Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 374 posts

Re: How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

#101

Post by socalgal2 »

walthamstow wrote: post #26

I am completely biased but I think London is one of the best places to live in the world, everything considered. There's a guy on Instagram who spins a wheel for a random country and goes to eat that cuisine somewhere in London. There are maybe 1 or 2 places in the world you can do that. It's an incredible feat of human diversity to pack hundreds of global cuisines into a 10 mile radius.

I don't know London all that well, I've only spent about a month there. But in my limited experience the food scene didn't come close to LA, SF, NYC, Tokyo.

As an example, the LA metro Area (LA, OC, SB), 46% latino, 27% white, 15% asian 7% african, 3% mixed

There huge sections of those cities, several kilometers long where you drive for miles and see majority one culture. Several areas majority korean, chinese, japanese, vietnamese, middle eastern, african,

Re: How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

#102

Post by 3rodents »

romanhn wrote: post #6

A different perspective: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005 TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.

"Freetrade built a profitable trading app, got acquired by IG Group for £160M after targeting a £700M valuation"

That is not an accurate recollection of history. Freetrade raised money at a £700 million valuation at the very top of the market when money was plentiful, then, when the money dried up, and they were forced to go from losing money to making money, and they cut all advertising, they were able to just about scrape profitability. At the point of the acquisition, Freetrade either needed more investment to fund more advertising, or get acquired. After 10 years, a dozen rounds of fundraising and capital drying up, £160M is a good exit. Freetrade was significantly overvalued at £700 million.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/investing/article-142962...

Re: How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

#103

Post by tchalla »

kjellsbells wrote: post #24

Is this really surprising? London picks up all the advantages of the UK (legal system is sound, eg in contract law, native speakers of English, the lingua franca of business, strong university tradition) and adds in its special sauce: access to the City, global-tier culture, excellent public transport (I know we moan about it, but it really is excellent), and a timezone location that easily serves the US and Asia mar…

US founders have essentially outsourced risk to London.

> What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.

https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005

Re: How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

#105

Post by hardlianotion »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #74

The big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms. For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours…

Sounds more like a company problem than a London problem. Wages also - the distribution is very wide.

Re: How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

#106

Post by martinald »

ebiester wrote: post #79

As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?

There's a lot of problems with bureaucracy there (I've lived in London and Lisbon). It's a great city but the government is insanely inefficient (compared to the UK IME).

Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all.

In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues.

It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there.

The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.

Re: How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

#107

Post by danielbarla »

bf9d413906 wrote: post #91
keiferski wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my biggest problem with London is how it seems to lack a real spontaneous street food culture, especially compared to New York, Paris, or Istanbul (which is particularly great at this.) I spent a couple days walking 40+ km around the city and usually I just ended up eating at Istu or Greggs or one of those similar chains. The same thing in NYC or Paris gets you an infinitely better food experience. It seems like…

40+km, every day? Or even if total, it's a proper distance. I'm fascinated by that. Do you just walk around randomly or do you plan things you want to see ? Walking is imo one of the big "secret" ways to get to know a city. I fondly recall just getting lost on purpose in major cities, and at the end of the day take a taxi, or bus, or tuk-tuk back to the place I was staying. So many things seen, and tried, and random…

I completely agree, it's fantastic both for general fitness, and as a way of exploring. I do this on a smaller scale on a daily basis, walking the 8-10 km route to or from my work (when we have office days). This is walkable in about 1.5 hours, public transport would get me home in around 45 minutes, so I am not really investing much extra time. Varying the route slightly keeps things interesting, and you get a surprising variety with small (1 to 2 street) changes.

Another favourite of mine is cycling around a neighbourhood to get to know it; you get a totally different feel for things than from a car - things typically go by slower, and you are somehow just far more able to observe things.

Re: How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

#109

Post by [deleted] »

siquick wrote: post #19
romanhn wrote: post #6

A different perspective: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005 TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.

In football we’d call the US “tap-in merchants”.

[deleted]

Re: How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

#110

Post by stackbutterflow »

CatMustard wrote: post #98
lifestyleguru wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only so much of food one can eat and after all potatoes and steak do the job as well.

It's okay not to be that into food, but a bit odd to expect everyone else to be the same. If I had to eat steak and potatoes every day I'd be miserable by day 2.

Conversely it's true for the parent comment. Being able to eat food from any country is a plus only to those who are into that hobby. Personally it ranks pretty low in my list of things that make a city a great city. And if we're talking about food, access to fresh, high quality and affordable produce is way more important than being able to eat Afghan food at 3am. These criteria are arbitrary and don't make a city better than another imho.
Post reply on HN