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Taking Risk

tomblomfield.com

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Re: Taking Risk

#141

Post by mike_hearn »

worstspotgain wrote: post #140
mike_hearn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is Europe's tech hub at this point (not the EU's), assuming by tech we mean the sort of tech discussed in the article. As the article notes, the VC ecosystem in the UK does actually exist and is spinning up, whereas in most of Europe it hardly exists. If you want something a bit more objective than the article's assertions, there is an attempt to calculate a ranking here: https://www.startupblink.com/blog/anal…

Well, I suspect a lot of the UK's startup stats are still connected to its universities. The page you linked shows London with a massive index lead over the EU. When you scroll down to the lists of notable companies, only ~10% of them are UK-based. The contrast of London to the rest of Britain is also much starker than for some other EU hubs. It's questionable whether the "startup hub seed" would have germinated had…

Are they just a self-perpetuating reputation scam, or do they actually lead to real economic activity and growth? It can be both, but it can't be entirely the former if you think the startup edge is due to the universities.

I didn't see the list of notable startups. There's a section about "noteworthy growth and decline" but it's not got a list. For the other lists it's not clear how they're ordered.

> It's questionable whether the "startup hub seed" would have germinated had the UK not been in the EU

So why didn't it germinate everywhere else in the EU to the same extent?

This seems like wishful thinking. The startup capital of the world is the USA, notably not in the EU. The EU has done many things that are clearly startup and tech-hostile, but it's hard to think of policies that help. The EU is structurally designed to make it easier for France to sell agricultural products and Germany to sell manufactured products, but one of the reasons the UK didn't benefit economically from membership is because the EU doesn't make it easier to sell services (and the UK not benefiting is under-reported but unambiguously the case, see the recent Parliamentary report on trade ratios post leaving [1]). Yet many tech startups are software-as-a-service, so lack of a single market for services really makes the EU irrelevant to the tech ecosystem.

> It's pretty clear that an island company faces more market hurdles than a continental one

It's not that clear. The British Empire was a global trade based empire long before the internet existed. It's only got easier since then.

[1] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-... (read it carefully, civil service bias is apparent but the data is objective)

Re: Taking Risk

#142

Post by candiodari »

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?

Except normal Californian wages are 50% of a central SF apartment. Saving up to move there is very much an option.

Normal LONDON salaries are 30% of a London apartment.

Normal British salaries are 10% of a central London apartment, at best.

There's a big difference. You can save up as a USian and start a job in SF. You cannot reasonably do the same in Britain.

Re: Taking Risk

#143

Post by petesergeant »

thom wrote: post #83
Shrezzing wrote: post #28

> I don’t think it’s any longer about access to capital The link provided as proof for this comment is Wayve receiving a $1bn injection from Microsoft and Nvidia [1]. The $1bn raise is not the concern of a budding 23 year old graduate leaving Imperial/Cambridge/Oxford. They're looking at the first £100k capital to see them through the first few months. In the UK, the scene for the first capital injection is far weake…

Been a while since I was in this position but that first £100k used to be a cakewalk. SEIS made it almost a no-brainier for any high net worth individual to invest in startups.

> SEIS made it almost a no-brainer

and it still should, as I understand it. On a £100k investment that the business loses all of, the investor gets £75k (£50k tax relief + £25k-ish loss relief) back or something ridiculous, don't they? Makes me wonder how this hasn't made UK capital more readily flow

Re: Taking Risk

#144

Post by DeathArrow »

hedgehog0 wrote: post #29
DeathArrow wrote: post #15

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.

In Romania there are many expats working in Tech. Most young people speak English and the price level is pretty low while the taxes are flat.

I would also say Estonia.

Re: Taking Risk

#145

Post by CalRobert »

DrBazza wrote: post #138
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…

Having just returned from the US, I was struck by this 'risk aversion' and the innate US 'competition'. To give an example: there was a Subway on one of the streets in the US. A few doors down there was an independent sandwich shop that was offering similar, larger sandwiches, with more toppings, for less , with a huge advertisement saying so. In the UK, close to where I live, there's a Subway on the High St., and an…

Ah, I'd almost forgotten the styrofoam and mayonnaise sandwiches!

Re: Taking Risk

#146

Post by worstspotgain »

mike_hearn wrote: post #141
worstspotgain wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I suspect a lot of the UK's startup stats are still connected to its universities. The page you linked shows London with a massive index lead over the EU. When you scroll down to the lists of notable companies, only ~10% of them are UK-based. The contrast of London to the rest of Britain is also much starker than for some other EU hubs. It's questionable whether the "startup hub seed" would have germinated had…

Are they just a self-perpetuating reputation scam, or do they actually lead to real economic activity and growth? It can be both, but it can't be entirely the former if you think the startup edge is due to the universities. I didn't see the list of notable startups. There's a section about "noteworthy growth and decline" but it's not got a list. For the other lists it's not clear how they're ordered. > It's questiona…

The universities are not a scam and do count. "Self-perpetuating reputation scheme" simply means positive network externalities for good professors, researchers and students, who seek each other out. The glorious antiquated buildings don't mean much.

Similarly, a startup hub means positive network externalities for good founders, workers and investors. Much like planets clean out orbits, hubs tend to not be nearby. I don't have a good read on whether the London hub will persist or be overcome by an EU one. It will depend on which force wins out.

As for your comments about the EU's role, these seem political in nature and I just happen to mostly disagree.

Re: Taking Risk

#147

Post by marliechiller »

roenxi wrote: post #48
red_admiral wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UK isn't really known for being an ambitious nation. Industrial revolution? Railways? An empire on which the sun never sets? (Ollivander voice: "evil, yes, but ambitious"). Sure, things have gone downhill since then.

We don't judge nations in the present based on their historical peak. The UK hasn't been capable of building anything like that for more than a century; the hammering the Germans gave them was really exposing weaknesses that were already starting to set in from the 1910s. The UK is no longer known for being an industrial leader. Or indeed for achieving anything in particular except fading away with a certain graceful…

Industrial leader in what sense? There are a few industries where the UK is world leading

Re: Taking Risk

#148

Post by gampleman »

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…

As an immigrant to the UK I'm continually surprised on how poor life here actually is. The main culprit in my mind is the atrocious cost of real estate. Not so much in how much money it takes to buy a house - those costs can be comparable to other countries, but on the ratio of post-tax salary pound per square meter. Most of the real estate in the UK is very small, both in outdoor space as well as in indoor proportions.

In the US middle class housing often provides fairly large indoor spaces where multiple people can collaborate, as well as things like garages and large-ish lawns, these things are much rarer and more expensive in the UK.

This makes it much more difficult to have a space for multiple people to effectively collaborate on idea "for free". Sure, you can hire a co-working space, but that requires already some form of financial commitment.

Re: Taking Risk

#149

Post by lordnacho »

SeanLuke wrote: post #93
lordnacho wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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. But reputation is not a just measure of quality. It's mostly a measure of whether someone has heard of the institution at all, or knows anything about them. Similarly, US News has reputation survey based measures for its terrible rankings, and is roundly criticized for them, as…

I don't disagree, that is basically what it is.

I suspect the same thing goes for the corruption perceptions index. People conveniently drop the perceptions part, and they get their corruption reputation from last year's headline.

Re: Taking Risk

#150

Post by robertlagrant »

> Imagine how different the UK would feel if Google, Microsoft and Facebook were all founded here.

It wouldn't be the UK, I think. As a UK resident, who reads quite a lot of US business stuff, and who lived in South Africa for a few years, the culture is just totally different in both compared to the UK. I don't know if it's the frontier mentality still ongoing from them being relatively recent countries, but there's definitely something.

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