| > I would agree with this if I wasn't seeing entrepreneurs who are breaking the stereotypical British attitude of "sell for £10m, kids to private school, consultancy gig until I'm 50 and retire". We have US-style founders over here who are trying to build amazing things. The venture community hasn't caught up, but I think after one or two larger exits for truly spectacular businesses (forget Zoopla, which is about as innovative as Amazon would be if it helped you check the stock of book stores which you still had to visit), the limited partners in funds will pile on. My suggestion wasn't that we aren't creating successful startups. My suggestions is that RELATIVELY, when compared to Silicon Valley, we are not fostering innovation. Of corse we are breaking through the barrier but we will always be risk averse and when compared to Silicon Valley, we will never reach the same levels of innovation unfortunately. From just plucking figures from Google we can see that Silicon Roundabout has about 1000-2000 startups whereas Silicon Valley has more than 20,000 which is a ridiculous ratio. > That's changing amongst the top tier of venture investors. Rentify (my business) couldn't process credit cards when we raised from Balderton, and the first board mtg of the year was focused on going for growth uber alles. Agreed, I think it is changing but I really don't think it will catch up with SF VC. London is great for go-getters but when you go to SF you can raise money for an app that sends a "Yo". Don't get me wrong, it's not a good thing that you can get investment for the most ridiculous of ideas but i'm just trying to portray how risk averse we are as a population. Or maybe a better way to put it is that we take calculated risks. > I agree with this although I dispute the reasons, and the notion that it will never change. My suggestion that it would never change was a mistake. We will, as a population, become risk-prone but we will never compare to Silicon Valley. I think we will always be less likely to invest in 0-1's. |
it's pretty stupid how these ridiculous, unfounded memes perpetuate on HN. Young founders are best (but there are regular article how empirically they are worse), SV is the only place that has innovation (but clearly aren't).
The funny one I read a year or two ago was that no EU startup had ever sold for $100mill, which was utter nonsense that 5 secs of googling proved wrong, but was being repeated by various SV journalists.