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Taking Risk

tomblomfield.com

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Re: Taking Risk

#221

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

jltsiren wrote: post #191
light_triad wrote: post #155

There's many factors that make Europe less competitive than the US: small fractured markets, low salaries, high cost of living relative to wages, Brexit costs, fear of being labeled a failure, working to live, focus on worker's rights, stability, and pensions, general risk aversion etc. A big issue is there's a lack of mega successes high margin software businesses that pump knowledge and money back into the startup…

Low salaries increase competitiveness, while high salaries decrease it. That's one of the things you already learn as a kid when you live in an export-driven economy. Even if your country is not particularly export-driven but you participate in competitive markets, the same effect may apply. For example, the US lost many manufacturing jobs to China, because American salaries were not competitive (low) enough. Finland…

It's true, speaking as a US to Finland expat. The median CS grad I've met here in Tampere handily outclasses the CS grads I knew at Northwestern - which is no MIT, sure, but they're definitely no slouches.

Marc Andreessen once described reading a magazine as a teenager and seeing the "Midwest tinkerer" archetype of tech mogul, people who figure out a little bit of everything from scratch because on a farm you just have to do that to stay afloat and then bring that mindset into their SWE work and become minor legends wherever they go, and having this sudden enlightenment moment that shifted him from quiet nerd to confident striver. I spent my honeymoon year in northern Finland and came to the conclusion that the whole country is like that. Except, no one filled them in on just how absurdly good the margins on software can be when you throw business prowess into the mix. So many companies here been punching well below our weight class. (Okay, the very business-hostile nature of making a startup in the 90s/00s didn't help either - that's less the case now.)

I'm convinced it's more sociological than legal, although there are elements of both. My long term aim while I'm here is to be missing link between Finland and Silicon Valley. These guys are genuinely, still, much better than they themselves realize.

Re: Taking Risk

#222

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

nextos wrote: post #210
throwaway2037 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting post. Thank you to share your thoughts. > Finnish companies have traditionally been good at developing technology and bad at commercializing it. Can anyone provide some concrete examples?

Polar and Suunto. Excellent technology, but they were never marketed very well and achieved only moderate success. One was acquired by a Chinese corporation, the other is in financial trouble.

Suunto was a phenomenal company. We just got a guy from Suunto recently at my current workplace and he's incredibly sharp.

Re: Taking Risk

#223

Post by joecool1029 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #204
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #107

> It was inconceivable that the Bank of England would authorise me, a 31 year old who’d never even worked in a bank, to act as the CEO of the UK’s newest bank. In general I would think this as a good thing. The UK has a more rigorous banking control than the US (where different state laws can make starting a bank easier than in the UK), with more scrutiny of the business model and customer protection - you need to pr…

> none of the failures that have happened in the US in the past few years I assume you are referencing Silicon Valley Bank, which wasn't a small bank and wasn't run by young, inexperienced leaders. In the US, community banks would be 10% the size of SVB at its peak (before the run). Except SVB, can you name any other failures? And were they due to young, inexperienced leaders? I cannot name a single one.

Republic Bank just failed in the past month (not to be confused with the First Republic Bank that failed last year).

This newest Republic failure was a bank started by the guy who created Commerce Bancorp which was purchased by TD Bank. The guy is a piece of work: https://archive.is/DwtAx

(I wouldn't say he is young but really not the guy for the job given the history and the banking environment now)

Re: Taking Risk

#224

Post by kavalg »

csomar wrote: post #220

This is the most useless post one can read about some guy who is happy with his life and complain others are not doing things that he is thinking about... > just days before my start date at McKinsey, which finally gave me the confidence to choose the startup over a prestigious job offer. I highly doubt many people are getting offers at McKinsey and getting funded at the same time. The dude talks about risk but he li…

Yes, to get a sense of risk taking, I'd rather hear many stories by risk takers that failed than one story from the guy that succeeded.

Re: Taking Risk

#225

Post by bezier-curve »

mike_hearn wrote: post #132
dan-robertson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but I think it’s also true in the US (even more so as pay from the non-startup careers is higher). Maybe one should ask why it’s so much more common to do the irrational thing in the US than the UK.

Remember you have to normalize for population size. And when we say the US we really mean one small part of it. People in the US often move to California to start their startups, they don't necessarily stick around in the part of the US they're currently in. This is largely due to the VC ecosystem there which makes "irrationality" relatively safe vs everywhere else in the world where it doesn't. Tom's article makes t…

> four-day working weeks

I don't see how this affects innovation. Labor interests need to be taken care of too in a startup-friendly economy. In fact, I will probably never work for a startup simply because of the lack of safety net here in the states. That's a risk founders don't seem to consider too thoroughly - the lives they're entangling with their experiment.

Re: Taking Risk

#226

Post by camillomiller »

csomar wrote: post #220

This is the most useless post one can read about some guy who is happy with his life and complain others are not doing things that he is thinking about... > just days before my start date at McKinsey, which finally gave me the confidence to choose the startup over a prestigious job offer. I highly doubt many people are getting offers at McKinsey and getting funded at the same time. The dude talks about risk but he li…

Well yeah, the entire thing reads like a piece from someone who should look up the meaning of survival bias.

Re: Taking Risk

#227

Post by thefz »

jmrm wrote: post #188
thefz wrote: post #121

> I now live in San Francisco and invest in early-stage startups at Y Combinator, and it’s striking how undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers. But how many survive?

IMHO if those people have the money to be living in SF in the first place, that part must be solved beforehand

... I was talking about the startups. I really hope the people survive.

Re: Taking Risk

#228

Post by switch007 »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #107

> It was inconceivable that the Bank of England would authorise me, a 31 year old who’d never even worked in a bank, to act as the CEO of the UK’s newest bank. In general I would think this as a good thing. The UK has a more rigorous banking control than the US (where different state laws can make starting a bank easier than in the UK), with more scrutiny of the business model and customer protection - you need to pr…

> This means there are no small 'town' or small specialist banks in the UK

We do have about 250 credit unions and 42 building societies though

Re: Taking Risk

#229

Post by oblio »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #198
oblio wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't move if their lives are decent enough. If FAANG sets up shop in Milan and pays 80k compared to the local average of 40k, few people would rather move to Zurich for 150k and have to learn Swiss German and have worse weather and few local friends. For comparison, Eastern Europe has FAANG offices and people working there generally don't move as much, and the few that do leave, generally go to Switzerland (o…

> If FAANG sets up shop in Milan and pays 80k compared to the local average of 40k I see this types of claims on HN frequently. This looks "too easy". Why isn't Big Tech setting up offices in large southern European cities to do exactly this?

I don't know, that's why I'm asking. My guess would be that they didn't get tax incentives or other behind the scenes things that we rarely find out about.

Re: Taking Risk

#230

Post by switch007 »

davedx wrote: post #178
ggm wrote: post #23

Bankruptcy laws and social mores massively different. In the UK to go bankrupt is to be painted with indelible red shame dye. In America... going bankrupt means you are closing out the book on one failure to try another.

I think you're mixing up personal and business bankruptcies

They are. And bankruptcy doesn't apply to businesses. They go insolvent, not bankrupt.

Honestly the amount of incorrect information in this thread about the UK is quite disappointing, especially as most of it can be corrected with a quick Google search

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