I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup | Hacker News Reader

I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

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143 pointscesarosum245 comments

Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively.

The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from Cloudflare’s perspective our London-based EMEA sales team has been spectacularly effective.

Early in Eigen’s history there were many London-based employees who prioritised technological purity over commercial success; it was almost fatal for us. However hard it is, the UK needs to transform its cultural attitude to sales.

I think that’s a leadership issue not about “London”. The team we built in London was/is all about commercial success.

Personal anecdote - depends on where you are on the technology adoption bell curve. Innovative, a bit "out-there" things seem to be better received in the US.

London does sales well, if you want a sales office you open it in london.

What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea. Even less so to someone with a crap idea.

Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else.

They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised.

To back up the point that John is making, "Technical purity" above all else is a symptom of leadership not explaining the business needs well enough. (or not putting in place an engineering team with enough pragmatism to translate business to tech. )

I mean, good luck to him moving his HQ to NYC etc. but if I were an employee in London HM The Queen's tea cup in Windsor would be shaking from the sonic boom after I lit the reheats on my CV.

> I mean, good luck to him moving his HQ to NYC etc. but if I were an employee in London HM The Queen's tea cup in Windsor would be shaking from the sonic boom after I lit the reheats on my CV.

I wish I lived in London just to use this expressive nugget of gold.

Gold.

The Epstein Drive[1] method of finding a new job.

1. https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Epstein_Drive

> What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea.

That's what government's for

No, the UK government requires you to have no clue (but be chums with a minister or Tory MP) before it spaffs torrents of money your way.

It seems you are agreeing with the comment you replied to.

It isn't enough to be an idiot, you have to be an idiot with connections to get spaffed

>It isn't enough to be an idiot, you have to be an idiot with connections to get spaffed

The first part I can manage. But how do I get connections?

Whenever I hear advice about using connections and networking, I always interpret that to mean "be born with the right relatives".

It can be work connections too. My brother worked for a startup that got bought for a 150 million and he still connects with the old ceo whom I bet my brother could get funding from now if he had a good idea.

Go to eton is common

You are too late. They met at school!

Yes, I am in violent agreement. If anything the comment I replied to was understating the case, that was what I was pointing out.

But once you have that, anything is possible e.g a lucrative ferry contract despite owning not a single boat.

Nah, the way they got that contract - along with a bunch of private sector funding - was by having previous experience running a ferry boat line to the UK until the Competition Commission forced it to shut down due to being owned by Eurostar, and (from what I can tell) by already having everything lined up to actually operate ferries by the time the opportunity came along. It turns out that you don't actually need to own a single boat to run a ferry and generally wouldn't want to. Instead, you need to be able to lease one of the handful of ferry boats of a suitable size to operate from their chosen port, and it just so happens that the company which owns the only suitable boats in the world ended the existing contracts right when the new ferry line would've needed them... if they hadn't imploded due to all the key players pulling out because the press coverage had lead them to believe the whole thing was fake, including the port at the other end and the funding (which earlier media coverage made it seem didn't exist, right up until the point it was pulled).

As far as I can tell, the British media destroyed a potentially viable new company by seeding the belief it was a scam just out of sheer anti-Brexit spite. That seems like a pretty good reason not to set up business in the UK actually.

Well that and all that boring but important infrastructure that means you have the pleasure of living in a viable society, rather than a hellscape.

Easy now, I think they'd rather be called Florida

>Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else.

> They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised.

With supporters like this the UK is in no need of enemies. It would be difficult to more pithily explain why the US is a better place to build a startup as a founder, or to explain why US startups have more money and so can pay their staff more.

> It would be difficult to more pithily explain why the US is a better place to build a startup as a founder, or to explain why US startups have more money and so can pay their staff more.

But it is really simple. In US they have a higher appetite for gambling.

It's not gambling if you consistently make more money than the person who thinks they're being prudent. It's a better investent strategy.

This is devolving into a discussion about semantics, but in my vocabulary at least, just because you have an edge doesn't mean you're not gambling. It's about the level of risk, and investing huge amounts of capital in hopes of funding a unicorn tech startup fits the bill, to me.

There's a phrase in Europe. "Old money dies hard"

And money in Europe is old, and hard fought for. We still have rich people who's families made their fortune in the 11th Century.

Money in the US is new. And easily lost. The whole show is less than 250 years old. And that star is already on the wane.

US investors have a stronger focus on upside maximisation, Europe tends to focus on downside protection.

Having been on this merry-go-round in Europe, I can tell you that focusing on downside protection frequently results in poor decision making that activity prevents upside growth. In other words, worrying about the downside so much, makes it a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I’ve always thought it was stupid for VCs to worry about downside protection. Either you’re playing the VC game, and having companies go to zero is just part of the plan, or you’re not. Not being able to stomach the worst case scenario when you invest, just means you waste time that would be better spent trying to achieve the rocketship outcome everyone is looking for.

And far more money.

The US is just far wealthier than Europe.

I mean how stupid, trying to make some money. What kind of n00b tries to pay their own way?

How terribly blinkered we were to not waste runway on hyper growth knowing that there wasn't money to support it?

We are all so terribly stupid.

I wouldn't call it stupid unless you're participating in the VC ecosystem. If your aim is to build a sustainable business and get rich slowly by all means go for it. But if you want to get enormously rich the American way is clearly superior. Go big, fast, or go home. If the VC loses all their money who cares? Play at capitalism and lose, you lose your stakes. If you as a founder fail, well either try again or play a different game, one that doesn't involve questions like "Is the total addressable market here over a billion dollars a year?"

>What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea.

Different philosophies. In US you throw money at ten stupid ideas hoping that even nine will be dead, one will be successful and see extreme growth, making you very rich. It's more of a gambler's approach.

I don't know if studies were made but I suspect US based startups who survive to see a large growth while in EU even the growth is small more startups are surviving.

> most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else.

With hyper growth at least you have the satisfaction of taking thousands of investors with you if you fall, while producing a big hole in the stock market and capture media attention. You will never be forgotten, you will have a several Wikipedia pages about you and also some legal investigations. Your name will be mentioned in bussines schools.

> It's more of a gambler's approach.

Wrong. The cultural difference comes from differing appetites for risk. VC's aren't gambling on their portfolio companies, they expect each and every one of them to turn into rocket ships. If there's no potential to become a rocketship, they don't invest, simple as that. Stupid ideas don't get investment.

That VCs understand that it is highly unlikely that each portfolio company will actually become a rocketship, just means that they appreciate that each investment in the portfolio carries high amounts of risk. Europe doesn't have the same appetite for risk.

I can't say I agree with either of you 100%. For example, your statement that VCs expect each and every one of their investments to turn into rocket ships? Nah. If they don't know that a % of their portfolio will fail, then they're idiots. Also, FOMO. Any time there's a new hot technology, VCs soil themselves trying to get a piece of the action (AI, I'm looking at you). So they end up investing in start-ups that probably won't succeed (BUT IF THEY DO, RIGHT???)

I definitely agree that it's all about appetite for risk. I'm not sure you disagree with each other fundamentally, you're just watching from different sides and wording it accordingly. Some people buy stocks for long term investment, some people short sell, and some bet their house on a hand of poker. I'm sure they would have a bar fight if you got them talking about risk appetite.

> If they don't know that a % of their portfolio will fail, then they're idiots.

Yes, but they don't know which ones. What the commenter meant is that the VC believes each and every one of their investments has the potential to become a rocketship. So they spread the risk into several potential rocketships and hope for one of them to not crash.

Well, the line between a risky investment and a stupid investment isn't always obvious.

If my business plan is to make wifi-enabled juicing machines that cost $400 and only work on proprietary, DRMed packets I sell at a huge margin - great investment? Or stupid investment?

If my business plan is to make a $2,000 stationary bicycle, when most competing products cost <$400 - and it'll come with a subscription, but only people who've paid $$$$ upfront will be able to subscribe - great investment? Or stupid investment?

If I'm going to take out long cheap leases on office space, spruce them up a bit and sell short expensive leases? And some of the long leases will actually be from the CEO who personally owns some office buildings - great investment? Or stupid investment?

What if I run a website that lets strangers talk to each other, and I have a lot of users, barely any revenue, decades of losses, and I have no plan to make a profit. The users hate ads. Great investment? Or stupid investment?

It turns out some investments that seem dumb have worked out much better than I would have expected. Others not so much...

It seems to me like you're letting personal bias get in the way.

> Juicero

Huge margin, going for rich, health conscious consumers - great investment on paper. Shitty due diligence by investors who thought they could grade the investment by the numbers and not by the actual hardware, juice bags, etc.

> Peloton

Taking a commoditized product and differentiating with a premium offering offering high margins is literally a phenomenal investment, if you can find a market for the premium offering and can build a moat. Pharmaceutical companies do this all the time with drugs that are about to lose patent protection, put in a little tweak, get the patent moat back, market the hell out of it to get doctors to prescribe it instead of the suddenly cheap generic version.

> WeWork

You literally described a way to buy low and sell high, taking advantage of latent inefficiency in the market due to misaligned incentives on the part of real estate owners vs. short-term tenants. Basically run hotels but for entrepreneurs instead of tourists. Sounds like a pretty phenomenal investment to me! Too bad the CEO was unstable and let valuations run out of control.

> Social media

Facebook specifically actually was a pretty stupid investment. FB didn't just have a ton of users who hated ads, it had a CEO who foreswore ever deploying advertising, whose board structure kept him from ever getting fired. Pretty sure early FB investors are thankful that some business sense was knocked into Zuck before they went bankrupt.

Twitter, on the other hand, was a far better investment. If you can get strangers to talk to each other, you can get people to talk to brands. Of course that's valuable.

> they expect each and every one of them to turn into rocket ships

> it is highly unlikely that each portfolio company will actually become a rocketship

You're just rebranding gambling as "taking risk". Every gambler expects his next hand to be a royal flush, while understanding that it's unlikely.

I'm not sure that's true.

Gamblers often have various reasons for continuing to gamble, but very few of them EXPECT their next hand to be a royal flush. For most of them it is exactly the case that 'if I keep going, eventually I will get a big win that offsets my losses'.

That I suppose is a type of taking risk, but I think OP was not being quite as blunt.

In a situation where you have 10 companies each with a 1/10 chance of 20x growth (and a possibility for better) or 1000 companies, each with 1/1000 chance of 5000x growth, which would you pick?

While theoretically, the two situations are similar, and given an infinite amount of money and investment opportunities, the second situation pays off better, the first is more likely to yield returns in the real world. Most people would probably call the first one 'taking risk' and the second 'gambling'.

Perhaps a bit weird to talk of Europe when speaking of London, because that's where you've got all the Russian and Arab money sloshing around. It's not exactly Barcelona or Berlin.

I used to work for a startup founded by a few Brits. We had engineers in London, but no sales people, because of the culture. I was much easier to sell to Walmart than Tesco.

That's funny. I work at a public B2B tech company whose primary customers are in the retail space. Our main sales office for EMEA is in London and they're absolutely crushing it and always have been. They habitually convert more of their (albeit smaller) pipeline than North America does. Literally some of our best sales people are there in London.

Sure there's some satellites in France and Germany because locals prefer locals, but Brexit hasn't changed a damn thing for us.

like the author we're light on details beyond "the culture", "bad at sales". What does this _mean_ exactly?

It is everything.

Customers too risk-averse, class boundaries still endemic (it is amazing the US tech companies went into this, Google/Facebook/etc. seem to have hired the Notting Hill set as soon as they came to London), companies too conservative about investing margin in sales, very relationship-driven sales culture (as opposed to product-driven) that is closed to "outsiders", reluctance to cold-call, etc.

It is cultural because it can be anything else, do people from the UK have a different biology? No. I think if you look at politics in the UK, it is self-evident that the culture of the UK is not exactly entrepreneurial...unless you believe that a group of probably 30-50 people who went to the same school, went to the same university and largely studied the same course should rule the country...it is very weird.

'I think if you look at politics in the UK, it is self-evident that the culture of the UK is not exactly entrepreneurial...unless you believe that a group of probably 30-50 people who went to the same school, went to the same university and largely studied the same course should rule the country...it is very weird.'

My impression is that the UK and US are fairly similar in this respect. The leadership of the political and administrative class in both countries is dominated by graduates of a small number of institutions who took similar courses. In the UK it's primarily Oxford and Cambridge, and in the US it's Harvard, Yale and some other Ivy League colleges. There is a analogous pattern in many other countries.

Below is a list of all the national elections contested in the US and UK in the postwar period, noting the subject or subjects studied by the two leading candidates for head of government, along with the higher education institutions they attended:

USA

2020 Biden (Delaware/Syracuse, Law) v. Trump (Wharton, Economics)

2016 Trump (Wharton, Economics) v. H. Clinton (Wellesley/Yale, Politics/Law)

2012 Obama (Columbia/Harvard, Politics/Law) v. Romney (Brigham Young/Harvard, English/Law)

2008 Obama (Columbia/Harvard, Politics/Law) v. McCain (US Naval Academy)

2004 G. W. Bush (Yale/Harvard, History/Business) v. Kerry (Yale/Boston, Politics/Law)

2000 G. W. Bush (Yale/Harvard, History/Business) v. Gore (Harvard, Government)

1996 B. Clinton (Georgetown/Oxford/Yale, Foreign Service/PPE/Law) v. Dole (Washburn, Law)

1992 B. Clinton (Georgetown/Oxford/Yale, Foreign Service/PPE/Law) v. G. H. W. Bush (Yale, Economics)

1988 G. H. W. Bush (Yale, Economics) v. Dukakis (Swarthmore/Harvard, Politics/Law)

1984 Reagan (Eureka, Economics) v. Mondale (Minnesota, Politics)

1980 Reagan (Eureka, Economics) v. Carter (US Naval Academy)

1976 Carter (US Naval Academy) v. Ford (Michigan/Yale, Economics/Law)

1972 Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law) v. McGovern (Dakota Wesleyan/Northwestern, History)

1968 Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law) v. Humphrey (Minnesota/Louisiana State, Politics)

1964 Johnson (Texas State/Georgetown, Politics/Law) v. Goldwater (None)

1960 Kennedy (Harvard, Government) v. Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law)

1956 Eisenhower (West Point) v. Stevenson (Princeton/Harvard/Northwestern, History/Law)

1952 Eisenhower (West Point) v. Stevenson (Princeton/Harvard/Northwestern, History/Law)

1948 Truman (None) v. Dewey (Michigan/Columbia, Law)

2019 Johnson (Oxford, Classics) v. Corbyn (None)

2017 May (Oxford, Geography) v. Corbyn (None)

2015 Cameron (Oxford, PPE) v. Miliband (Oxford/LSE, PPE/Economics)

2010 Cameron (Oxford, PPE) v. Brown (Edinburgh, History)

2005 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Howard (Cambridge, Law)

2001 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Hague (Oxford, PPE)

1997 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Major (None)

1992 Major (None) v. Kinnock (Cardiff, Industrial Relations)

1987 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Kinnock (Cardiff, Industrial Relations)

1983 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Foot (Oxford, PPE)

1979 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Callaghan (None)

1974 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Heath (Oxford, PPE)

1974 Heath (Oxford, PPE) v. Wilson (Oxford, PPE)

1970 Heath (Oxford, PPE) v. Wilson (Oxford, PPE)

1966 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Heath (Oxford, PPE)

1964 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Douglas Home (Oxford, History)

1959 Macmillan (Oxford, Classics) v. Gaitskell (Oxford, PPE)

1955 Eden (Oxford, Oriental Languages) v. Attlee (Oxford, History)

1951 Churchill (Sandhurst) v. Attlee (Oxford, History)

1950 Attlee (Oxford, History) v. Churchill (Sandhurst)

1945 Attlee (Oxford, History) v. Churchill (Sandhurst)

Sandhurst is essentially equivalent to West Point. What is particularly notable about the UK is the number of Prime Ministers who were educated at Oxford: in the postwar period, all but two graduated from one of Oxford's various colleges. This probably has more to do with Oxford than the UK as a whole: in terms of prestige, academic success and establishment influence, Oxford and Cambridge are more or less identical, yet Cambridge clearly has a problem with producing Prime Ministers.

The US has a little more diversity in the academic institutions that educate its presidents, but that perhaps isn't surprising given it has about five times the population and about forty times the geographic area. A small number of institutions still dominate.

There is a little less diversity in the US in terms of the courses taken: all but three postwar US presidents have been law, politics, economics or history graduates. Of those who weren't, two were graduates of national armed forces academies, and one (Truman) had no degree. On the UK side there are graduates in chemistry, geography and languages, but law, politics, economics and history still dominate just as they do in the US (classics — which Johnson and Macmillan studied — is a combination of ancient history, languages (Greek and Latin), literature and philosophy).

I would look at background more than university. For instance, Thatcher's background has nothing in common with Cameron's or Johnson's.

Oxford is top of the league and attracts brilliant, ambitious people so it's not surprising that it is over-represented at the top as well, though it's interesting that it dominates so absolutely. It may partly be self-reinforcing because I suspect that ambitious young people who want a career in politics think "right, first step is Oxford PPE".

That is because no-one in the US could possibly conceive of a system in which college wasn't the thing that separates people. But if you are a Brit, you understand that almost all of the people you name went to the same high school and have the same background culturally...it is like all the Presidents you name not only going to the same colleges but also going to Philips-Exeter or Groton and having grown up in the North-East with parents who largely did the same jobs...that kind of thing is basically inconceivable to people from the US (the reason for this is a subtlety in how politicians are selected that, again, people unfamiliar with the detail of UK politics don't understand...to become an MP in some parts of the UK, particularly in the past, you only needed to win over at most 50 to 100 people...that is it, I am not talking about hundreds of years ago, I am talking about a decade ago...this changed slightly as both parties brought in changes to selection processes, but it is still hugely undemocratic in a way that would make no sense to anyone from the US).

Also, as I was careful to mention, the issue isn't necessarily that PMs went to the same university (although they did, your reasoning is backwards about Oxbridge...the UK has a large number of other very good universities that are better than Oxbridge in some subjects, the perception that it is a cut above is because all the PMs went there not because it actually is). It is cultural, and it is throughout govt...so in the US, you still see the same elite representation in the civil service...but it is nothing like the UK where there is close to 100% representation (the FCO is notorious for this, you need the right university, right high school, right primary education, and right parents...I know a guy who went to a £30k/year private school, parents went to Oxbridge, he got a first in IR from St. Andrew's a top university for IR, then got a distinction at KCL for IR again a top university globally for the subject, 4 high A grades at A-level...didn't even get an interview with the FCO). This is often very subtle because you have private schools teaching subjects like Classics...these subjects aren't really taught at all outside private schools, so if you go to a private school you can get into Oxbridge even if you are a relatively mediocre student if you apply to this subject (Theology is another, Land Economy is another...most students in the UK have no idea these routes into Oxbridge exist).

There is a semblance of truth to some of this, but I'm afraid anyone not especially familiar with the UK could come away from reading what you've written with a very distorted impression of reality.

I may be misreading some of your remarks — please forgive me if that's the case — but to respond to some of the points you make:

The list of UK Prime Ministers and opposition leaders, particularly in the earlier part of the twentieth century, does contain many wealthy 'establishment' figures, including some with aristocratic backgrounds, but the suggestion that almost all of them went to the same high school and have the same cultural background is a gross exaggeration.

Churchill was the son of a Lord and an American heiress, and was literally born in a palace. Thatcher was the daughter of a shopkeeper and a seamstress, and grew up in a home without a garden or a proper bathroom (the family's toilet was in a small outbuilding — not an uncommon situation for ordinary people at the time).

Attlee was the son of a wealthy lawyer, and he grew up in a house with a tennis court and several servants. Callaghan was the son of a coastguard sailor who died of a heart attack at a relatively young age, leaving his wife and children in poverty; as a teenager Callaghan was eligible to go to Oxford, but he couldn't afford to. He became Prime Minister regardless.

Cameron's father was a stockbroker and his mother was a magistrate. Major's father was a circus performer who made a living selling garden ornaments, and his mother was a dancer who worked in a local library; the family was nearly bankrupted in the 1950s and lived in a small flat in Brixton. Major never went to university, yet he still became Foreign Secretary (meaning he was in charge of the FCO — perhaps your friend's mistake was going to university at all, though I wouldn't worry about him; the future King and Queen are also both St. Andrew's graduates), and then Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister.

Eden's family were landed gentry. May's father was a village vicar; both of her parents died shortly after she graduated from university.

Wilson was the son of a chemist and a schoolteacher. Blair's father was given up for adoption as a baby and became part of the family of a shipyard worker and his wife; he grew up in a Glasgow tenement with an ambition to become a barrister, which he achieved. Blair's mother was the daughter of a butcher; she was born in the flat above the family shop.

One could go on; there is certainly privilege in the backgrounds of many British Prime Ministers, but there is also poverty and much else too.

There are popular private schools in the UK favoured by the wealthy, such as Eton, Harrow, Westminster etc., and many of the UK's political elites were educated at those schools, but it is not correct that almost all of them were. Many of the pupils at those schools do have wealthy parents, but not all of them are from the same background (I attended a British private school on a scholarship. Thatcher attended a local girls' grammar school on a scholarship). There are also expensive prep schools in the US favoured by the wealthy and privileged; the US and UK are not especially dissimilar in that regard. The main difference is that British schools tend to have longer histories, and admit a higher proportion of students on academic merit due to old bursaries and tax incentives.

I am struggling to understand your remarks about the number of people that must be won over to become an MP in parts of the UK, but what you are referring to sounds a lot like rotten boroughs, which were — contrary to what you state — abolished over a hundred years ago, by the 1832 Reform Act. If you are not referring to rotten boroughs, then what you are describing is just a marginal constituency where the vote is tightly contested between parties, and those exist in all democracies that use the first past the post system, including the US.

If anything, some would argue that the electoral situation is better in the UK because gerrymandering — which is acknowledged to be a widespread problem in the US — is for the most part impossible in Britain, since districting has largely been removed from political control and handed over to the independent Boundary Commissions. I take no stand on the wisdom or otherwise of the current approach to that issue in the UK, but similar solutions are widely advocated in the US in areas affected by gerrymandering. It is not uncommon for elections in the US to be decided on the basis of a small number of votes — the US and UK are, again, similar in that regard. So few people needed to be 'won over' to change the result of the 2000 presidential election in the US that the election was effectively decided by a court, and a closely divided court at that.

I agree with your observation that the electoral system in the UK can be 'hugely undemocratic', but that is a generic complaint about the first past the post system, which is also used to decide all major national elections in the US.

I can attest to the fact that Latin (if not full classics courses, which are typically the preserve of universities) is still commonly taught in British private schools, but I don't see much evidence that learning it will do a great deal for you career-wise anymore in the UK; Johnson is the first Prime Minister in sixty years to have a classics degree. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Johnson, Eton. Cameron, Eton. Douglas-Home, Eton. Macmillan, Eton. Eden, Eton. I am not sure what you are trying to prove to yourself. You are grasping as straws trying to prove that Blair, who went to fee-paying schools was actually a working-class man of the people...why? It is a very odd exercise (do you not understand that becoming a Minister is a different process to joining the FCO as a civil servant? If you just Google, 55% of diplomats went to a public school and 33% went to a public school and Oxbridge...the only job with a higher proportion in the UK are senior judges...btw, this is nearly double the rate for chief executives). Does Philips-Exeter and Groton have the same route into govt specifically (which is surprising given that money is more important in US politics, and the US has far wealthier people at the top end)? No. It is a very odd argument to take (and btw, not one made by anyone in these positions, the FCO has said publicly they need to change hiring and have been trying for years now, the Tory party came to this conclusion about two decades ago...you have picked the strangest hill to die on).

No, I am not referring to rotten boroughs. I am referring to how MPs are selected. That is why I said specifically that not many people understand this (because not many people actually know about their political parties work or know MPs). All you have to do is convince the local constituency party or some other small group of people in a safe seat (again, both Cameron and Blair have reformed this, although Labour's recent issues with selection should demonstrate that the system is still problematic). The US has primaries, it has caucuses...there are some safe Tory seats where the constituency party is literally 10-20 people, the selection process for Labour can be even more opaque (again, this is why the Tories decided to reform, they just kept selecting the clubbable old boys but they still have issues, particularly in Scotland, where the constituency party is very small/weak...one recent addition to the Scottish Parliament was the 21 year old son of a current MSP...meritocracy?).

Yes, the UK doesn't have gerrymandering...how did the Sixth Boundary Review work out? No controversy according to you? Ofc. It is nothing to do with a small number of votes deciding elections, that is just irrelevant, the outcome of an election is the outcome, it being close has nothing to do with anything.

FPTP isn't undemocratic. I would look at what the word democratic means. It is unrepresentative, it is most certainly not undemocratic. And there is nothing wrong with unrepresentative democracy (and that has nothing to do with the topic either).

It does your career good because you can get into Oxbridge with very little competition from students who go to schools that don't teach those subjects, and get a job in the Civil Service...or advertising, or banking, or PR, or any of the professional jobs that overindex towards people with a the right background. The point is that it has no value, and that things that have no value are rewarded. You can believe that there is no advantage (again, an odd take given the preponderance of evidence and the fact that most institutions have accepted this is happening)...all that would indicate to me is that you don't actually know anyone who works in any of the places I mention...that is it.

If you were a scholarship boy, don't try to waggishly quote Latin. People can see through you like a window, it impresses no-one.

> You are grasping as straws trying to prove that Blair, who went to fee-paying schools was actually a working-class man of the people...why?

I did not claim that Blair was a 'man of the people', though there are plenty of people who might credibly be described in those terms who have been involved in ruling the UK. You stated above that 'if you are a Brit, you understand that almost all of the people you name went to the same high school and have the same background'. I am British, and I know your statement is an exaggeration, which is why I noted examples of the backgrounds of some of the people referred to. I agree with you that it is relevant to a discussion of this topic that Tony Blair attended a fee-paying school, but I also think it is relevant — if background is important as you suggest — that the decision to send him to a fee-paying school was made by a mother who was the daughter of a butcher, and a father who was adopted into a working class family as a baby and grew up in a tenement in Glasgow. You can draw whatever conclusions you want from that, but to me, a reasonable consideration of that example, and others like the ones I noted, illustrate that it is not correct that 'almost all' of the British ruling class have the same cultural background.

> Does Philips-Exeter and Groton have the same route into govt specifically (which is surprising given that money is more important in US politics, and the US has far wealthier people at the top end)? No.

I'm no expert on American prep schools, but a quick look at the alumni of the ones you mention reveals two presidents, three secretaries of state, four treasury secretaries, dozens of governors, the founder of the Republican Party, the first Director of the CIA, the first Director of National Intelligence, the founder of Facebook, and too many senators, members of congress, federal judges and ambassadors etc. to list. It is curious to me that you don't believe this indicates that attending these schools provides a route into government, whereas a similar list of the alumni of a British school like Eton does. In looking up Groton alumni I found an observation about the school from one of them, who was a friend of Franklin Roosevelt's (another Groton alumnus). He wrote 'Ninety-five percent of the boys came from what they considered the aristocracy of America [...] Among them was a goodly slice of the wealth of the nation.' It seems to me that Eton and Groton are not dissimilar in that regard.

> All you have to do is convince the local constituency party or some other small group of people in a safe seat (again, both Cameron and Blair have reformed this, although Labour's recent issues with selection should demonstrate that the system is still problematic).

This is a description of the process required to be selected as a candidate for a particular party. In order to become an MP the candidate must then win an election that returns them as the most popular candidate. It may be disappointing that voters in safe seats reliably opt for the candidates of a particular party, but that does not necessarily make their election 'hugely undemocratic'. If the people in these constituencies objected to the candidate of the party that traditionally wins there, they could democratically elect someone else instead.

> It is nothing to do with a small number of votes deciding elections, that is just irrelevant, the outcome of an election is the outcome, it being close has nothing to do with anything.

It would be relevant if that is what you had meant when you wrote that becoming an MP in the UK only requires winning over a small number of people. You have clarified that what you actually meant is that being selected as a candidate for a particular party in parliamentary elections might only involve winning over a small number of people in a local constituency party. Those candidates must then secure the votes of a much larger number of people in an election if they are to become MPs. You neglected to mention that latter fact, presumably because you felt that elections in safe seats are somehow undemocratic because the local population reliably elects candidates from a particular party.

> FPTP isn't undemocratic. I would look at what the word democratic means. It is unrepresentative, it is most certainly not undemocratic.

In the UK, the first past the past system nearly always produces a result in which a substantial majority of voters are not represented by the MP they voted for. British governments are therefore typically controlled by a party that has been rejected by a majority of voters. The governing party in the UK hasn't won a majority of the votes in a general election since the 1930s. I would argue that the UK is a democracy in some sense of the word in spite of this, but the first past the post system is not guaranteed to produce democratic results, and in Britain it usually doesn't.

> If you were a scholarship boy, don't try to waggishly quote Latin. People can see through you like a window, it impresses no-one.

I think we're in agreement here. If quoting Latin impresses no-one, it's unclear to me why you think it is important that some old-fashioned schools briefly force their pupils to study it. It can be studied at Oxford and Cambridge and many other universities, but classics has been a niche subject for a long time, and it doesn't confer any particular career advantage over more popular subjects like economics and history that are taught at all schools. I doubt it is any easier to obtain a degree in classics from a prestigious university due to a lack of competition from applicants who were not educated at private schools than it is to obtain a degree in any other niche subject that is more widely taught. It is true that there is less competition for places to study classics than many subjects due to a lack of interest, but that is also true of courses in language and religion — subjects which are very widely taught outside private schools. [1]

Classics was already an outdated choice of university subject by the time Johnson was studying it in the eighties, which perhaps explains why prior to the 2019 election no Prime Minister or opposition leader with a classics degree had contested a general election for six decades.

[1] https://www.admissionreport.com/university-of-oxford

>Customers too risk-averse

In EU gambling and casinos are legal almost everywhere. There's no need to go to Vegas or make high risk investments.

> class boundaries still endemic (it is amazing the US tech companies went into this, Google/Facebook/etc. seem to have hired the Notting Hill set as soon as they came to London)

In the UK, the working class used to be propelled upwards by grammar schools, [1] which selected children based on academic ability. Of course, there are problems around not wanting children who didn't get into grammar schools to be written-off, but I can't ignore their effectiveness in this regard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school

Yes, despite what I said, I don't think comps have been the answer. Bullying is rife, the stats on sexual abuse of girls in UK schools is unbelievable (one of the highest in the world, bullying is only as high in Europe in Finland another comp education system), it isn't possible to succeed in a comp because you are stuck with a load of people who don't want to be there.

The playing field can never be level. Where I am the grammar schools are as good as the private schools, but they are only in places where property prices are prohibitively high (ofc)...but they are the only effective way out (Sajid Javid went to a comp, it is possible but it is very rare and requires support from family that isn't available in most of the UK). The way to move forward is to aggressively stream students (not necessarily by ability, I went to a school with a guy who was thick as pig shit but went into St. Andrews because he worked hard, took his A-levels three times iirc), improve teaching, and offer more opportunities in poor areas (maybe even through positive discrimination, i.e. offer kids from poor areas a chance in a decent school...the UK used to have state-funded places in private schools).

You are right though, it isn't only cultural. Part of the reason why this group is so far ahead is their education system is far better.

slower sales cycles, more risk-averse.

In fairness, Cloudflare's public perception as a disruptor already did Cloudflare's marketing for it in 2017 onward when y'all opened your London office; Eigen doesn't seem to have that advantage.

I can imagine the sales landscape being a bit better with those tailwinds.

The 2017 date you mention is not correct.

I was Cloudflare's first employee in London in 2011. Cloudflare went all in on London shortly thereafter and at one point 50% of Cloudflare engineering was in London and 50% in San Francisco. We had sales very early on in London covering EMEA. At the current time the London office is "full stack": engineering, operations, support, sales, legal, HR, finance, ...

Thanks; I googled it and the press was heaviest in April 2017 for a new London office, so this is a helpful correction for me. Though deeper inspection found 2013 (https://www.facebook.com/Cloudflare/posts/10151742549255432), so I probably should've just googled harder.

It also changes the equation substantially since the rest of my assumptions were based on 2017, though I wonder how much the environment also changed between 2011 and 2021, brexit aside?

Cloudflare's London office remains large and important. We've built up Lisbon as an alternative location in part to give folks a choice between London and a continental European city and in part because we are hiring so fast it's good to hire in multiple places.

Why not just open to remote hiring across Europe then, rather than be location-dependent?

They're doing that as well https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/

Just opening for “work from anywhere” has right to work, legal and tax implications for the employee and company. So we’ve taken an approach where people can work where we have a legal entity.

We also do believe that time in the office is valuable and prefer employees be “near” the office so they can work together with other in the office as needed.

But this isn’t set in stone. Maybe totally remote would be great for us, we’ll experiment and see.

> prioritised technological purity over commercial success; it was almost fatal for us.

A leadership failure, exactly. I thought I understood how business worked until I joined a startup. It was eye-opening hearing how Sales people did their jobs and the pressures they were under. Personally, I'd fail at being a Salesperson, it's a special talent. If a business allows its tech team to dictate a "better late than never" attitude then it's quite likely doomed.

I was going to cite the same section, but what the author fails to notice or mention is a massive amount of inflation circles the planet right now that has not been seen since the 70's, which is perhaps before his time, but he may have noticed being based in London the BBC's Faisal Islam has already dropped it into a report that the Bank of England is seeing 5% interest rates in 2022 with inflation remaining on its current trajectory! When money becomes tight due to things like inflation, selling becomes harder because people want quality because it adds value and this "London-based employees who prioritised technological purity over commercial success" is to put it another way, quality, which will hurt the competition. When money is cheap due to low interest rates, people throw it around like confetti, when money becomes expensive, we will see who is not wearing a swimming costume when the tide goes out. Helicopter Ben is at it again. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-59358070

"Helicopter Ben"

I think you mean Papa Jerome "Money Printer goes BRRRRR..." Powell.

At least Bernake had a cap on the balance sheet...

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).

>I studied somewhere that was doing AI research back in the 60s

Edinburgh?

Yes. Still a great uni but known more for the people who studied and went elsewhere than the people who stayed (in AI).

> 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).

Barclays, Lloyds, Rothschild, NatWest Markets (+HSBC which maybe isn't "home grown").

Barclays is largely US after the LEH acquisition, and is run terribly (and largely by Americans). Lloyds isn't an investment bank. Rothschild is a mid-market (and is actually a combination of British and French). Natwest Markets is part of RBS now, and RBS investment banking was shut down after the govt acquired most of the company in 2008.

I recently had a massive American devops company's sales team on my case trying to sell me their product. It was obnoxious and put me off dealing with them entirely. When I insisted I was the wrong person they wanted me to hook them up with my CTO and tried to bribe me with Amazon vouchers.

I'll take the British way over that any day of the week.

Yeah, the whole blog post came across as anecdata-driven decision-making and "I want to be in NYC because London has driven me away" rather than the "we have determined that this company's HQ requires things only available in X". That thing being money, apparently. The circumstances he outlines are too general to be reasonable, and it makes for a bullish article but not a robust argument. Good luck to him and the company, but this smacks of running away from a problem only to discover that your baggage came with you.

I run a US-based start-up with a distributed team, but I personally live in London. I'd say a lot of this is true. I don't personally know how Brexit has or hasn't affected talent availability yet, but everything else lines up with my experience. US investors throw money around and European investors are much more traditional.

But I'd like to offer a different perspective on this quote from the article:

> I am not alone in believing Europe has a problem with founders and investors, who lack ambition in comparison to the best of Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. While I have been blessed with my European investors, who are very much the exception to this rule and share my ambition, I have seen this lack of boldness during my various fundraising processes with many other investors.

The US VC market right now is very "frothy", as the VCs say. It's so frothy, you might as well say the froth has churned into butter. The article says that European investors lack "boldness", but one might instead say that US investors are lacking outlets for their ample capital and will throw money at nearly anything right now. I guess it depends on your point of view.

But the truth remains - it's a whole lot easier to raise money in the US right now.

How do you manage a company from across the Atlantic? What does your tax situation look like? Do you personally enjoy living in London or are you there in spite of your interests?

1. One day at a time. But in all seriousness, a good co-founder and team. Also, we started the company during COVID which I think made the VCs less worried a about a full remote situation.

2. US citizen but UK tax resident. So two income tax returns. It's a pain, but thankfully the tax treaty means one offsets the other and it works out in the end.

3. Personally want to live in London

Feel your pain. Canadian citizen who previously founded startup in London and had to pay double taxes. Enjoyed the life in London though. Would love to go back some day.

Is there anything that specifically prompted you to live in London in place of other cities like Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, or areas elsewhere in the US and the rest of North America? Given what I've read on tax rates, incomes, and QoL (especially after Brexit) it doesn't seem economically advantageous to live there as a tax resident, especially with FATCA hanging over your head.

The English language is probably a big draw.

I doubt Brexit's effect on QOL can yet be separated from Covid.

Different people like different places?

London is a beautiful city with high QoL if you live in a nice part. Much better transit and walk-ability than anywhere in the US except Manhattan. Same language and similar culture for kids in school. Very high quality schools if you live in a good area. Closer timezone to the US than Asia. The government systems are much easier to navigate for an English-speaking American than somewhere like France. Universal healthcare and much lower obvious social issues (i.e. homelessness) than California. Easy and cheap to travel around Europe (Paris is a day trip). Lots of people from all over the world in London. Beautiful cycling in the countryside. Lots of arts and culture in my own language. Great comedy scene and music scene. Endless history to explore.

Other people prefer different places. Lots of places are great. London is a great fit for us.

FACTA has zero impact on my life. Maybe it annoys my bank, but I'm sure they have long figured out how to deal with it. I spend 5 minutes a year sending my accountant a list of checking accounts to report as part of my taxes.

Brexit hasn't really affected me in any way personally, but it might be a bigger factor for others.

I can't really speak for the tax, but QoL is pretty good in London. Compared to the other cities I've lived in (>9mo in Glasgow, Portsmouth, Manchester, Sheffield, Southampton, Austin, Berlin, and Hamburg), the city has everything. It's more expensive than all those other cities, except maybe Berlin, but compared to similarly sized places it's not bad. Factoring size and location, the equivalent of my 1 bed flat in Clapham would be about 120% more in NYC.

London has one of the highest percentages of green space of any large city (33%), excellent public transport, some of the best music and theatre in the world, options in all British sports supplemented by regular visits from American leagues, excellent (though not leading) restaurants and speciality food markets, and more. You can't discount the English language either.

Regarding Brexit, at the moment it's kind of hard to say because COVID (and the ongoing collapse of the government) has muddled its economic impact so much.

> excellent (though not leading) restaurants

The variety is leading though. You’ll have a hard time finding such a variety of high-end restaurants anywhere else.

If you have money, it's really hard to beat QoL in London. Brexit mostly affects the poor.

Sure, if it bothers you to spend ~8k USD/mo on rent, London might not be for you.

> But the truth remains - it's a whole lot easier to raise money in the US right now.

In the 20 or so years I've been involved in startups it's always been easier to raise money in the US.

> The US VC market right now is very "frothy", as the VCs say. It's so frothy, you might as well say the froth has churned into butter. The article says that European investors lack "boldness", but one might instead say that US investors are lacking outlets for their ample capital and will throw money at nearly anything right now. I guess it depends on your point of view.

I wonder how many US investors are actually (partially) Europeans.

It's really not that hard to meet many Europeans in the valley who decided to move there to innovate and build without the restrictive environment of their homelands. I wonder how many Europeans investors are diverting parts of their funds to more ambitious and risky investments here in the US.

My 2c theory for the difference in investor outlook is "old money" vs "new money". Old money is more risk averse - avoiding capital loss is more important than making the biggest gains. It's probably not possible to preserve a fortune for hundreds or thousands of years without this kind of attitude.

There are a LOT of really old money families in Europe (and they are a big part of the ruling class) and I believe this colours the entire investment outlook.

In China the money is even newer than the US (practically no billionaires by inheritance for fairly obvious reasons), so would expect them to be even more aggressive and this seems to play out.

One place I see the cracks in this idea are former Soviet states. It seems like their billionaires should be more willing to back moonshot investments than they actually are. Perhaps it is because many of their billionaires are politically connected oligarchs and don't back growth plays in the same way (more about gaining and keeping control of existing pie).

An alternative would be that it's cultural in some more complex way and proportion of inherited wealth is either a factor or actually a consequence of other things going on.

I work for a company head-quartered in one continent, listed on another and I work in a third (the UK) - and sales are based all over.

Not for one moment saying there aren't local issues/idiosyncrasies - but I'm unsure how moving your company solves them, and article seems to overlook all manner of problems:

Aren't you going to lose staff when you move?

Is everybody going to have to get up really early to talk to Europe?

Won't new employees cost more in NA?

i.e. Why not just hire a US based sales rep to sell to your US customers, in the style that works there? (and a native speaking, convervative, tech-enabled one for Germany etc)

Or just register yourself at a Missouri PO, list in the US, seek US investors etc?

Well precisely

Moving to NYC/silicon valley is going to mean fishing in a very over fished pool. There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour.

Even if you don't loose staff, operating an engineering team over large distances is a challenge unless you know what your doing.

Given that he's blaming the engineers for concentrating on "technical purity" when I assume he was in charge, I suspect he's not really of the right mindset to be responsive enough to make the changes needed.

Still, best of luck. I look forward to the updates on progress.

Yes, there was a subtext of:

1) I'd like my company to be doing better ("what an innovative thought")

and

2) It isn't, because the engineers are trying to make the product better and sales can't shift it (but these two things definitely aren't connected and due to me not being in NYC which will magically solve these issues)

I don't know about his own mindset, but my first thought when he talked about attitudes towards sales is well of course you're hearing negative attitudes towards sales if you're in a company full of engineers with PhDs, nothing to do with Britishness

I mean, HN isn't British, and it's skewed towards people working for high growth companies in California, and yet because it's also skewed towards people whose mindset is engineering subthreads on sales are full of people with a negative view of salespeople, sales as a profession, sales as an organisational priority, products sold by enterprise salespeople etc.

> There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour.

Yeah, I moved from London back to NYC after Brexit and literally got a 100% raise. And London is well above the European average.

Post-covid (and with remote still the norm in many companies) the global market for high-talent employees has really leveled the playing field regarding compensation and packages. Where there might have been a 25-50% difference in a FAANG package between the bay area or NYC and London a few years ago it seems to be closer to 5-10% now if you know how to play the game. Junior people might be getting a bigger haircut on the difference, but for senior engineers and senior management in engineering/devops/sre it is a good time to be in the market over on this side of the pond.

Facebook recruiting in London feel about as desperate to fill their pipeline as Google did ten years ago these days.

London has many great qualities, but tech hiring here is also really challenging.

> Facebook recruiting in London feel about as desperate to fill their pipeline as Google did ten years ago these days.

I'd say it's more size than desperation. Yeah, recruiting in London probably gives you lower bang for the buck than tapping other labor markets. But once you reach a certain size, you're going to be recruiting in basically every market, since good people are a small proportion of the population and you have a huge need for good people.

For example, Google has had great success in hiring Serbian developers. They also hire developers in Brazil, Poland, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, France, etc - 40 different countries. To exclude England would be kinda weird. Facebook being a few years behind Google makes sense, and they'll end up in a similar position, basically hiring everywhere.

My impression of desperation from Facebook is admittedly anecdotal, but it's based on just how aggressive their recruiters currently are about repeatedly contacting people who have previously turned them down vs. the others. It's not really that they're that different from e.g. Google, more as an illustration of how tough the London market conditions can be even with deeper pockets than most startups.

Completely agree.

The grass is always greener, and moving to NYC will not come without challenges. However, post-Brexit UK is problematic on the skilled worker front for startups. Before, many European tech workers converged to London to work in startups (or ended up there). This seems to be happening much less now due to multiple reasons [0]. Overall, I think Brexit removed one of the main benefits of being based in the UK: being in that special EU English-speaking country that moves faster and better than the rest of the EU, yet, is part of it and greatly benefits from this setup. Now, you're left with Ireland, a beautiful country but probably hard to attract talents at scale in Dublin if you're not a big tech.

[0] purely subjective based on personal history. I'm currently working remote for a London-based startup and have the most challenging time hiring. It was easier pre-Brexit. I moved back to my home country in 2020, fearing the covid restriction x Brexit restrictions combo in the mid-term. The result of my (partly Brexit-induced) move is that my next gig will probably not be UK-based. I know I'm not alone in that situation, and I know we don't get CVs anymore from people ready to jump on the next plane to Gatwick to start a job in London. I wonder how many years we'll need to see this trend confirmed and who will be the real winners. Paris? Amsterdam? Berlin? Barcelona? All of them, hopefully!

Amsterdam will take the cream of the US based tech companies, Ireland will continue to be the ops centre for EMEA and Spain will continue to get most of the contractors.

Why do you think this, genuinely curious?

Well with Ireland and Spain, there's no change.

I think Amsterdam will get much of the London-based business because of their (relatively) lax labour laws (closer to UK) and the facility of the natives with English (important for relocating execs and their family).

There is a massive housing shortage in the Netherlands, isn't there? I agree on your other point but might be logistically complex and expensive v.s. Berlin for instance.

It won't be Germany, because of the labour laws, unfortunately.

Couldn't the UK just solve this problem by making it super easy for those people to get work visas?

Your best tech talent coming from Bucharest to London has always preferred to go to San Francisco if they could, but the EU made it so much easier to come to London. There's nothing about not being in the EU that prevents the UK from offering a similar deal.

What am I missing?

> What am I missing?

Perhaps the fact that Brexit was at least partially driven by xenophobia, and no politician will gain popularity by announcing "We are making it super easy for foreigners to come work here!" (and yes, even highly skilled ones).

Yes, I think the UK will end up carving exceptions everywhere they can to keep Brexit alive from a political standpoint, but dead from a practical sense. Right now, the fear of the unknown is what's most likely pushing people not to move to the UK anymore. In five years from now the situation should be clearer I'd say. I personally hope they'll open things up again but we'll see!

Clearly America is the place to be if you want to make billions in tech. The bigger question is why every single company needs to target billions of dollars. You can still build a very successful company in London and get quite wealthy, you just might not get your own private space program.

Meanwhile in London your workers will have free healthcare, their kids will have free higher education, etc.

He's totally right about Brexit though. The talent pool in London is never going to be the same.

Higher education in England is definitely not free. I imagine most well-funded startup employees have good healthcare plans in the US too.

It's relatively low cost, though. Tuition maxes at <£10k/y, usually financed with a reasonable repayment rate (5% earnings over ~£25k, I can't remember for sure), and the option to pay off early if you're willing.

Most employees in well-funded organisations in the UK will have private healthcare too. My plan costs me ~£14pm, which is actually tax rather than a premium, with no deductible/copay/excesses.

Your numbers are not quite correct, which changes the dynamic of the argument.

> Tuition maxes at <£10k/y

For the majority of courses offered at the BSc level they are more or less fixed accross the board. For example, it doesnt matter from the cost perspective if you do BSc CS at Kings uni in London, Manchester uni or Aston university, since the fee is exactly the same £9250. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/computer-s... https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/202... https://www.aston.ac.uk/study/courses/computer-science-bsc/s...

Additionally, by saying "Tuition maxes at <£10k/y" you could imply to some that fees are in a certain range below 10k, where in fact they are generally speaking very close to £10k.

> Most employees in well-funded organisations in the UK will have private healthcare too

While this might create debate I think it's worth pointing out that there is a BIG difference between UK and US private healthcare.

> Meanwhile in London your workers will have free healthcare, their kids will have free higher education, etc.

Oh it's free for engineers? Who pays for it? The Queen pays for it?

Edit: it was early when I wrote this. I said free higher education, which is wrong. I meant cheap.

Sounds like the author is upset that Brexit has closed the valve on the pipeline of cheap labour from EU workers. There's no shortage of talent in London trust me, it's just that you're going to have to start paying more than a pittance to get it. Brexit so far has been a positive thing for tech workers' salaries.

Yes, I voted remain but I suspect the businesses yelling that they can't hire really mean they can't hire for what they were accustomed to paying before Brexit. It's particularly prevalent in lower paid areas like transport, coffee shops, and agriculture. If the success of your business depended on low wages Brits won't accept, you're likely to be in trouble.

The issue isn't pay itself but companies not knowing how to operate with higher wages (i.e. how to economise on labour usage) and not knowing how to deal with tight labour markets.

In agriculture, you have farmers complaining about no labour whilst they are failing to use machines that could replace the labour (and, unf, agriculture in the UK has turned into one massive IHT avoidance scheme...so most of the operators are clueless). In retail, you still have companies doing multi-day interviews with logical reasoning tests, team-working tests, problem solving exercises for shelf stacking positions (which, btw, they are getting people to do for free with no training on welfare-to-work programs).

I am not sure if I agree with the original post. Is it completely off though? No. Not at all.

"cheap EU labour" tends to apply more to fruit pickers than AI PhDs I suspect

Nope. Eastern European brilliant minds would flock to London and get paid far lower salaries than they were worth. Ukranians, Lithuanians. The legacy of communist math is alive and well - they were generally better than any western european talent you could get and cheaper. They would always get the top jobs, but the regular influx of new blood meant salaries were stuck.

But Brexit hasn't really changed that - most of Eastern Europeans you're describing aren't EU citizens and needed work visas even before Brexit.

Baltic countries. Romania, Bulgaria. There was a lot of talent available from the old Iron Curtain. The only example I can think of were Ukrainians and Bielorussians and even then I met a few people from Belarus.

Tech salaries in continental Europe are significantly lower than in the US or UK. Even the most highly developed economies like Germany and Denmark often provide 50% of what you might make in CA or NY for a similar role.

But not 50% of what you might make in London and that's what this is about.

And the EUR goes a lot farther in say Berlin than the GBP goes in London these days (see rent, eating out prices etc)

> Tech salaries in continental Europe are significantly lower than in the US or UK.

With the exception of Switzerland.

Tech workers salaries are going up everywhere, though, and it's happening in other industries too. It can't be because of Brexit that a bartender in NYC is getting paid more, but they are.

Found it amusing after moving to the bay area that a job ad on the side of a local Chinese restaurant was offering more for a "floor supervisor" than a professorship at Oxford Uni that I had just seen.

The labor pool isn't any cheaper in NYC. Salaries are significantly higher than London.

He's in for a harsh reality.

Not 'significantly' higher, no. In the remote-first covid world you are going to be paying at least Austin/Seattle rates for talent in London and closer to NYC comp packages. It has been a very, very good 12-18 months for tech talent in London if you have the right CV.

I'm not doubting it's been a good couple of years for folks in London, but I'm sitting on some pretty good salary data and the density of high compensation packages for both new grads and senior hires is still an order of magnitude bigger in SF, Seattle and NYC (coming in third).

Most people are really underpaid and would be shocked to learn what is available. If you went to the right schools with the right internships you shouldn't ask for anything less than $225k to start off with and on the more experienced side, I know a few dozen engineers in NY with total comp packages at or above $450k.

I worked in Finance before I worked in Software and the situation was much the same -- top talent came from London for higher salaries.

Not particularly convinced about the Brexit angle or the comments on sales - for example, you can bet that The City has some highly aggressive salesmen/women given its status. But from my perspective Europe suffers from a problem of culture - there is seriously old money here and, I'd assert, a related, outdated zero-sum/dog in the manger mentality. Anything like FAANG, Tesla, SpaceX etc that seriously threatens to disrupt the status quo is either stillborn, strangled at birth or shortly thereafter as this guild's dead hand does its work.

interesting perspective i have not heard before but make sense as a narrative. wonder what data is behind that - seriously old elites shutting down innovation.

It's pretty common in Europe for people to get a socially-funded education then go off to the USA. It's called brain drain and has been happening for a while, not sure why this guy needs to write an article pretending that's not what's happening here.

You don't really have a choice do you? Is he supposed to refuse to go to college for free/low cost because he pays taxes to be able to do that?

I also see a lot of brain drain in Brazil. Most are from public colleges, and they go mostly to Europe.

I thought this was because lots of Brazilians are eligible for Portuguese passports

Many come straight to Germany or other more rich EU countries.

If you've got a European passport then you can go anywhere in the EU.

A portuguese passport would allow just that. So would an Italian passport (many South Americans, especially from Brazil and Argentina would qualify).

My point is that as a Brazilian, you don’t need a Portuguese passport before you go to a rich EU country. It’s trivial to get a German working visa in tech.

It's not too trivial to go from an European country to the US. An H1-B is a hassle, as are the other types of visa available.

Can't imagine what is the process of "taking your startup" (with you) entails.

Moving to the US from Europe isn't that easy. I only made the move because my wife is a postdoc over here, but with things like H1-B freezes and covid-19 it can be very difficult to do.

I've worked with a lot of Europeans and overwhelmingly they are not on H-1B visas.

Green cards, L-1, O-1 and spouse visas are the way to go.

Getting an O-1 visa in the software space is a lot easier than you think, especially with the way the software industry works in Europe (it's a much smaller pool with a higher average level of education and way more public speaking & publishing opportunities) in general the requirements are easier than if I were to have to try for it.

This is a non sequitur. There is no way to directly get a green card. That is a final outcome after proceeding through one of the few remaining immigration visa options.

Also O-1 is decidedly not easy. Look at Peter Roberts frequent legal posts here for comments about it.

I'm on a J2 and think I can progress onto another one if I decide to stay in a couple years (via a work sponsorship). Saying this, Green Cards are obviously crazy difficult to get without already living in the US for years and O-1 visas are also really difficult to get. L-1's work if you're at a large company but not if you're working for startups.

I mean it's O-1 how easy can it be. Most likely requirements are publishing papers or making some insane startup.

One Javascript developer famously got one just from speaking engagements and writing a semi-popular framework.

Opens vscode to write left-pad2...

There has to be more to it than that, what's their name?

Summary: He received free money from EU. Now that he could not get enough from UK government, he is leaving.

And not to the EU, but the US.

This is misleading. Their staff having EU-funded PhDs is very different from receiving free money from the EU.

Technically correct, though he is directly benefiting from EU funding. Or was.

In the EU industry PhDs are fairly common. In this case, the PhD student does R&D work for a company, and gets paid through an EU PhD grant.

For some companies, it's an indirect way to get funding, because it provides for cheaper highly skilled labour.

(Anecdote incoming) For example, many years ago at the end of my industry internship, the company offered to continue the project as a PhD, pursuant grant funding. When I declined, they offered a well paid full-time job to do the same.

Literally each part of this sentence is false

He’s almost certainly just re-hashing open source AI anyways.

I’m not sure I get it. This just sounds like someone wanting to move to NY and coming up with a rational for it.

The company still seems to be selling and recruiting in London.

A ‘poor sales culture’ in London won’t effect a companies ability to hire good sales people and get sales unless they’re a bad company to work for.

Brexit will have an impact on recruitment but there is no problem (at least there wasn’t a few years ago) getting work permits for people with AI related phds to work in a company serving financial and legal companies in the city in the UK.

As an European, I am quite happy with a less aggressive sales tactic - it makes companies focus on quality over whoever gets the loudest sales guy.

This article basically explains what most of us already know. American tech firms in general are much more concerned with raw profit than with the actual quality and purpose of the enterprise. It’s definitely a different culture.

This is not true. The reason is that EU is simply left behind and there is no willingness whatsoever to change.

I dont understand, does he want the technical staff to sell because he doesnt have a sales team or is it that the staff were not creating a commercial project? If thats was the case then why didnt he or other management step in and do something about it? If Brexit was a problem why didnt they just relocate to Berlin, Paris or Stockholm?

Or is this all to do with the much higher ratings tech companies receive in the US?

> Almost my entire R&D team who received PhDs from British universities had them funded by the European Union

Well, there you go.

Was the UK not a net contributor to the EU budget? And therefore, why cannot the UK fund PhDs more effectively than the EU? I would've thought being less removed from the universities and research groups would make funding more effective.

That's the Brexiters logic, but it turns out UK was not only contributing to the EU but also trading. Now it doesn't need to contribute anymore but it also lost exports, access to talent and so on.

Fine, but my point is there is no reason for Brexit to be a net negative when it comes to the funding of PhDs - if anything, it offers an opportunity to be more effective at funding.

Same when it comes to the specific issue of access to talent - nothing in principle stopping the UK from making it extremely easy for talent to come to the UK.

Anything remotely related to the EU is toxic as far as the current government is concerned. This includes immigration which they successfully tied to the EU in voters minds.

The point is that there was both scales of economy due to the Erasmus program and a lot of pan European research grants..

Being able to pull from a Europe wide talant pool was a huge benefit to the UK and her universities.

So there was massive, irreplaceable benefits just for universities lost due to the Brexit project.

Along with that Brexit has cost the UK a ton of money.. this net contributer stuff was literal propaganda.

The UK is worse off now, with less funding to go around.

> Along with that Brexit has cost the UK a ton of money.. this net contributer stuff was literal propaganda.

The fact that the UK was a net contributor to the EU is uncontroversial [1]. Please cite sources if you're making a drastic claim otherwise.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48256318

I didn't read what roomey said as claiming the UK wasn't technically a net contributor. Just that it this fact is just a sliver of the entire picture, but was used heavily in pro-Brexit propaganda.

Indeed, the UK can now spend what they net contributed to the EU before. But I think it's doubtful that this makes up for everything else the UK lost in the process that isn't just some monetary number (in some government budget).

Things like the already mentioned access to the European research and university space - which hugely profited the UK because they used to be really good at "brain draining" the rest of the EU. Access to the European markets is now harder as well, translating directly to (at least in the short term) lost revenue and profit for UK companies, and lost tax revenue for the government, as well as some additional supply chain problems on top of the supply chain problems everybody else faces already.

The UK says their net contribution was "an average net contribution of £7.7 billion between 2014 and 2018". Of course this is only partially true. They got a lot more money back indirectly because they directly profited from some of the work various EU agencies did (and now they have to pay people to do the same work a lot of times). Some of these agencies were based in the UK, paid from the EU budget with individual employees paying taxes to the UK government. A lot of the university stuff (funding PhDs, Erasmus) is also not covered by their estimates (tho general research grants were). They lost access to EU funded research programs (like CERN or ITER), too, and now have to foot the bill to participate in those themselves, if they want and are allowed to still participate (e.g. ITER is not EU, and the UK will still participate, but where the EU previously paid a lot of the UK scientists and engineers out of their funds, now the UK government will have to pay them directly).

So I think their actual net contribution was more like 4-6 billion, and that doesn't still factor in lost opportunity costs due to now limited access to the European economic and labor markets, and the collective bargaining powers of the EU in things like trade deals, etc.

Given all that, I'd argue that there is ample reason to theorize Brexit was monetarily a net negative for the UK. It's hard to say yet, because the long and slow Brexit process took ages, everybody is still adopting, and it's therefore too early to have any reliable mid to long term numbers. And of course, the impact of COVID-19 makes it even harder to analyze just the Brexit outcomes.

So, back to topic, I would agree that at least the Brexit supporters who focused mainly on the net contributor thing (not all Brexit supporters operated that way) used it as propaganda - like the infamous red NHS bus - and not in a sound argument for their cause. They willfully ignored all the other things that would or could happen as a result of a Brexit.

Yes thank you. You explained much better than I did what I meant.

> Fine, but my point is there is no reason for Brexit to be a net negative when it comes to the funding of PhDs - if anything, it offers an opportunity to be more effective at funding.

This works only if you assume that the amount of money stayed the same. For now, there has been a flux of capital and business moving over to the continent. Trade decreased as well. This can change in the long run, depending on the policy of the Bank of England, but for now Brexit is a net loss in British government funding. Besides the fact that the money that was supposed to be saved was also supposed to be spent simultaneously on the NHS, infrastructure, and developing the “northern powerhouse” (of cards, unfortunately, as the North of England gets shafted again).

You are missing two parts: 1) _during_ the whole “transition” period nobody knew anything how this would pan out. That means nobody* would write grant proposals for ERC funding for the future. Which is the drop in received funding that the UK institutions start seeing now 2) highly trained people do have a choice in moving. And the UK very openly communicating: we don’t want those stupid foreigners made a number of people thinking twice of going there. They are still some of the most famous universities which reduces this effect, but still it was the default choice for anyone and isn’t anymore.

So you get an atrophied bureaucracy for distributing research money and combine it with a reduction in applicants and you get fewer graduate students about 2-5 years after you switch.

*significantly fewer people

> And therefore, why cannot the UK fund PhDs more effectively than the EU?

I always assumed the whole raison d'etre of Brexit was that Conservatives wanted to avoid the obligation of paying into funds like this. Sounds lovely in theory but leaves less government money available to companies with social/professional connections to the cabinet.

Funny to see the red wallers finally realizing that too now.

I still think the whole divide over Brexit was less about the principle of it, but more about whether you are more aligned with the current EU political leanings or with those of the current UK ones (reflected in its Tory leadership).

If you are more aligned with the EU political leanings, you would want them to be able to force the UK government to do what you believe is the right thing. If you are more aligned with the tories, you want them to be free to do their thing without being told what to do by the EU. And that seems to correlate highly with whether you think Brexit was a good or a bad idea.

An interesting thought experiment I like to ask people to do is whether they would change their views on Brexit if the political leanings of the EU and the UK were flipped. I.e. the EU views were more like ones they disagree with (e.g. more right-wing perhaps), and the political leanings of the UK were more like what they agree with. For example, if the UK wanted to have more funding for science, but the EU frowned upon that regarding it as unfair competition, or something along those lines.

I'm doubtful about that. For one thing large amounts of left wing areas voted for Brexit including Wales as a whole. Also the Tory leadership at the time was pro-remain whereas the Labour leadership was lukewarm at best.

Yes, dividing the brexit issue as a left/right issue is very reductive. Both Labour and Tories were very much divided in half with pretty obvious internal conflicts.

Regardless of the left/right false dichotomy, if either the EU, national governments thereof, or the UK were to start looking after their electorates' interests rather than doing the bidding of faceless globalist puppet-masters, it would be a start.

That's the thing, they're not faceless to the establishment. They are their friend and donors.

> I still think the whole divide over Brexit was less about the principle of it, but more about whether you are more aligned with the current EU political leanings or with those of the current UK ones (reflected in its Tory leadership).

Not necessarily. As a socialist, I really don’t align with the “current EU political leanings”. I also realise that the EU is still useful for several things, and that leaving it would be at best counter-productive.

Replace “the EU” with your country. You can be in disagreement with your current government without wanting to secede. That’s the same with the EU, really: for all its warts and idiosyncrasies, we are better united than divided.

> For example, if the UK wanted to have more funding for science, but the EU frowned upon that regarding it as unfair competition, or something along those lines.

The UK wasn't practically constrained by EU rules on state aid or industrial policy. Most other EU countries had substantially higher levels of state aid. Rather it was the policy of successive British governments to leave it to the market. The EU was a useful scapegoat for deflecting blame.

The current Prime Minister even promised to stay in the single market while campaigning for Brexit, professing himself a 'Fan'. The single market was after all in large part the creation of Margaret Thatcher. Promising a hard Brexit was the way to win the Tory leadership contest.

I think the vote for Brexit was more an expression of identity than a political programme as such. Much like the rise of Trump, but with the UK tabloid press playing the role of Fox News.

The divide is young/old, socially liberal/authoritarian more than economic left/right. Historically the left had opposed EU membership seeing it as a capitalist project. But with the UK being on the economic right of the EU, the single market ended up being something of a moderating influence.

Authoritarian pensioners are electorally dominant and have decided to screw over their kids.

> The current Prime Minister even promised to stay in the single market while campaigning for Brexit, professing himself a 'Fan'.

Could you provide a source for the promise to stay in the single market?

> The single market was after all in large part the creation of Margaret Thatcher.

In the context of the European Union, the 'Single Market' is a legal construct; it was created by the international treaties that underpin the union, and it grants powers to the EU that can be used in various ways, ostensibly for the purpose of regulating trade.

Thatcher was in favour of liberalising trade in Europe and was therefore in favour of a European free market in the broadest sense, but her opinion of the particular mechanisms implemented under the rubric of the 'Single Market' would depend on the details. She was in favour of the Single Market to the extent that it removed trade barriers and decreased regulation, and she was against it to the extent that it was deployed as cover (as she would see it) to bypass national parliaments and introduce new economic regulations at the supranational level. Here is a quote from a speech she gave in Bruges in 1988 to the College of Europe [1], which is probably the most famous statement of her views on the subject:

'The aim of a Europe open to enterprise is the moving force behind the creation of the Single European Market in 1992. By getting rid of barriers, by making it possible for companies to operate on a European scale, we can best compete with the United States, Japan and other new economic powers emerging in Asia and elsewhere.

And that means action to free markets, action to widen choice, action to reduce government intervention.

Our aim should not be more and more detailed regulation from the centre: it should be to deregulate and to remove the constraints on trade.

Britain has been in the lead in opening its markets to others [...]

Of course, we want to make it easier for goods to pass through frontiers.

Of course, we must make it easier for people to travel throughout the Community.

But it is a matter of plain common sense that we cannot totally abolish frontier controls if we are also to protect our citizens from crime and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists and of illegal immigrants [...]

And before I leave the subject of a single market, may I say that we certainly do not need new regulations which raise the cost of employment and make Europe's labour market less flexible and less competitive with overseas suppliers.'

[1] https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107332

> Could you provide a source for the promise to stay in the single market?

https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-single-market-...

Thanks for the link. I've read through the quotes, and I can't find any instance of Johnson making a promise during the referendum campaign to keep the UK in the single market. I don't understand how he could have made such a promise even if he had wanted to, since he would have had no power to keep the commitment at the time — he didn't become Prime Minister until years after the referendum campaign. In 2016 he wasn't part of the government and wasn't seeking to be, at least not openly. He had no authority to make promises about future policy, and he wasn't proposing to replace the Cameron government.

What I see in the quotes in the link is Johnson expressing a personal preference for the UK to retain access to the single market and influence in its governing structures, in remarks made in 2013, a few years before the referendum was held. He talks about his voting intentions — at that time, he was the Mayor of London and had no vote in Parliament, so he is referring to how he might vote in what was, at that time, a hypothetical future referendum. The wider context, which is apparent from the contemporary reporting [1], is that, at the time, he was calling for the Single Market to be reformed, and for the UK to leave most of the EU's structures, but to remain part of the reformed market. A couple of years later, Cameron attempted to secure some reforms to the UK's relationship with the EU, but he focused on immigration and welfare rather than the Single Market. Cameron then presented the reforms (such as they were) as part of the basis for his support of the UK's continued membership of the EU during the referendum campaign, but no changes to the Single Market of the kind that Johnson had called for earlier were agreed.

My recollection of the role of the Single Market in the referendum is that the official Leave campaign was pressed to take a position on retaining Single Market membership; that they ultimately came down in favour of leaving (in order to remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the ECJ and allow EU regulations to be repealed); and that Johnson (who was part of the official campaign) subsequently adopted that official campaign position in his public statements. During the referendum itself he therefore supported leaving the Single Market, at least in its unreformed 2016 incarnation.

My memory is that the key statement of the official Leave campaign's position on the Single Market was made by Michael Gove on the Andrew Marr show. I remember it because the Leave side had been under pressure to make its position clear at the time, and Gove's response on the show seemed to signify that they had chosen to bite the bullet and accept leaving the Single Market. On the one hand, adopting a clear position meant that they couldn't be accused of equivocating on the subject any longer, but on the other hand, the Remain campaign was then able to argue more strongly that the Leave side was embracing trade disruption. Here's the relevant quote from the transcript of the Marr show[2]:

'Marr: Let me ask you, just before we leave the economics actually, a very simple question I have tried to get an answer to from various people on your side – is should we or should we not be inside the single market? Do you want us to stay inside the single market? Yes or no.

Gove: No. We should be outside the single market. We should have access to the single market, but we should not be governed by the rules that the European Court of Justice imposes on us, which cost business and restrict freedom.'

The BBC reported at the time that Gove's answer on the Marr show was a response to the pressure to clarify the Leave campaign's position on the Single Market.[3]

Incidentally, with regard to Johnson claiming to be a fan of the EU; I don't personally find this surprising. He has a well-publicised affinity for European civilization; in a book about ancient Rome that he published some years ago, he wrote approvingly about the ability of the Empire to unite diverse peoples as citizens of a common European state, and contrasted that history with the EU — the book was adapted into a television series for the BBC that he presented. His father also used to work for the European Commission; before he was sent off to Eton, he, his siblings and his future wife were educated at a school in Brussels that was established for the children of EU staff [4]. It may be worth noting that the comment was also somewhat qualified; he said that 'in some ways' he was 'a bit of a fan'.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boil-it-down-...

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/08051604.pdf

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36084457

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_School,_Brussels_I

That was the suggestion that was made to many industries and regions, yes. In reality it seems that those funding sources are not being met, e.g. Cornwall [0] and the red wall [1]

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-55279468

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-levell...

The top-rated comment on this FT article [0] spells it out really quite clearly.

English regions used to receive funds of £1 billion a year from the EU regeneration fund for poor regions with the final year om 2018 the final figure being £1.12bn of the £8.4 billion total over the seven year period.

For 2018, this worked out to be Midlands (£190m), Yorkshire (£143m), Cornwall (£95m), the north west (£88m) and the north east (£80m).

Now this figure of £1.12bn (£8.4 billion over the seven year budget) has been cut to £220m for 2021-22 and £3.6bn in total for the same period.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/eb56347b-42bb-4c56-906a-2ea24bd54...

p.s the comments section on the FT is probably the best on the internet, apart from maybe here

> p.s the comments section on the FT is probably the best on the internet, apart from maybe here

My impression as well. The articles are also good, but bear in mind that both have a noticeable neo-liberal point of view.

Some of the comments are excellent but the ft is definitely not better than here. There's very little moderation of trolls and it's clear that many of them on the ft are paid - judging by how incessant and on message they are. It can be tiresome filtering through them.

Yes, you're right, here is far better than the FT. Badly phrased on my part I think. If you have a subscription and aren't using github/iamadamdev/bypasspaywalls then you can block or mute individual users.

Short answer: the UK and the EU have different priorities and the Tories are not interested in giving money to get more fancy “intellectuals” (who tend to be foreign and liberal).

Also, for now Brexit is costing more than the money that was supposed to be saved.

The UK has actually remained a member of the EU's science funding programme after Brexit as part of the exit deal, although that membership has not been formally ratified yet.

Yes, that is part of the trade and cooperation agreement (who knows how long this thing will last, though?)

It includes mechanisms for the UK to pay if British scientists get too much of EU money. Who can bet anything on the British government keeping their word when they need to pay? The government with no qualms about breaking international laws “in specific and limited ways” when it suits them, and that is reneging on its promises about the Irish protocol?

Besides, this does not cover any use of other EU funds beyond Horizon Europe, like the ERDF.

I did not understand that point at all. The author writes: "The loss of this funding and scientific exchange is a major loss for British and European academia — and innovative companies who need to hire the best scientific and technical talent." But what is it exactly that the UK lost [funding-wise, science-wise] due to Brexit?

The quote in my post about funding can no longer happen. The EU only funds research at EU universities, and UK universities aren't that any more.

Historically, Israeli computer scientists have been able to apply and win ERC grants. That said, I have not checked if anything has changed for the UK in this regard, hence why I am curious.

AFAIK, unless this changed British scientists can apply to Horizon Europe funding, which includes ERC grants. However, there is some uncertainty as this is related to the trade and cooperation agreement, which looks a bit shaky right now.

One of the problem was that the British government does not keep its word, so people are wary of putting British colleagues only for their funding to get pulled at the last minute because lord Frost wants to annoy the EU.

This isn't true, you don't have to be a member of the EU to be part of the Horizon programme, which is the EU's science funding mechanism. Membership of Horizon was part of the Brexit deal for the UK, although it seems to be uncertain now as part of the wider disputes.

I wonder how you move a company with about 200 employees to a different country and time zone.

Especially when they prioritize technological purity over commercial success. Okay irony aside, you kick (most of) them out and hire new folks.

Fire UK engineers, hire US sales people.

Trying to start a business in the UK: "What are you doing? You'll fail! You'll go bankrupt! You'll be homeless! Why don't you get a nice civil service job with a government pension?"

Trying to start a business in the USA: "Rock on, bro! You're going to be the next Zuckerberg/Gates/Bezos!"

Failing at a business in the UK: "Told you so! And now everybody knows you're a failure."

Failing at a business in the US: "Every success has a few failures on the journey : If you have another go, it'll prove that you're a fighter!"

Succeeding at a business in the UK: "Who did you screw over to make that money?"

Succeeding at a business in the US: "Awesome! Let me pitch you my idea..."

>Trying to start a business in the USA: "Rock on, bro! You're going to be the next Zuckerberg/Gates/Bezos!"

Same person, few years later: "I don't care you are homeless and have nothing to eat. I didn't force you make stupid things. Get of my lawn, I'll have guests later!"

I'm in the USA. I generally think of Americans as incredibly selfish when compared to other cultures. But I was homeless and hungry and I've been surprised at the generosity of strangers to help me out.

Likely a prequel to "leaving NYC for SF".

Wherever he goes his problems will follow him. The US won't be a utopia when it comes to hiring PhD's with sales skills either.

I can't think of a worse group of people to try and make do sales.

Good sales requires cultivating the right environment for good sales people. That means you need good pipeline. Sales people are blood-thirsty mercenaries who go wherever the most pipeline is so that they can maximize their personal income. They're short-term minded people who only care about results over the next quarter.

Ph.Ds are inherently delayed-gratification types of people. Salespeople are thrill-seekers (aka, always crash the sales department's parties if you want to have the best time).

"PhD's with sales skills..."

Sounds expensive.

Not sure I get the part of talent pool. Exactly which part of AI research or development can't be done as remote work?

You still need a tax office to hire people as employees though.

But yeah, they could easily operate in both countries if they're willing to move everything like this!

Just bring them on as contractors, problem solved...

There's EU draft regulation regarding AI utilization. Prohibited AI would be described as, "...systems or applications that manipulate human behaviour in order to circumvent the free will of the users."[0]

[0] https://www.ey.com/en_ch/ai/eu-draft-regulation-on-artificia...

Hopefully crime goes back down. I was born and raised in Brooklyn during some of NY's worst crime waves. It appears to be heading back that way again with inflation and crime. Felonious assaults are up over 18% since 2020, and robbery is up by 15.8% compared to 2020. His startup sounds like any other tech-based company. He needs techs, mathematicians, AI, data sci., etc. With the great work-from-home experiment due to COVID, and tech not really needing to be physically present in NYC, why move there for the high rents and cost of living? I ran a business in the tri-state area for 9 years, but I catered to artists and shows, manufacturing, and designed and built physical objects with tech interfaces or controls. I had to be in the area. Now I do more consultation, design, and engineering and I work around the world from a nice NY town 45 to 60 min. from NYC on the Hudson. Wouldn't go back to NYC if you paid me. Thinking on going back to live in the rice fields of Indonesia or another bucolic place to enjoy my family more in a nice environment, if I can swing it.

> since 2020

Isn’t that just because nobody was out on the streets in 2020?

It has gone up from years previous too. I was only citing the year-to-year. I grew up with friends who became NYC cops, and they and others have let me know their hesitancy to be very proactive due to all the negativity towards their profession and liability risks. If you don't think 'defund the police' and bail out 'protestors' with long criminal track records doesn't give a green light to those considering doing something lawless, let me tell you the story of my already-bad neighborhood when the blackout of 1977 occurred. If you haven't been in a riot or mass looting, you don't have the same fear of lawlessness and vulnerability that simply occurs when the lights go out. People getting sucker punched will be the last of your worries.

I am personally betting 80% of the people that left NYC will be back. Plus a lot more that will move to NYC for the first time.

It sounds great to live in a cottage... but once you realize there's nothing interesting going on there, and you essentially live your life through a screen and a microphone... it's not what most people want long term.

Google just bought (not rent) an extra building for $2B. They said that when they give new hires a choice, NYC ranks #1 in their preference.

I live in NYC and I can tell you there are more people on the streets than pre-covid. And international travel/tourism is just getting started.

I still go to NYC to do inspections and other work-related tasks, and sure, if you're single and coming from the burbs or out of state, it's your adventure to the big city. I suspect those are the Google employees you are referring to, not native NY'ers. I don't think the 80% will be most of those who left, and I don't see the crowds you say you see compared to pre-COVID. MTA ridership is down 40% or more, and there are less cars, so I am not sure about your perception of more people. Although, I said bucolic, I don't mean a satellite dish on top of a cabin far from civilization, although, I did live in East Java, Indonesia for a year where 40% of the homes had dirt floors. I loved it much more than my apartments in NYC. I live in Nyack, NY now, and it has enough to do and see. I also prefer to do physical activities and see some trees, and be able to see starts in the sky than glaring LED screens full of adverts all around me. I had worked at the Brooklyn Museum in 80s and after living in Brooklyn/Manhattan apartments then, the best thing NYC offered me was the skate circle in Central Park during the Summer, but I also found that in my travels to Montreal, Spain, and all other parts of the world including SE China. All the other supposed benefits of museums, theaters, and film were mainly for tourists. Most of the people I grew up with became cops, garbage men, iron workers, criminals, or died. Times Square was not the Disneyland it is today. I actually preferred the more characterful Times Square of the 70s and 80s, and the NYC when crime dropped in the 80s. Me and my pals were hanging in the subway tunnels decades before the hipsters brought all their fluff down there to have impromptu raves in the 2000s, but I don't think that is still happening, although with law enforcement standing down a lot more, it has more potential again. NYC like most places in the world are becoming homogeneous centers of group think and like, mostly due to the pervasiveness of tech, big tech, and corp. cronyism. All my working-class friends are relatively fit, and aside from the crossfit acolytes, office workers and the population in general when you walk the streets of NYC look a lot less fit than I recall from the 1970s to the 1990s. Modern, urban, cube life is not for me.

None of that makes sense. The language is certainly sending off grifter alarm bells.

The talent pool shrunk... So I'm going to upend the entire thing and start again? How does that make sense? What talent do you need?

I would wager that the investment graft is drying up and thus is a play to secure funding for more US biased sources

Perhaps slapping AI all over your generic document product is dying a little as a strategy too.

>We’re in good company making this step: SaaS giant UiPath moved its headquarters to New York in 2017 to be closer to its international customer base.

UiPath moved offices in the US because it is easier to finance a business in US. But even if the offices were moved most of the work it is still done in Romania.

There was just recently a thread about this, apparently it's no longer the case that most of their work is done in Romania.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29319776

So what does he mean exactly? He just says some vague stuff about "bad at sales" and smth about the "culture" without actually giving any examples of what he really means. He mentions Brexit, mentions hiring then says it's not as big a deal as "sales". Then mentions EU funding for workers, then stops talking.

So what does he mean? Do British sales people not bother contacting anyone, do all British customers hate sales people and tell them to sod off? This is like Brexit all over when someone mentions some vague thing and everyone starts commenting with their own interpretation of what it means but nobody bothers to pin down what it actually means. What does it mean? I have no clue at all. I felt like I knew more before I read this article than after.

>The sad truth is that there are no listed trillion-dollar tech companies in Europe. Given Europe’s market size and depth of its talent pool, this is a surprise. Deliveroo, for example, had an extremely challenging IPO, trading at much lower multiples than some of its American peers despite better metrics.

Is that really a sad truth other than for VCs who want to exit based on future expectations? If you have better metrics and you make money you're employing people and you're paying wages and you're growing things seem fine.

No doubt the US has many great tech companies but if you see some of the inflation in terms of funding rounds and evaluations slapped on companies that aren't profitable is that really necessary to emulate?

> Advances in the type of small data AI we do — AI created without vast data sets — would have only been possible here in Europe, with its deep and diverse technical and mathematical talent. This would have been difficult in Silicon Valley given US tech’s reluctance to experiment and innovate, beyond the conventional “big data AI” approach.

Can anyone expand on what the author is saying here/validate it with personal experience? I have never thought of AI advances as “only” being possible in Europe, or of the US tech scene as reluctant to innovate.

He is talking about work that involves a deep understanding of the domain and data, on smaller datasets that require a lot more framing to make sense of.

I understand the author to be saying that "small data AI" activities as a fraction of all AI work in the US is lower, because in the US it is so much easier to make more money doing big-data work instead.

I'm slightly confused. Is the traditional way not the stable way to go about things instead of how it is done in the US? These seem more like positives than negatives to me.

A little off-topic, but I find it strange to brand the company around the "Eigen" name when it's already a super well-known C++ numerical library: https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

"super well-known" totally depends on which bubble you live in. "Eigen" immediately made me think at the eigendecomposition [1], which is a relatively common operation in AI, and probably served as inspiration for the names of both the C++ library and the company.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigendecomposition_of_a_matrix

NYC is not the right choice though. Ridiculously expensive office space and wages compared to pretty much everywhere else in the US except California. The coasts are beautiful, but the idea of living there…eww. Midwest for life. Good luck.

I really like the way he describes Europe. Pretty much the way I see it as well.

That's a good example of how a sub-par article with catchy title generates a sub-par discussion.

Best of luck.

Highest effective tax in the US, insanely expensive real estate and rents, high and rising crime [1]. Good luck, you're gonna need it.

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1006/nypd-citywide-cri...

Are there any European websites in the Alexa top 50?

https://www.alexa.com/topsites

For all I know, Europe mostly missed the internet.

Will the same happen with AI, data centers, solar, crypto and biotech?

VK.com is European if you’re talking about the continent. Though not if you’re talking about the EU.

The web was invented in Europe. Still, you’re right, few big internet successes in Europe. Problem is almost entirely addressable market size.

What hinders Europeans to address big markets?

More limited home markets, in both a regulatory and cultural way.

Since we are talking about internet companies - why is the home market important?

Language, culture, regulation - it's not just a matter of reach.

Like, imagine a successful-at-home French startup wanting to expand internationally. First, unless you're happy staying in the confines of the old French Empire, you're gonna need to translate everything, definitely to English, maybe to German or Spanish. Second, your app is built with French attitudes in mind. Chances are you're gonna have to change that to adapt to American, British, German tastes, and that's a lot of redesign. Third, for every country you expand to, you have to comply with local rules and regs. The EU has helped here, but definitely not solved the issue.

Whereas in the US, not only have you got 330 million wealth consumers under broadly the same legal/cultural regime, but they practically all speak English too! That gives US startups a much more solid base to expand from. Hell, in Europe the UK is by far the biggest tech hub on the continent, and Ireland punches far above it's weight. Don't discount the advantages of language or culture even in a globalised world.

I know someone that work in a startup that does exactly that. Opening a new country takes 3/6 months, as you need to open an office in the country and recruit people here. And that's now that they have a good process for it. Translation and localisation add processes and takes time. You need a new sales team for each country. Sometimes support too. Launching something in the USA would be equivalent to have France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK at the same time. That's a lot.

Yes, this so much!!!

Everything about US-based companies' success globally has to do with the fact that we've had a head-start on exporting our culture through media.

Everyone in the world has some idea in their head (regardless of how true) of what Americans are like. Can you say the same for the French? Germans? Portuguese?

> Everything about US-based companies' success globally has to do with the fact that we've had a head-start on exporting our culture through media.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that there is a close relationship between our companies, our government, and the application of our considerable intelligence and military resources, too.

Language barriers, legal differences between countries, etc. Also less availability of capital in general.

More underappreciated aspect is variety. US tends to be very copy-paste - once you solve someone's problem well, it's quite likely your solution is universally applicable to large swaths of the market. EU varies not only country-to-country, but often even between departments of the same company in the same building. It's not just technology, even markets for beer or coffee are likely more varied in your average EU country than in the entire US

We provide documents and services for startups and this is spot on. Once you've got past the idea of "getting investors to invest in a funding round in exchange for equity" and the obvious differences of i18n and l10n, there are real differences - in France you need to have a lawyer to be able to operate at all, and in Germany investors participate through holding companies instead of directly. And it gets more complicated when you start talking about options or convertible notes.

The complexity of getting our platform to work with all of this is as big a consideration as market size is when we're looking to expand abroad.

It's hard to finance a business the way you can in US.

If two start-ups tackle the same problem, the US startup can get 100x more money. Guess who will be the winner?

Do you believe Elon Musk could have launched Tesla and SpaceX in South Africa?

Another reason would be language and legal requirements.

I work for the software division of an international wholesale chain, based in Europe. For the checkout process, not only we have to translate everything in tens of languages, but we have to implement many legal requirements in price calculations, taxes, discounts, money laundry, invoicing and so on.

Even a single country like India is a headache because they have different legal requirements in each Indian state.

When you add countries from Europe which aren't in EU, countries from Europe which are in EU but have different legal requirements, countries from Asia, it can become really complex.

And we are just a handful of people and not payed a lot.

It is kind of biased if you take global raw data as the US and China have a bigger share of global internet users. Baidu is 6th but I doubt that it is highly frequented by American or Europeans. However, the problem shows when you search by country. Top visited sites in Europe are still American.

US is exporting it's recent culture trough Hollywood, music, news stories, Internet, while Europe does not.

I believe there are more Europeans who know how life in Pittsburgh is compared to Americans who know how life in Torino is.

Europeans are willing to try new tech originated in US while Americans would be more reticent to use new tech originated in Europe.

I think there's a difference between where companies are listed/head-quartered and where the work is done (e.g. Google seems to have 4 separate offices, just in London).

Or consider India, where huge amounts of dev work is done - but nobody can name an "Indian web brand" (internationally).

Only actual European brand I can think of that's made global impact is Spotify.

Europe seems to do better on the less fancy consumer facing side of IT - reasearch and 'hard' companies like ARM.

A couple more European examples:

- Wise (formally TransferWise)

- Skype

- Deliveroo

- JustEat

Nokia, UIPATH, SAP.

Spotify and Glovo too. The former if being public on the NYSE still counts as European.

thing is most US startups are based on VC vaporware. lots of noise, but no end result in the long run when it counts. whereas, EU startups grow at a slower pace, but end up making more money in the long run i.e more sustainable. right now, you've a bunch of US VC funded companies with 200m revenues, yet valued 50x or even 100x revenue. and yet there's probably tons of EU funded companies that are around the same revenue numbers, but most people wouldn't know since they're likely to be private. another notable EU software company I can think of is Serif that makes affordable alternatives to Adobe products. they charge 50$ for a product and get out of the way.

We are dumb, here in Europe. We don't know anything about Internet or computers on this side of the pond. We did't make any advances in science and technology. US did everything by itself, without importing brains from other countries.

We are humbly grateful the Usians gave us Google Ads, Facebook, iPhones and PornHub, things which are absolutely essential to any being not living in a cave.

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