[benbrownww]

My experience running 2x startups in EU is that while lower salaries (esp Dev) helps at seed stage, in addition to government schemes like SEIS, scaling at SV pace is not possible without SV money. The best product in the world still needs consistent paid PR and advertising to acquire users - even viral growth needs a great social and content team to compete with a SV counterpart. These cannot be scaled cheaply. When the 1st round of EU unicorn founders sell out and start investing - then things will get interesting. Problem is - I don't have faith in many of the EU start ups being touted as unicorns, especially when I compare them to AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe et al.