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I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

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Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#201

Post by vr46 »

seanbarry wrote: post #196
jgrahamc wrote: post #6

Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively. The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from…

I recently had a massive American devops company's sales team on my case trying to sell me their product. It was obnoxious and put me off dealing with them entirely. When I insisted I was the wrong person they wanted me to hook them up with my CTO and tried to bribe me with Amazon vouchers. I'll take the British way over that any day of the week.

Yeah, the whole blog post came across as anecdata-driven decision-making and "I want to be in NYC because London has driven me away" rather than the "we have determined that this company's HQ requires things only available in X". That thing being money, apparently. The circumstances he outlines are too general to be reasonable, and it makes for a bullish article but not a robust argument. Good luck to him and the company, but this smacks of running away from a problem only to discover that your baggage came with you.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#202

Post by biztos »

clement_b wrote: post #176
goldcd wrote: post #18

I work for a company head-quartered in one continent, listed on another and I work in a third (the UK) - and sales are based all over. Not for one moment saying there aren't local issues/idiosyncrasies - but I'm unsure how moving your company solves them, and article seems to overlook all manner of problems: Aren't you going to lose staff when you move? Is everybody going to have to get up really early to talk to Eur…

Completely agree. The grass is always greener, and moving to NYC will not come without challenges. However, post-Brexit UK is problematic on the skilled worker front for startups. Before, many European tech workers converged to London to work in startups (or ended up there). This seems to be happening much less now due to multiple reasons [0]. Overall, I think Brexit removed one of the main benefits of being based in…

Couldn't the UK just solve this problem by making it super easy for those people to get work visas?

Your best tech talent coming from Bucharest to London has always preferred to go to San Francisco if they could, but the EU made it so much easier to come to London. There's nothing about not being in the EU that prevents the UK from offering a similar deal.

What am I missing?

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#203

Post by simonswords82 »

ageitgey wrote: post #9

I run a US-based start-up with a distributed team, but I personally live in London. I'd say a lot of this is true. I don't personally know how Brexit has or hasn't affected talent availability yet, but everything else lines up with my experience. US investors throw money around and European investors are much more traditional. But I'd like to offer a different perspective on this quote from the article: > I am not al…

> But the truth remains - it's a whole lot easier to raise money in the US right now.

In the 20 or so years I've been involved in startups it's always been easier to raise money in the US.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#204

Post by biztos »

DeathArrow wrote: post #145

>We’re in good company making this step: SaaS giant UiPath moved its headquarters to New York in 2017 to be closer to its international customer base. UiPath moved offices in the US because it is easier to finance a business in US. But even if the offices were moved most of the work it is still done in Romania.

There was just recently a thread about this, apparently it's no longer the case that most of their work is done in Romania.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29319776

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#205

Post by busterarm »

evgen wrote: post #193
busterarm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The labor pool isn't any cheaper in NYC. Salaries are significantly higher than London. He's in for a harsh reality.

Not 'significantly' higher, no. In the remote-first covid world you are going to be paying at least Austin/Seattle rates for talent in London and closer to NYC comp packages. It has been a very, very good 12-18 months for tech talent in London if you have the right CV.

I'm not doubting it's been a good couple of years for folks in London, but I'm sitting on some pretty good salary data and the density of high compensation packages for both new grads and senior hires is still an order of magnitude bigger in SF, Seattle and NYC (coming in third).

Most people are really underpaid and would be shocked to learn what is available. If you went to the right schools with the right internships you shouldn't ask for anything less than $225k to start off with and on the more experienced side, I know a few dozen engineers in NY with total comp packages at or above $450k.

I worked in Finance before I worked in Software and the situation was much the same -- top talent came from London for higher salaries.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#206

Post by Cederfjard »

barry-cotter wrote: post #157
DeathArrow wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be difficult to more pithily explain why the US is a better place to build a startup as a founder, or to explain why US startups have more money and so can pay their staff more. But it is really simple. In US they have a higher appetite for gambling.

It's not gambling if you consistently make more money than the person who thinks they're being prudent. It's a better investent strategy.

This is devolving into a discussion about semantics, but in my vocabulary at least, just because you have an edge doesn't mean you're not gambling. It's about the level of risk, and investing huge amounts of capital in hopes of funding a unicorn tech startup fits the bill, to me.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#207

Post by wrinkl3 »

kranke155 wrote: post #81
brianmcc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"cheap EU labour" tends to apply more to fruit pickers than AI PhDs I suspect

Nope. Eastern European brilliant minds would flock to London and get paid far lower salaries than they were worth. Ukranians, Lithuanians. The legacy of communist math is alive and well - they were generally better than any western european talent you could get and cheaper. They would always get the top jobs, but the regular influx of new blood meant salaries were stuck.

But Brexit hasn't really changed that - most of Eastern Europeans you're describing aren't EU citizens and needed work visas even before Brexit.

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#208

Post by mytailorisrich »

JProthero wrote: post #136
hogFeast wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is everything. Customers too risk-averse, class boundaries still endemic (it is amazing the US tech companies went into this, Google/Facebook/etc. seem to have hired the Notting Hill set as soon as they came to London), companies too conservative about investing margin in sales, very relationship-driven sales culture (as opposed to product-driven) that is closed to "outsiders", reluctance to cold-call, etc. It is…

' I think if you look at politics in the UK, it is self-evident that the culture of the UK is not exactly entrepreneurial...unless you believe that a group of probably 30-50 people who went to the same school, went to the same university and largely studied the same course should rule the country...it is very weird. ' My impression is that the UK and US are fairly similar in this respect. The leadership of the politi…

I would look at background more than university. For instance, Thatcher's background has nothing in common with Cameron's or Johnson's.

Oxford is top of the league and attracts brilliant, ambitious people so it's not surprising that it is over-represented at the top as well, though it's interesting that it dominates so absolutely. It may partly be self-reinforcing because I suspect that ambitious young people who want a career in politics think "right, first step is Oxford PPE".

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#209

Post by gpderetta »

f6v wrote: post #158
stayfrosty420 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was because lots of Brazilians are eligible for Portuguese passports

Many come straight to Germany or other more rich EU countries.

A portuguese passport would allow just that. So would an Italian passport (many South Americans, especially from Brazil and Argentina would qualify).

Re: I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

#210

Post by avianlyric »

DeathArrow wrote: post #150
barry-cotter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else. > They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised. With supporters like this the UK is in no need of enemies.…

> It would be difficult to more pithily explain why the US is a better place to build a startup as a founder, or to explain why US startups have more money and so can pay their staff more. But it is really simple. In US they have a higher appetite for gambling.

US investors have a stronger focus on upside maximisation, Europe tends to focus on downside protection.

Having been on this merry-go-round in Europe, I can tell you that focusing on downside protection frequently results in poor decision making that activity prevents upside growth. In other words, worrying about the downside so much, makes it a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I’ve always thought it was stupid for VCs to worry about downside protection. Either you’re playing the VC game, and having companies go to zero is just part of the plan, or you’re not. Not being able to stomach the worst case scenario when you invest, just means you waste time that would be better spent trying to achieve the rocketship outcome everyone is looking for.

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