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Funny how San Francisco can't fit the chart they have. League of its own I guess.
This checks out. I live in Silicon Valley but now work for a startup in London. Same vibe, less attitude. They are not the same. The energy/resources in SF/SV are 5x at a minimum - but London has it going on.
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:
> it's not ideal is it?
or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:
> as you say sir
> very good sir
with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]
Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s03Fq1nsbng
(The full scene is around 11:30 in the first episode and I think its captures a conversation of subtext and indirectness quite well).
The awkwardness for founders in London is that when they want to IPO, London doesnt have nearly as deep a pool of capital as the US, so they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table.
Bruder, komm nach Berlin or frère, allez à Paris
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
best reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not. I remember a tech…
We say "interesting" for that
I wonder who are these people willing to work in London and transfer 60% of their net income directly to landlord. Maybe money doesn't matter because most of the time they spend in work and commuting?
Bruder, komm nach Berlin or frère, allez à Paris
My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.