>It isn't enough to be an idiot, you have to be an idiot with connections to get spaffed The first part I can manage. But how do I get connections?
Whenever I hear advice about using connections and networking, I always interpret that to mean "be born with the right relatives".
It can be work connections too. My brother worked for a startup that got bought for a 150 million and he still connects with the old ceo whom I bet my brother could get funding from now if he had a good idea.
Are there any European websites in the Alexa top 50? https://www.alexa.com/topsites For all I know, Europe mostly missed the internet. Will the same happen with AI, data centers, solar, crypto and biotech?
I think there's a difference between where companies are listed/head-quartered and where the work is done (e.g. Google seems to have 4 separate offices, just in London). Or consider India, where huge amounts of dev work is done - but nobody can name an "Indian web brand" (internationally). Only actual European brand I can think of that's made global impact is Spotify. Europe seems to do better on the less fancy consu…
thing is most US startups are based on VC vaporware. lots of noise, but no end result in the long run when it counts. whereas, EU startups grow at a slower pace, but end up making more money in the long run i.e more sustainable.
right now, you've a bunch of US VC funded companies with 200m revenues, yet valued 50x or even 100x revenue. and yet there's probably tons of EU funded companies that are around the same revenue numbers, but most people wouldn't know since they're likely to be private.
another notable EU software company I can think of is Serif that makes affordable alternatives to Adobe products. they charge 50$ for a product and get out of the way.
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?
Yes, I think the UK will end up carving exceptions everywhere they can to keep Brexit alive from a political standpoint, but dead from a practical sense. Right now, the fear of the unknown is what's most likely pushing people not to move to the UK anymore. In five years from now the situation should be clearer I'd say. I personally hope they'll open things up again but we'll see!
Clearly America is the place to be if you want to make billions in tech. The bigger question is why every single company needs to target billions of dollars. You can still build a very successful company in London and get quite wealthy, you just might not get your own private space program. Meanwhile in London your workers will have free healthcare, their kids will have free higher education, etc. He's totally right…
Higher education in England is definitely not free. I imagine most well-funded startup employees have good healthcare plans in the US too.
It's relatively low cost, though. Tuition maxes at Most employees in well-funded organisations in the UK will have private healthcare too. My plan costs me ~£14pm, which is actually tax rather than a premium, with no deductible/copay/excesses.
The top-rated comment on this FT article [0] spells it out really quite clearly. English regions used to receive funds of £1 billion a year from the EU regeneration fund for poor regions with the final year om 2018 the final figure being £1.12bn of the £8.4 billion total over the seven year period. For 2018, this worked out to be Midlands (£190m), Yorkshire (£143m), Cornwall (£95m), the north west (£88m) and the nort…
Some of the comments are excellent but the ft is definitely not better than here. There's very little moderation of trolls and it's clear that many of them on the ft are paid - judging by how incessant and on message they are. It can be tiresome filtering through them.
Yes, you're right, here is far better than the FT. Badly phrased on my part I think. If you have a subscription and aren't using github/iamadamdev/bypasspaywalls then you can block or mute individual users.
Well with Ireland and Spain, there's no change. I think Amsterdam will get much of the London-based business because of their (relatively) lax labour laws (closer to UK) and the facility of the natives with English (important for relocating execs and their family).
There is a massive housing shortage in the Netherlands, isn't there? I agree on your other point but might be logistically complex and expensive v.s. Berlin for instance.
>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.
I think there's a difference between where companies are listed/head-quartered and where the work is done (e.g. Google seems to have 4 separate offices, just in London). Or consider India, where huge amounts of dev work is done - but nobody can name an "Indian web brand" (internationally). Only actual European brand I can think of that's made global impact is Spotify. Europe seems to do better on the less fancy consu…
A couple more European examples: - Wise (formally TransferWise) - Skype - Deliveroo - JustEat
Spotify and Glovo too. The former if being public on the NYSE still counts as European.
Moving to the US from Europe isn't that easy. I only made the move because my wife is a postdoc over here, but with things like H1-B freezes and covid-19 it can be very difficult to do.
I've worked with a lot of Europeans and overwhelmingly they are not on H-1B visas. Green cards, L-1, O-1 and spouse visas are the way to go. Getting an O-1 visa in the software space is a lot easier than you think, especially with the way the software industry works in Europe (it's a much smaller pool with a higher average level of education and way more public speaking & publishing opportunities) in general the requ…
I mean it's O-1 how easy can it be. Most likely requirements are publishing papers or making some insane startup.