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Taking Risk

tomblomfield.com

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Re: Taking Risk

#261

Post by DrBazza »

vinay427 wrote: post #180
DrBazza wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, as I don't live in SF, but I know that not all start-ups are in SF/The Valley even if the VC money is raised there. In the UK, they're disproportionately concentrated in London. In fact the UK government has encouraged many of them to set up around Old Street / 'Silicon Roundabout' (sigh). That area is only accessible by public transport, whereas SF/California is accessible via cars, so the choice of where…

It’s not clear at all that the vast majority of people in London commute by public transport. The sources linked below, one during the pandemic in 2020, and the other a series of estimates, suggest the figure is more like 25-35% but I wasn’t able to find something more conclusive. [1, 2] More to your point, I agree that SF or at least the Bay Area has a higher dependence on cars, but it’s also more geographically con…

I was replying regarding why London rent is high in general. SF/The Bay seems to be disproportionately tech-based jobs. London is a more generic mixture, including finance, arts, entertainment, services, insurance, tourism and so on.

Though specifically tech: offices are in central London - Google at King's Cross, Apple at Battersea, Facebook near Oxford St. Old Street and Hoxton for start ups. And of course fin/fintech in the City, Canary Wharf, and the West End. That's 10s of thousands (if not 100s) of developers concentrated in around London.

Microsoft in Reading 20 miles outside London is a bit of an outlier.

No one drives to any of those jobs. And the talent pool for those jobs is centred around London and London transport.

And then if you want to raise VC you need to get into the City or Canary Wharf for meetings - they won't go to you as you need their money. And then they'll be interested in 'where are you set up, and where will you get your talent from and grow?' - I can't recall any significant tech company that's inside the M25 and not in Central London.

The "Microsoft UK in Reading" equivalent towns in any other direction than the M4 would be something like Maidstone (Kent, SE), Bishop's Stortford (NE), Milton Keynes (NW), Crawley (S). None of those have any significant tech companies. Weirdly, Guildford (SW) does have a tech scene partly because some gaming companies set up there in the 1980s and 90s.

Re: Taking Risk

#262

Post by openrisk »

DeathArrow wrote: post #250
openrisk wrote: post #238

People attribute differences in the enterpreneurial landscape between the US and European countries to cultural factors (aka some "abnormal" risk aversion) but consider the possibility the difference is actually the rational stance on the face of persistent realities. First, there is the issue of the absence of scale. As a Briton once said (and Brexit famously demonstrated), there is no such thing as Europe. This is…

>First, there is the issue of the absence of scale. As a Briton once said (and Brexit famously demonstrated), there is no such thing as Europe. Aren't the markets global? Aren't Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung playing on global scale? Why limit yourself to a particular country or continent?

Markets are now "de-globalizing" in real time but that is less relevant for startups. Any entity that is now a "global" multi-national had to grow into that status at some point in their lifecycle. That trajectory is much easier (depending on sector) if the starting point is within a larger country. There are multiple factors: easier access to capital, more human talent, larger customer bases, a single regulatory framework etc. etc.

These factors don't just act linearly, but in a combinatorial fashion that helps beat the genuinely low odds. Changing the world (which is what the formation of a major new enterprise effectively does) is not a trivial occurrence. Overcoming those obstacles is occasionally possible but it is very complex and costly. For the European economies the writing is on the wall.

Re: Taking Risk

#263

Post by shswkna »

mike_hearn wrote: post #131
worstspotgain wrote: post #76

I think the "one thing that's not like the others" in the article are the crazy-high rankings of Britain's top schools. Universities are a bit of a self-perpetuating reputation scheme, and the UK has been punching well above its weight in that department. Having worked with all Europeans, I can't say that I found the British to be skill or preparation outliers. Maybe just a little above the mean? Speaking English nat…

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…

Note that the Scandinavian and Baltic countries do have an active tech startup scene.

Re: Taking Risk

#264

Post by vouwfietsman »

gambiting wrote: post #101
worstspotgain wrote: post #76

I think the "one thing that's not like the others" in the article are the crazy-high rankings of Britain's top schools. Universities are a bit of a self-perpetuating reputation scheme, and the UK has been punching well above its weight in that department. Having worked with all Europeans, I can't say that I found the British to be skill or preparation outliers. Maybe just a little above the mean? Speaking English nat…

>> are the crazy-high rankings of Britain's top schools The problem(in general) with University rankings is that the ranking is done almost entirely on the number of publications.....in English. So it's no wonder that British universities take a lot of the top spots. I've had these conversations many many many times with people - it's not like the Universities of Warsaw or Milan or Prague are not as good as Oxford -…

> a lot of research doesn't get published in English, so somehow it doesn't "count".

As it shouldn't. I am from a non-English speaking country myself, and I cannot begin to tell you how senseless it is to cling to native languages for any serious work. It's creating an arbitrary barrier to collaboration just for pride or convenience. English is the lingua-franca (lol) of the world, just embrace it and stop being proud of your weird language that you're stuck with because of random traditions and geography.

Imagine Prague universities would have top AI research published in Czech, would that actually help the scientific community? My bet is: not until someone goes and translates it to English, is it going to be read by anybody outside of the country, whether that person is native English or not.

In this thread there's a lot of talk of the EU losing competitiveness because it is a fragmented market between a group of isolationist countries, opinions like these are a big part of that. Stop putting English second place, this is a global world now, English is the language of the global world, learn it, use it, or lose.

Re: Taking Risk

#265

Post by bezier-curve »

mike_hearn wrote: post #234
bezier-curve wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People weren't choosing short weeks because they wanted leisure time. It was because there wasn't enough electricity to work five days a week due to Marxist miners unions shutting down the power stations. Also on checking it turns out I misremembered. The UK went to three day weeks during this time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week TV stations were also required to shut down at 22:30 to conserve power.…

Thanks, this is interesting. I can appreciate there being a balance of these two economic extremes. I think for the US, it needs more socialist policies so people's lives aren't ruined for things outside their control. E.g., going bankrupt at 24 over medical bills (happened to me).

Re: Taking Risk

#266

Post by gampleman »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #199
gampleman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proportio…

> As an immigrant to the UK I'm continually surprised on how poor life here actually is. Why do you stay?

I didn't move here for the economy and I don't stay because of it either. In my case it's mostly family circumstances.

Re: Taking Risk

#267

Post by robertlagrant »

oblio wrote: post #259
robertlagrant wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans don't move en masse. They move as individuals. Lots of people in the UK move to London to make money. Move to the capital, make your pile, leave at 50 and buy a big house.

> Americans don't move en masse. They move as individuals. LOL, literal much? :-) Also, as always, being too much of a pedant comes back against you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Trail I know it's not applicable to the modern day, but there you go, mass migration in the US :-)

Hah yeah you're spot on - it's definitely not applicable to the modern day!

Re: Taking Risk

#268

Post by robertlagrant »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #203
robertlagrant wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad stereotype, I think. The US has regulatory failures like FTX, but at least that's a brand new market and type of commodity (or currency, maybe). And it was prosecuted under existing regulation anyway. The EU had Wirecard, a financially totally mundane company, and regulations didn't stop anything. It happens everywhere. The difference is that the US is a force multiplier for businesses and innovation, s…

> The EU had Wirecard To me, this is misleading. Please stop writing as though all of the EU is uniform. It would be better to write: "Germany had Wirecard". That is much more accurate.

They're both accurate, in that people are talking about Europe, and the EU regulatory environment. Germany is more precise geographically.

Re: Taking Risk

#269

Post by WitCanStain »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #217
throwaway2037 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an immigrant to the UK I'm continually surprised on how poor life here actually is. Why do you stay?

Sunk cost fallacy most likely.

Why comment when you have no way of knowing, when the OP is themselves available to answer?

Re: Taking Risk

#270

Post by djtango »

jasonkester wrote: post #232
kavalg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s often the same person. I had a dozen failures before I struck on the sass product that retired me in my forties. You try, you learn, you improve, and eventually something might work. Or you don’t try, keep your safe job and work until you’re 70 like everyone else.

Thanks for this - I think there's something to also be said about too many people failing once and not trying again.

This could be for any number of reasons:

1. burnout 2. life circumstances (dependents like kids, parents or others) 3. time to failure - if you built a company for 9 years, you might have less time and appetite to start again (partly due to 1 and 2)

Life is uncertain, many things about our life are probabilistic. Risk management is central to many aspects of life. On HN a prevailing sentiment is on the luck of doing a startup (no doubt you do need luck!!!) but what about the farmer or fisherman? A disease or weather can wipe you out. Or a storm can kill you while you're out at sea.

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