UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

Alan Turing didn't die before 1900. Agree he isn't exactly relevant to the question of a modern tech sector, but these examples are at least interesting for what they show isn't the problem. A comment above AtomicOrbital's argues it's to do with a "deferential, hierarchical society" and that "bureaucracy is great for running an empire". That clearly can't be the case, given that Britain churned out computing pioneers when it was at the height of its imperial power.

I think the actual reasons are a lot simpler than some imputed aspect of the British national character. Obviously, struggling to compete with US tech supremacy isn't limited to the UK. Specifically:

1. Outside the USA there's no real culture of granting equity to early stage employees. Interestingly, ARM was one of the very few exceptions. Incentivized and passionate employees are considered non-negotiable for US startups, not so elsewhere.

2. The USA and California specifically has some laws that happen to be really good for founding successful internet startups e.g. banning non-competes, at will employment, the first amendment, and so on. UK and EU have the opposite: lots of laws that make it difficult or risky.

3. The USA benefits from a large internal market with homogenous language and timezones. When British computer companies tried to expand into the USA all kinds of logistical issues got in the way of them scaling up, both in the USA and Europe. It's much easier for a company to get big in the US and then start picking off local markets one by one.

The first two problems often combine. Try setting up an employee equity scheme for a new startup in Europe. You'll find the tax systems often make it absurdly complicated or even impossible, and accountancy/legal firms are usually inexperienced with it. I'm going through this problem right now. I asked for a US style straight equity vesting scheme - no options even - and got back some wacky alternative that involves buyback clauses, contractual promises to continue granting equity even after termination for cause and contains nonsensical statements. Justification is local tax law. Sigh.

Yes, you're completely right. Not that I'm in favour of the wealth inequality in the US, but in some ways it's one of the US's biggest assets. There are a lot of people in the US who are so excessively wealthy they're willing to throw money at moon-shot companies (and sometimes simply ideas) that will almost certainly never yield them a return.

You don't get companies like Space X and Blue Origin without extremely ambitious and extremely wealthy individuals and the US has a large amount of both. In the UK people are generally far more conservative both with their ambitions and with their investments. We do have innovative tech companies here, but they're far less ambitions than those you'd typically find in the US. Things like food delivery, customisable greeting cards, accounting services, etc.

I think to a lesser extent there are geographical, demographical and regulatory advantages to starting tech companies in the the US too. In the UK employers have provide paid holiday, maternity leave, and pay national insurance contributions for everyone they employee. This isn't a huge issue if your a profitable company, but things like this add up if you're trying to bootstrap a company with a limited amount of VC money. Similarly, we can't scale as easily because of our geographical and demographical limitations. Europe isn't as easy to scale into for various geographic and cultural reasons and the UK as a domestic market is far smaller than the US.

While nothing I've said makes it impossible for the UK to create a tech giant, it does stack the odds against us. And just based on relative population size we're already 5 times less likely to create a tech giant when compared to the US.

> To be honest I'm not sure any country apart from China stands any chance of becoming technologically sovereign.

IMHO, the US probably could manage it too: it has a big population and lots of natural resources. The reason it isn't is more of issue of ideology and will: it was far more technologically sovereign in the past than it is now, but chose to give that up so some investors could get more profits in the short-term. It's unlikely to change, since the ideologies that drove those choices are still strong.

Would Russia not be a more natural source of this? I know they're not exactly best pals but China is maybe one of the closer countries to Russia outside of Belarus and Syria rn.

I wonder how they would pay for it. The world market operates in US dollars so presumably they'd have to set up some kind of bilateral arrangement and I doubt Russians would accept Yuan.