[nickthedart]

I'm glad someone else thinks this too. In Nottingham a 2-bedroom terraced house in a good area can be rented for £500 a month and in a bad area £300, a whole year's bus travel is £350, or £199 for 100 days of your choosing, and there are extensive cycle lanes. There' s lots of fun stuff going on , varied nightlife. Its under 2 hours on the train to London when you need to go. To me this is the sort of place people should be doing startups, not London. £18k salary here would get you a reasonable existence for a few years while in a startup company. It seems to me to start a startup one has to have some basic business sense which means one understands balancing ingoings and outgoings. Therefore it seems a bit flawed to try to start a company somewhere so insanely expensive that, like you say, its employees spend 70%-80% on accommodation. Its rather important to retain key early technical staff. Not very easy for that to happen in London.