London’s startup scene is getting more sophisticated | Hacker News Reader

London’s startup scene is getting more sophisticated

economist.com

88 pointsjimsojim62 comments

This article is a fluff piece on EF. EF is not a very large part of London's startup scene. In a couple of years of various startup heavy tech meetups in London, I've yet to meet anyone who's gone through EF. Which is not to dismiss them, I'm sure they're good, but with a title like that you'd expect them to have actually explored what's going on in London rather than just marketing an individual incubator.

Why any serious founder would show their face at a tech meetup is beyond me. What an utter waste of time for early-stage startups.

Some people go to meetups to socialise with people working in a similar area. It's probably good to de-stress with something like that even if you have an early-stage startup.

We went to some HN London meetups in London when we were at an earlier stage (hard to find time now). It was fun, a good way to unwind and meet other like minded people. You don't have to throw 100% of your life and time into working and sleeping only.

1. Recruitment - You may hire someone you meet. 2. Networking - Someone may work in a related industry that can be advantageous to you. 3. Relaxation 4. Keeping aware of industry trends. Yes some of this can be done online but in-person gives a different perspective and can be... 5. Fun.

Why would anyone go outside and meet people, have a drink or two and talk about common interests? That's also beyond me.

As always, there's a happy balance. It is probably bad to be a social recluse, unless you are in crunch mode and not looking for hiring anytime soon, but at the same time it's probably bad to be out for events every night and spending too much time socializing.

> EF is not a very large part of London's startup scene.

The rule e.f. companies are given is that conferences are a waste of time unless you're speaking. I've spoken at HN London and other events, but am generally less 'startup scene' oriented than I was before I joined.

Definite PR article for EF. I live in Shoreditch, have my own startup, go to a lot of events and have barely heard of them. The events I've got more out of include:

http://3-beards.com/dontpitchmebro - Interesting pitches, usually very high quality. The group that run it do a lot of cool startup events.

http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/ - Geeky fun, though has been getting increasingly commercial

Lately the best meetup has been "lean coffee" (http://leancoffee.org/) , the quality of people and feedback I have got from that meeting has been superb. I suggest starting one in your area.

Overall I am negative on accelerators. Perhaps I am bias as I have enough savings/income from an existing small business that I don't need my living expenses paid for what I think may be giving away too much of your business. Though I look forward to reading other peoples experiences.

>Overall I am negative on accelerators. Perhaps I am bias as I have enough savings/income from an existing small business that I don't need my living expenses paid for what I think may be giving away too much of your business. Though I look forward to reading other peoples experiences.

If having cash lying around from a previous business/startup attempt was a pre requisite to starting a startup are you not creating a sort of catch 22 scenario for the whole ecosystem? The current accelerator model seems very completely sensible given the level uncertainty involved in startups and has plenty of successful examples including YCombinator.

Have you specific reason to not like accelerators?

I personally agree with Ryan. The whole accelerator ecosystem is designed for the final benefit of VCs. It is like some clever fox built a pen, where the hen are competing to get more fat for the feast of the fox. If you managed to get enough for your own good, why the heck you need to work harder and trouble people just to enrich one more VC?

I don't agree with this (EF#3 Cohort Member). I was pretty sceptical of accelerators before joining EF, and remain sceptical of VCs, but I found EF really useful for things that I just would not have seen coming (someone else has mentioned "unknown unknowns" which sums it up fairly well).

Where do you hear about LeanCoffee?

> Perhaps I am bias as I have enough savings/income from an existing small business...

Yes.

IIRC meetcleo.com (e.f. 5) were presenting at DPMB a little while ago.

EF turned me - a Computer Science graduate with a vague interest in startups - into the founder of an angel-backed startup.

The pace of learning during the six pace programme is rapid, but that's not what I see as most important. I'm most grateful for them giving me the opportunity to start my own thing straight out of university.

Without EF, I would have been forced to get a graduate job at a tech company in order to pay the bills. Building a startup in London would have been orders of magnitude harder. I know people who are trying to build products in their spare time, and it's tough.

Thanks to EF, I'm now running a five-person company with nearly 10,000 users.

Oh, and I met my co-founder on the programme. Not bad.

Come on man, you can't just drop that and then not share what you're building.

https://joinencore.com/jamesmcaulay

> for women are generally outnumbered on Britain’s science-degree courses, especially among PhD

That's really not true. Physics undergraduate in most universities is perhaps 1:10 male:female. Postgraduate (PhD) is pretty much half/half in my experience. My department is physics/space/climate and we have more girls than boys now I think.

Perhaps the scene is worse in computer science, but I've been to a few machine vision conferences and women are pretty well represented.

EDIT: That said, engineering undergraduate was atrocious at my university. I had some friends doing civil/mechanical and it was maybe 1:20. Comp sci was pretty good though, as was maths. Biology and chemistry (and biochemistry) always seem to attract girls too.

"That's really not true. ... in my experience."

The plural of anecdote is not data.

(Although neither the original article provide some...)

See my sibling comment for some stats.

My beef is with the word 'especially'. If you look at the numbers for both UCL (my university) and Oxford (who via public scrutiny have to publish extensive statistics), you can see that postgraduate tends to have a more equal male/female ratio than undergraduate. Girls are still outnumbered, but saying 'especially among PhD' implies the situation worsens.

Where is this shown ?

In the Oxford data you link in the sibling comment, in the "Student numbers" PDF, the 2015 ratio for male/female Postgraduate research is 1.37, Postgraduate Taught is 1.18 and for Undergraduate 1.12, in agreement with the 'especially' in the article.

> That's really not true. Physics undergraduate in most universities is perhaps 1:10 male:female.

It was talking about science-degree courses, not Physics specifically. You seem quite sure it's not true, do you have any sources?

I interpreted the statement as as slightly more hyperbolic than it actually is. What they say is true, across the board, but it's not as bad as it sounds. The problem is that 'especially' implies that the ratio gets worse as you get higher in academia and I think that's nonsense.

My undergraduate degree was physics, but we spent time in other classes run by the maths and engineering departments.

The stats for UCL are here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/srs/statistics/tables/g/1415

It's difficult to get more granular data. The graduate figures there are for masters and PhD combined. My department is space and climate and we certainly don't have 99 PhD students!

I can't find stats for my undergraduate intake (Warwick '08), so you'll have to take my word for it. Things may have improved a lot since then. My girlfriend says that her physics course (St Andrews) was fairly even.

Oxford is an interesting edge case because they seem to control for gender quite well. They accepted more girls than boys for undergrad in 2013 (over all sciences) at least.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/gazette/statisticalinformation/#d.en.62...

I think you mean 10:1.

I just went through EF - while the cost of living in London is awful, the EF stipend more than covers it. I wouldn't have even considered moving back to the UK (much less to London) had EF not been able to assure me that they could deliver on the mentoring, connections, and financial support that they advertise.

In 3 months I learnt a lot about a variety of industries as we very rapidly iterated through teams and ideas, and I'm now developing instrumentation and software that will be launched into space later this year.

It certainly beats the opportunities I've had in finance and academia over the past few years!

Any independent opinions of EF? They are great things about them in most media, though most articles have a PR flavor to them.

As someone who went through the process, I'm glad I did. They do a great job of building up a good atmosphere among the group, and just working with such a high concentration of smart, engaged and interesting people is a great experience.

That said, as a model for building startups, I remain skeptical. Given such a short time period, there's a lot of pressure to grab quick wins and sell an idea before writing any code. That takes a certain kind of customer, and a certain kind of idea. Nothing wrong with it as such, but it's pretty narrow and it's easy to reel off interesting companies which wouldn't fit well in that model. Stripe probably would, but less so Google, Uber, EF itself etc, especially not anything with an unclear trajectory or that will grow its own market. There's a strong feeling among my group that the most successful members have been the ones who most wanted to start a company for its own sake, without particularly caring how, and there's plenty of people who started out wanting to solve some problem in biotech or education only to end up data mining online shoppers. There are exceptions to this, like OpenCosmos, but they usually started EF pre-formed.

(As an aside, they haven't quite resolved the tension between making EF seem valuable and the fact that people who see EF as a gatekeeper have the wrong mindset. Those who think about it too hard might also realise that they are disincentivised from taking EF's funding at the end of the program.)

Speaking of PR flavour, I think improving communication about what the process is actually like (perhaps as opposed to what they would like it to be like) would be a key improvement. Their marketing about being obsessed with problems and deeply technical doesn't tell the above story. Their definition of "deep tech", which basically means "not a CRUD app", probably seems sane to your average web designer or VC, but if you spend your days in the guts of an OS or compiler you might be disappointed. Ok, so if your programming itch is scratched by chucking data into scikit-learn and selling it as an API, you're going to have a great time – and you can slap the "AI" label on your company as a bonus.

Lest that sound too negative, again, I did enjoy the process and they seem to be doing well so far. My impression is that all the cohorts have had a different feel, and they're still iterating on the process. Right now they have something pretty good, and they might just be able to make it great.

Largely agree there - given that EF itself is iterating and changing quite rapidly, it should be interesting to see how it evolves now that it seems to be entering hockey-stick stage. The deep tech didn't really materialise too much IMO, but as a former physicist I guess I have fairly extreme expectations regarding what constitutes "depth" in technology.

I'm quite impressed with Accelerated Dynamics and ThirdEye, I'll be following them closely.

Fifth cohort here.

- Everyone else here seems to have a doctorate in machine learning, have three of more degrees, and be from Impbridge. I'm an anomaly in terms of being a generalist with kernel -> UX experience. Teams are always two tech cofounders, there's no 'business guys', just another programmer who knows a lot about business metrics.

- e.f. made a solid difference in unknown unknowns - things that retrospectively seem obvious. In my case the effect of webcrypto on my funnel, but that's a pretty specific example.

- Here's my revenue before/after joining e.f. http://imgur.com/3ImMybc : if you want the Y axis book a meeting.

My lawyer lives in London. He's from silicon valley and has helped hundreds of startups, including some of the biggest.

His observation about London is that the cost of living is simply so high, that it is impossible to have a real startup culture here.

Really? It was my impressions that the cost of living in SF in much, much higher. Cost of living in London is high but I don't find it too bad and I know lots of people on much lower salaries than me who don't find it too difficult either. Of course this is assuming you're young/no dependents etc. but that's most startup founders.

"Of course this is assuming you're young/no dependents etc. but that's most startup founders."

This is far from true.

"In fact, research shows that the median age of U.S.-born tech company founders is 39, and there are twice as many entrepreneurs older than 50 than there are younger that age 25." [1]

[1] http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/242851

Interesting, thanks for the correction. I had a feeling that was going to happen lol

I wonder if that's because older founders (assuming age = more experienced) are more likely to succeed or last longer than a very young (<25) founder, so they don't go back to normal jobs for longer if at all.

I've lived in London and SF. And I would say Silicon Valley is as expensive, if not more, than London

> the cost of living is simply so high, that it is impossible to have a real startup culture [in London].

That's an odd way to phrase it. Cost of living is only ever going to be one in many factors that contribute to the level of startup culture/community in a given city.

It's also worth considering how the cost of living and the maturity of the startup ecosystems in SF and London have changed over time. I dare say SF would have been comparatively cheaper back in the days when the startup ecosystem was forming than London is today. No doubt modern-day London faces additional challenges because it's already an expensive city and parts of the ecosystem aren't as mature.

The very centre is too expensive - the reason Shoreditch is a centre of startups and artists and the like is that twenty years ago it was where all the crime was. Now the creeping gentrification is happening (as it does everywhere) and some of the startups are moving out to Hoxton or further. Fortunately (and in contrast to SF on its peninsula) there is land all around, so when an area gets too expensive it just pushes people slightly further out.

Shoreditch and Hoxton lost the battle to gentrification a long time ago.

None of the creatives who reinvigorated the area can afford to live there anymore.

Also, London does not have uncontrolled urban sprawl. It is constrained by the Green Belt, which was designed precisely to prevent sprawl. This is one of many reasons property prices are naturally high.

You can live on £1000 per month. Of course it's not as much fun as spending more money (especially since the people you see on the street seem lavish in their spending). It's very easy to get accustomed to an expensive lifestyle.

In SF, is it possible to rent a single room 15 minutes walk from where all the tech companies are located for $800 / month? Because in London you can.

Pretty hard to live off £1k a month in London. Rent is going to be ~50% of that minimum, then you have council tax + bills. Doesn't leave much at all for transport/food and whatever else might come up.

£1k is a bit less than the recommended monthly cost for students in London of around £1.1-1.2k, depending who you ask. That presumably assumes sharing a flat/house with others, but also probably assumes living relatively close to the university.

The "London Living Wage" works out to about £1200 per month, after tax. There are people earning less than this in London.

If the startup doesn't need to be in London they could cut costs significantly by being further out of London in the suburbs, or in a satellite town, and taking the train in when necessary. But this can put off potential employees. Maybe it could work at the beginning.

I was offered a single room (small but livable) 5 minutes walk off Brick Lane for £535 all incl. If you work in Shoreditch you can easily walk to work, so no transport costs. That leaves £500 for food & other spend. If you cook for yourself this is very plausible.

Of course finding a room like that and getting it over the other dozens of people who want it is not that easy, but that's a system you can hack too.

Hmm. Almost exactly $900, with a quick bit of searching.

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-5357172...

I'm curious as to how you can assess lavishness of spending of people walking by on the street; presumably you're very good at identifying branded fashion?

In the TV show "Project Runway" they pit a bunch of fashion designers against each other. At the end they judge the clothes that they've made. One of the more positive they can say about a piece is "It looks expensive". The trained eye can quickly ascertain things like that (the material, the cut, the stitching). One of my friends (she works in fashion) says she can immediately tell if a guy is wearing high-street brands (H&M and the like).

There's equal opportunity and equal outcome, they propose to tackle the problem with equal outcome. With more women taking degrees in the UK one must ask why they are less seen in STEM based subjects and not try to artificially level the playing field.

My personal opinion is that the issue is a social one, where we are still awaking from a period where women must do certain jobs and men must do others. You don't see many women as bin collectors although they are more than qualified for the job. I think the best place to tackle this stigma is in Primary and Secondary Schools. The results will take a few years to filter up all the way from Primary to University.

Meanwhile, start-ups should be judged equally based on their quality and not discriminated by who is attempting it. There is a ridiculous notion that we can artificially change the end result and somehow that won't lead to issues.

Why sophisticated? It simply says bar is higher and woman participants are as few as in the past.

EF is a relatively new Accelerator (< 4 years I think) which essentially means that their early incubated startups will only now be showing their real potential. IMO their future seems both solid and exciting : 3 out of top 5 up-and-coming AI startups in London have been created through EF cohorts - #1 being Google's DeepMind.

via http://uk.businessinsider.com/10-british-ai-companies-to-loo...

I wonder whether The Economist knows about the MiniBar meetup in London.

I don't see an electric vehicle manufacturer in London.

Because companies grow out of the environments that surround them. London depends heavily on public transportation, so I wouldn't expect to see much innovating in the automobile industry there.

Nearly every F1 team is located in Southern England. Williams is in Wantage, Mclaren in Dorking. Exotic materials, wind tunnels, FE clusters, CAD/CAE engineering talent, etc...

(McLaren is in Woking, not Dorking)

Red Bull are based in Milton Keynes.

There's Global Electric Vehicle Corporation.[1] It's a classic startup. Cool web site, new marketing concept ("white label" electric vehicles), hip features ("not just a car, an eMobility vehicle designed to meet the lifestyle needs of today's electronically wired and iPod generation"). They're not actually shipping cars, and all the images of cars seem to be renders. But their web site is really cool.

(Although they're in the Midlands, not London.)

[1] http://www.globalelectricvehicle.com/

True. But electric vehicles (milk floats, buses, trains, trams, underground trains) have been used for a very long time. Since 1890 for tube trains, for example.

England's electric vehicle companies would tend to be located in areas that had heavier engineering - electric trains were built in Birmingham

Electric trains still are built in Derby and Loughborough.

Perhaps Vivarail counts as a recent startup, founded 2012 in Stratford upon Avon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivarail

While not a fully-electric vehicle, the McLaren use some interesting battery tech in their P1 road car and F1 cars.

It would be insane to start an EV company in London. Rent and rates are cripplingly high and you could get considerable tax incentives for setting up elsewhere in the UK.

Nissan have recently opened a massive battery factory in Sunderland to complement their existing car factory. Jaguar Land Rover have announced electric models for 2017 which would be manufactured in their Birmingham, Halewood or Solihull factories. Magtec in Sheffield and Zytek in Staffordshire design and manufacture electric drivetrain systems for a number of companies.

London =/= Britain.

Right you are! When Britain produced strategic Handley Page bombers, they made it at Bricket Wood.

This is because they can only historically be in Woking.

The guys

Reply on news.ycombinator.com