24 yo from London here. That language is completely standard to me. I've been saying awesome with a straight face for as long as I can remember. I'm not sure it's the best way to have made the point.
33 yo, and I can cope with using awesome too. I've even been known to use dude and on occasion, stoked. However, that is because I've always been into "extreme" sports (windsurfing, snowboarding, etc). In these sports, it is very much about small fairly close-knit communities who adopt common vocabularies made up of technical terms and also (normally) a bunch of "Americanisms" to express their feelings.
I see tremendous similarities between the startup culture and the extreme sports culture. Both tend to reject conventional methods of rewarding people with "status" (i.e. family background) and focus instead on meritocratic measures like ability / performance. Issues like nationality tend to also become less relevant as people travel around frequently. Thus it is not surprising and, is actually welcome, that a universal vocabulary has emerged to connect startup'ers wherever they might be based.
Of course, I accept that the author has a point about slavish imitation being a bad strategy. In extreme sports circles, no one likes the guy who turns up with all the kit and the lingo but without the skills, so the key lesson to UK startups is probably best summed up as: focus on walking the walk, before we start talking the talk.... ;)
(Separately, the Beatles might have emerged from Liverpool, but they were hugely influenced by a number of American acts, and indeed were involved in a virtual creative arms race against Brian Wilson at one point.)
I've lived in England and New Zealand and I felt the same; none of them seemed especially unusual to me. Who would describe something as "awesome"? Probably anyone who grew up in the 80s and watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for a start...
I see tremendous similarities between the startup culture and the extreme sports culture. Both tend to reject conventional methods of rewarding people with "status" (i.e. family background) and focus instead on meritocratic measures like ability / performance. Issues like nationality tend to also become less relevant as people travel around frequently. Thus it is not surprising and, is actually welcome, that a universal vocabulary has emerged to connect startup'ers wherever they might be based.
Of course, I accept that the author has a point about slavish imitation being a bad strategy. In extreme sports circles, no one likes the guy who turns up with all the kit and the lingo but without the skills, so the key lesson to UK startups is probably best summed up as: focus on walking the walk, before we start talking the talk.... ;)
(Separately, the Beatles might have emerged from Liverpool, but they were hugely influenced by a number of American acts, and indeed were involved in a virtual creative arms race against Brian Wilson at one point.)