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What's Not wrong with the London startup scene...

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Re: What's Not wrong with the London startup scene...

#13

... talking about “what’s wrong with the London startup scene” to drive traffic to their site. Consider this post two-fingers up to those people. Two-fingers up?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_sign#V_sign_as_an_insult

Maybe I live a sheltered life, but it's very uncommon nowadays compared to the single finger, no? At least, it seemed far more common back pre-2000.

Re: What's Not wrong with the London startup scene...

#14

... talking about “what’s wrong with the London startup scene” to drive traffic to their site. Consider this post two-fingers up to those people. Two-fingers up?

In Britain two fingers (with the palm facing the person making the gesture) is basically synonymous to the single finger. Two fingers the other way around means victory.

There is plenty of argument as to the etymology behind that, so I won't paste specific links trying to explain one theory over the other.

Re: What's Not wrong with the London startup scene...

#15

Plenty of things are wrong with the London startup scene - Silicon Valley has the advantage of being close to great universities where you can recruit great talent (not that these companies don't go to the East Coast to recruit). London doesn't have that, at least from a technical talent perspective - the area that comes close to matching that description in the UK is Cambridge (or Oxford, to some degree). Secondly,…

You do realise you can quite happily commute from Oxford or Cambridge to London? It's only about an hour on the train from either city.

Oxford and Cambridge are hardly the only two universities to hire tech talent from either, there are are universities with excellent CS depts in London itself. Imperial and UCL spring to mind. There are at least a dozen more excellent universities within a couple of hours travel time from London...

Re: What's Not wrong with the London startup scene...

#16
post #10
post #2

There are so many pieces on what is wrong with the London scene, because the real scene (full of crazy people) is in Silicon Valley. You cannot compete with the insane people there who are happy to destroy capital and jobs in the pursuit of notoriety, peer adulation and the odd $1bn exit.

You seem to be ignoring the central role played by London financiers in the largest global destruction of "capital and jobs in the pursuit of notoriety, peer adulation and the odd $1bn exit" in the last 50 years. In other words, there's a perfectly adequate bankroll, but they happen to prefer poker over blackjack.

Sure, but tech is small-fry talk compared to finance. Want to talk finance and we'll have to up the chit-chat to A-league economics... are you game?

Tech is easy. It uses machines to make light of manual tasks. It helps to find efficiencies. Add money into the mix and it creates a gold rush. Is Silicon Valley more than a gold rush where the guy selling the spades is getting seriously rich while once in a while some idiot or other hits a rich seam and then everyone wants to build an instagram... sorry, I mean mine in that place...

Re: What's Not wrong with the London startup scene...

#17
post #7
post #2

There are so many pieces on what is wrong with the London scene, because the real scene (full of crazy people) is in Silicon Valley. You cannot compete with the insane people there who are happy to destroy capital and jobs in the pursuit of notoriety, peer adulation and the odd $1bn exit.

I don't think that's really a fair characterisation of anything.

If VCs published data of all their investments, and produced it in a form that is comparative with other 'asset classes', you would soon see why tech VC HAS to be confined to the desert...

(yes, yes, I am over-dramatising, but would it be any fun if I put across something more balanced?)

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