being on the economic right of the EU, the single market ended up being something of a moderating influence.

Authoritarian pensioners are electorally dominant and have decided to screw over their kids.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#118

Post by selimthegrim »

hogFeast wrote: post #115
jgrahamc wrote: post #6

Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively. The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from…

The commercial culture in the UK is, generally, nothing like the US. You have companies with great products that refuse on principle to hire lots of salespeople. I actually can't think of a SaaS company that is as aggressive in investing in sales and marketing as you see on average in the US. And this is rational because the return on investment is usually very poor (fintech in the UK is probably the best example, su…

>I studied somewhere that was doing AI research back in the 60s

Edinburgh?

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#119

Post by dogman144 »

an9n wrote: post #66

Not particularly convinced about the Brexit angle or the comments on sales - for example, you can bet that The City has some highly aggressive salesmen/women given its status. But from my perspective Europe suffers from a problem of culture - there is seriously old money here and, I'd assert, a related, outdated zero-sum/dog in the manger mentality. Anything like FAANG, Tesla, SpaceX etc that seriously threatens to d…

interesting perspective i have not heard before but make sense as a narrative. wonder what data is behind that - seriously old elites shutting down innovation.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#120

Post by wikibob »

busterarm wrote: post #101
exdsq wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving to the US from Europe isn't that easy. I only made the move because my wife is a postdoc over here, but with things like H1-B freezes and covid-19 it can be very difficult to do.

I've worked with a lot of Europeans and overwhelmingly they are not on H-1B visas. Green cards, L-1, O-1 and spouse visas are the way to go. Getting an O-1 visa in the software space is a lot easier than you think, especially with the way the software industry works in Europe (it's a much smaller pool with a higher average level of education and way more public speaking & publishing opportunities) in general the requ…

This is a non sequitur. There is no way to directly get a green card. That is a final outcome after proceeding through one of the few remaining immigration visa options.

Also O-1 is decidedly not easy. Look at Peter Roberts frequent legal posts here for comments about it.

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