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Taking Risk

tomblomfield.com

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61–70 of 304 posts

Re: Taking Risk

#61

Post by lordnacho »

SeanLuke wrote: post #30

> Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. ... according to QS Global Surveys. A disreputable organization who won't open their data and whose rankings are based at least 50% on reputation surveys (!!), of which only 2% or so are responded to. Is it worth mentioning that it's based in England? I'm not saying the US should have more institutions. I'm saying that i…

But reputations are what they are, and you can't dispute that those four unis are top drawer by that "measure" if we can even call it that.

Regardless of what you think of QS. I also think it's silly to have uni rankings, but the way to think about them is that they simply construct a ranking that shows what people expect based on reputation. If you don't have Harvard and Cambridge in your top tier, your ranking is wrong.

Re: Taking Risk

#62

Post by outsomnia »

robin_reala wrote: post #49

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…

Yes, they are regulated abroad because they are rightly frightened of what SV will do to them without it, it's unrelated to "competitive advantage".

Re: Taking Risk

#63

Post by sgt101 »

"quantum computers, nuclear fusion, self-driving vehicles, space exploration and drug discovery"

The mark of bullshit. No one can make this judgement.

Re: Taking Risk

#64

Post by dan-robertson »

oblio wrote: post #50
reedf1 wrote: post #22

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…

> The talent arbitrage is absurd, physics grads with 1sts from top Russell Group unis fighting to be paid £30k/yr. That much?!? I'm joking, but I've always wondered with FAANG never set up large R&D centers in Southern Europe. They have good universities and salaries are extremely low, even lower than in the UK. Plus good weather & co. The actual Mediterranean climate :-)

Presumably because an ambitious young person in southern Europe would rather move somewhere like Zurich for higher pay rather than getting paid less in southern Europe? Who are those R&D centres going to end up hiring?

Re: Taking Risk

#65

Post by oblio »

baxtr wrote: post #51

Everyone here blaming the costs of living in London being a major driver for people looking for security: SF is not cheap either! I don’t think you can boil it down to that only. What can be others fundamental reasons? also for Europe in general?

Smaller countries, less money to throw around in general.

Focus on more traditional sectors and a general fear of software solutions (partially justified since many software things are net negative).

First mover advantage for the US as the country that invented the transistor, the social media, internet, etc. Especially in this era of Extremistans (see: Black Swan), being first is super important.

Oh, and this isn't talked about enough, US protectionism (and focus on locally produced things), look at all the efforts to keep jobs in the US, to keep Chinese companies out, etc. As an example, even when Apple was crap in the late 90s and early 00s, it still had relatively high percentages of the desktop/laptop market compared to the rest of the world, just because it was the poster-boy of US computer companies. It's more subtle and it's imperfect (see the steel and auto industry being overrun by foreign companies).

It's very complicated, but 1 & 2 are probably the biggest factors.

Re: Taking Risk

#66

Post by sofixa »

colesantiago wrote: post #14
DeathArrow wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The UK isn't really known for being an ambitious nation. They've ruled the seas and half of the earth for centuries. They've ruled commerce and industry for centuries. Isn't that a proof of ambitions?

Not when it comes to startups, besides the UK keeps going on about what they have done in the past. So, why hasn't this translated to trillion dollar companies in the UK?

Is a tech company only successful if it has a trillion dollar valuation? So there are only 6 successful tech companies in the whole world?

As always, you have the good counterexamples of critical for the world companies such as ASML, ARM, Zeiss, Ericsson and Nokia (5G) that don't have such high valuations. Does that mean they aren't successful or needed?

Re: Taking Risk

#67

Post by blowski »

CalRobert wrote: post #46

Not the UK, but I'm a Californian who lived in Ireland for ten years. The risk aversion is _intense_. Me: "I want to build a house" My Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you will fail, it could fall down, you don't know anything about houses". They were extra horrified that I didn't want to build it out of concrete blocks because "you can't build a house out of wood" My Californian friends (but one in particular): "F…

A few personal anecdotes aren't very convincing arguments about the future direction of the world economy.

Re: Taking Risk

#68

Post by TulliusCicero »

dan-robertson wrote: post #55

The cultural commentary does seem right to me. People in the UK are probably more risk-averse and anti-ambition. There’s also some stuff about the culture of investors, like the thing about US startups making wild claims. This only really works because the investors in the US understand that the claims are nonsense, and VCs don’t sue the companies for fraud (because the companies are typically dead and it’s an iterat…

The claims are hyper ambitious, that's not the same thing as being nonsense. Aiming extremely high isn't somehow fraudulent.

Lots of kids have plans to become pro athletes and almost all fail, but that doesn't mean all those plans were nonsense to begin with.

Re: Taking Risk

#69

Post by oblio »

dan-robertson wrote: post #64
oblio wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The talent arbitrage is absurd, physics grads with 1sts from top Russell Group unis fighting to be paid £30k/yr. That much?!? I'm joking, but I've always wondered with FAANG never set up large R&D centers in Southern Europe. They have good universities and salaries are extremely low, even lower than in the UK. Plus good weather & co. The actual Mediterranean climate :-)

Presumably because an ambitious young person in southern Europe would rather move somewhere like Zurich for higher pay rather than getting paid less in southern Europe? Who are those R&D centres going to end up hiring?

People don't move if their lives are decent enough.

If FAANG sets up shop in Milan and pays 80k compared to the local average of 40k, few people would rather move to Zurich for 150k and have to learn Swiss German and have worse weather and few local friends.

For comparison, Eastern Europe has FAANG offices and people working there generally don't move as much, and the few that do leave, generally go to Switzerland (ok) or the US.

But those are the ultra ambitious, maybe 10-20%, and they generally leave because Eastern Europe has a lot of other structural problems that aren't really there in say, Spain, for example Eastern Europe has pretty bad healthcare in general, infrastructure is much worse than in Spain, general quality of life is also worse than in Spain.

Re: Taking Risk

#70

Post by dan-robertson »

rwmj wrote: post #7

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…

Yeah, but I think it’s also true in the US (even more so as pay from the non-startup careers is higher). Maybe one should ask why it’s so much more common to do the irrational thing in the US than the UK.
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