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The commercial culture in the UK is, generally, nothing like the US. You have companies with great products that refuse on principle to hire lots of salespeople. I actually can't think of a SaaS company that is as aggressive in investing in sales and marketing as you see on average in the US. And this is rational because the return on investment is usually very poor (fintech in the UK is probably the best example, supposed to be the "best of the best"...pretty much unanimously weak results/growth from companies that are largely British). Autonomy/Darktrace is a possible exception (they have a lot of US people tbf) but given what happened to Autonomy...the jury is still out. And CS courses in the UK have a very academic bent. This is a rather complex cultural point but, ultimately, it comes down to the teaching. What kind of things are prioritized, what kinds of things have value, and teachers in the UK value complexity for it's own sake (to give you an example, I studied somewhere that was doing AI research back in the 60s, was offered huge grants from military and corporates...all turned down, research stagnated, grad students all leave...the uni is feverishly trying to connect professors with funding now, all totally non-commercial nonsense...once this starts it is very hard to reverse). Also, using the example of a US-based company opening an office in the UK isn't very helpful. The UK has lots of US investment banks doing very well in the UK but only one home-grown investment bank (and that one has been taken over by people from the US, and isn't doing very well). There is a reason why this is the case. Companies that are based overseas in the UK tend to be different in fundamental ways from ones that aren't. In tech, the big problem is that the UK is largely used as an outsourcing hub (particularly in development) because there is no real commercial expertise (this isn't obvious to people in the London tech bubble, most of the tech industry in the UK still exists that bubble). The rest of the article is total nonsense but Britain has had these problems for decades. You see it in every industry, every part of the UK. Attitudes are slowly shifting but it is a very deeply embedded cultural thing (you actually see this in some British colonies, that is how deep it is). |
Barclays, Lloyds, Rothschild, NatWest Markets (+HSBC which maybe isn't "home grown").