51–60 of 304 posts
I don’t think you can boil it down to that only.
What can be others fundamental reasons? also for Europe in general?
Our instinct is to regulate and tax the technologies that are being pioneered in California, in the misguided belief that it will give us some kind of competitive advantage. I don’t think that that’s the reason for regulation: it seems to me that US companies traditionally don’t care about externalities (environment, privacy, accessibility, etc.), and regulation is required to bring them into line. That doesn’t alway…
It would be more interesting to not consider just US and UK, but the whole world. Lots of new startups might come from Asia. Eastern European startup scene is interesting, also.
May I ask which countries in east Europe would you consider to be good and convenient, esp for foreigners (non-EU)? When I visited Budapest I like it there, but don’t know much about the tech scene.
Also, Romania, Poland have good reputation in this space but I don't have any direct experience with them.
I considered a startup after university in the UK. The talent arbitrage is absurd, physics grads with 1sts from top Russell Group unis fighting to be paid £30k/yr. For me it came down to security, life is expensive, rent is expensive. I didn't have a spare parental garage to setup five computers - I barely had room in my flat for one desk . I barely had money for that flat let alone internet, and food. I had zero cap…
It's crazy that politicians on all sides talk about growth, but then consistently do almost nothing to address the single largest thing that's sucking the life out of 20-30 year olds.
Saying that, it's clearly not the only cause as housing in SF and NY is also really expensive.
Nevertheless I do wonder about the effect of people being able to move to Silicon Valley:
- moving there can be a good move for ambitious young people – it’s surely easier to raise capital, find employees/cofounders, etc
- for most internet businesses, starting in the US rather than the UK can be an advantage – doing business internationally can be harder and the US is 5x the size and wealthier on average.
- given this, there’s a reasonable selection bias in the pool of companies in the UK seeking investment: they are started by people who were ambitious enough to start SV-style startups but weird enough to not be doing it in the US. If those potentially-UK startups in the tail of outcomes are disproportionately being started in the US instead, that’s really going to suck for a VC.
Bankruptcy laws and social mores massively different. In the UK to go bankrupt is to be painted with indelible red shame dye. In America... going bankrupt means you are closing out the book on one failure to try another.
> In the UK to go bankrupt is to be painted with indelible red shame dye Is it? Do people generally know when someone (personally, or in this case, since we're talking startups, their company) goes bankrupt?
Something that was not really approached in this article is the underlying assumption that "entrepreneurship is good" and the difference of culture towards that. Start-ups can be seen as the things that bring society forward, or the things that create useless junk and enshitification from bullshit-talkers who just want to make money. It's not 100% the first in US and 100% the second in Europe, but the balance is just…
Startups aren't any more fundamentally scammy than any other business trying to get your money.
Oh sure, some are scammy, but that's true for big established businesses as well.
Bankruptcy laws and social mores massively different. In the UK to go bankrupt is to be painted with indelible red shame dye. In America... going bankrupt means you are closing out the book on one failure to try another.
> In the UK to go bankrupt is to be painted with indelible red shame dye Is it? Do people generally know when someone (personally, or in this case, since we're talking startups, their company) goes bankrupt?
The expected returns from "want[ing] to go and work at companies like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs or Google" are both greater and more certain, so perhaps the individual young people are acting quite rationally in the UK? For context I spent years in my 20s doing start ups in London, and undoubtedly would have been better off financially now if I'd worked for some soul-sucking consultancy instead. I do agree with him tha…