UK's hardware talent is being wasted

Secondly the government acts as an economic terrorist by stopping innovation. Search engines and social media are a classic example by treating them as publishers so the owners are liable for any copyright infraction. No one is going to build a company with the threat of being prosecuted over the actions of one of their users. This goes for hardware as well, e.g. the government brought in the EU regulations on drones, which bans the flight of autonomous drones and thus stops innovation. This means people like myself who were working on autonomous drones had to stop, causing me to lose out on millions in revenue and the government missed out on the taxes I would have paid.

Short of a revolution or an economic collapse nothing will change. The latter is baked in at this point, when and how bad it will be I do not know, I'm hoping for the best and planning for the worst.

Visas. US has a very very weird visa system that really hates skilled workers.

For markets to exist, monopolies must be avoided. As you can't expect large companies to police themselves, this was generally the role of the state. The states must strike a balance between keeping large companies happy (that want monopolies and have cash today) and true markets (which are efficient on the long run).

The finance industry is probably just a side effect of everybody focusing on short term (both public traded companies and politicians/states)

I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in the world.

Personally I’ve been trying to self-fund and bootstrap a hardware startup (based in Australia but I’m reasonably well connected in Silicon Valley as I’m a YC alum). I’ve had plenty of early success and validation of all my market theses, but it’s super hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say “exciting” and want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding needs and path to market.

In a world in which investors and other startup industry contacts are accustomed to seeing a bootstrapped SaaS app showing signs of growth and revenue just a few months in, with a hardware startup it’s just impossible to avoid looking like a failure by comparison - due to all the costs, delays and complications involved with getting an MVP to market. And because successful hardware startups are so scarce relative to software ones, it’s hard even to get any good advice; there’s just barely anyone around with good, relevant experience to share (and I already know many of the people who have built companies in this vertical in past decades, none of whom are in SV).

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make it work is to start by achieving success as a software startup, then transition into hardware to later - but even then you’d have to convince investors that it’s worth the risk.

In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS wins over the past decade, and that’s all that most investors are willing to even consider.

The exceptions are “start-big and-get-huge-fast” plays like Groq - but the founders of that company were already highly credentialed and connected when they started, and even then vanishingly few investors are willing/able to fund new companies like that. That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere.