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by photon137
5174 days ago
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Plenty of things are wrong with the London startup scene - Silicon Valley has the advantage of being close to great universities where you can recruit great talent (not that these companies don't go to the East Coast to recruit). London doesn't have that, at least from a technical talent perspective - the area that comes close to matching that description in the UK is Cambridge (or Oxford, to some degree). Secondly, even if you have people with good talent available, many of them see the London finance machine as their destination of choice (though they may not admit so openly). The finance culture has seeped into the startup culture as well - many of them see the finance companies as their potential clients (so that's not surprising) - but that has led to a gatekeeper culture that is prevalent to a lesser degree in the US (maybe I'm wrong here). Lastly, the level of risk-aversion is generally higher in the UK than that in the States - the positive energy on the West Coast is _tangible_. How many APIs have you seen coming out of London - and frameworks people can build upon? That is, raw technical products for the heck of it - not travel websites, shopping portals or phone-apps. Those are the things that form the bedrock that show the underlying passion of the startup community of an area. London (and the UK) sorely lacks that. |
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Are you sure? By which I mean are you aware that 2 million people pass through heathrow each day, London oscillates between 9 and 13 million people a day, it's the main gateway to Europe from the states and a financial world capital. If that doesn't attract talent from around the world I don't know what would. Sure, plenty of people would rather work at a bank than a startup but it's the same anywhere. The difference is the sheer number of people, not to mention local universities like Imperial and UCL, not forgetting other universities with niche specialisms like Royal Holloway and Westminster with information security.
> Secondly, even if you have people with good talent available, many of them see the London finance machine as their destination of choice
As I've mentioned earlier, some would rather work for a bank than a startup, but there's plenty in London that doesn't directly involve finance. If it comes across that finance companies may be potential clients, it's because they have the money to buy the products London startups can build and there's lots of them.
> Lastly, the level of risk-aversion is generally higher in the UK than that in the States - the positive energy on the West Coast is _tangible_.
I can't speak for the west coast or the states but this varies greatly. We have things like the prince's trust, the Technology Strategy Board, SEEDA and innovateuk amongst others. If you pick the right niche to get into then people will practically throw money at you to solve their problems. I will happily concede though that if you don't pick the right niche there is a level of risk aversion though but things like Seedcamp and HN London meetups are challenging that.