[mfDjB]

I moved to London to do a startup in December 2019. All I can say is do not do this. The government during covid has been horribly inefficient, I just received my NHS ID in the last month (taking upwards of a year to process, during which time they denied me covid testing after I had the necessary symptoms) and I received my NINO 6 months after moving here, however now with covid they aren't even processing these anymore.

In terms of brexit, any sort of gains for a startup will be possible only if the British government allows them to be (for example with deregulation or the removal of GDPR or the reduction/easing of bureaucratic proceses). In my experience betting on the British government to do the right thing is a bad bet. They have the digital London effort but it seems more like a PR stunt than a good-willed effort to attract startups.

You will also encounter strange socio-economic effects that you would not see in other places, for example being an engineer and starting a startup here is viewed as a negative while being a business major is a positive. There is a big divide between capital and labour that perpetuates itself through these stereotypes that are not present in places like America.

[ac2u]

>You will also encounter strange socio-economic effects that you would not see in other places, for example being an engineer and starting a startup here is viewed as a negative while being a business major is a positive.

Your experience might be a bit more localised to the part of the UK you're in than you think rather than being a UK thing. I've never found people care enough to provide negativity or positivity regarding where you've chosen to specialise your education in most cases.

>In terms of brexit, any sort of gains for a startup will be possible only if the British government allows them to be

Agreed. Lack of access to capital and the lack of tax planning for anyone but the rich holds the UK back compared to the states. I don't agree with much the current government did, but one sentiment that Cummings expressed that was correct was that when novel tech gets bought over by US giants (eg Deepmind), is a failure on the UK's part. They're essentially allowing all the future upside to be exported.

Not that I blame anyone that accepts a buyout offer, if they didn't, then there'd probably be no upside to capture at all due to lack of risk-taking private funding.

[Nursie]

I don't think undoing the GDPR would be doing "the right thing", personally. I'm hoping that's legislation we keep for the time being, until we can figure out how to do it better. But fundamentally it's pulling in the right direction.

You're right that in a lot of the UK software folks are viewed as 'beneath' the management and business types though, and not valued in the same way as they are in other economies. Useless arseholes with few worthwhile skills can get paid a ton if they can talk themselves into a position as a delivery manager or project manager.

[mfDjB]

In regards to GDPR, I agree it's the right thing for consumers, but it puts compliance pressure on startups. So from the perspective of a startup, I could see its removal being a positive.

(Note that is just from the perspective of a startup)

[rswail]

Don't collect information about your customers that you don't need to provide the service to them.

If they decide to delete their account and request that they be forgotten, delete that data that you only needed while providing the service.

It's not hard to comply, and it's a cost of doing business that you have to accept. If you implement it right, then you'll be compliant by default. Not sure how not being compliant is a positive for any startup.

It's the law in the EU, so unless you want to cut out a market of half a billion people, you have to comply.

[Hallucinaut]

It shouldn't be acceptable for startups, nor anyone else, to play fast and loose with personal data, just as it isn't with financial data.

Unless your business model revolves around usage of personal data, in which case GDPR is a very useful set of minimum baseline requirements for handling the data, compliance is fairly trivial.