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Comment by garethsprice | Hacker News Reader

Go and try to start a company in the UK, and then see if you're quite as enthusiastic about repatriating smart people.

Nothing about British society and culture is receptive to startups and entrepreneurs - it's an uphill struggle (both ways! in the snow!) to even get something simple started, let alone fully explore new ways of doing business.

The net result is that the entrepreneur has produced less value for the world than if they'd been able to build their idea in America, where there's far less friction in getting new ideas off the ground.

The US is (still) a unique and wonderful place for smart people to try to realize their potential. As a country in a global competition for talent, we should be doing everything in our power to attract and retain the smartest people in the world.

(UK emigrant)

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Do you mean start a company, or build a product? As another UK expat in America, starting my first company here (and having run a company back home), the process for starting a company in the UK is slightly more efficient than in the US.

If you're talking about finding investment, that's a different matter. But finding investment is only "easy" in a few places in America. It's certainly no easier to find investment in the city in which I am based than it is in London.

Edit: (and I'm not so sure we should all be building companies that need hundreds of thousands of dollars to get off the ground. That places exist where we can do that in the world is great, but bootstrapping creates different types of worthwhile businesses.)

Finding investment, talent, or even just being able to tell people you're starting your own business without getting a look like you've just told them you've got a second head... the US (even the remoter parts) has a far better support network for entrepreneurs than even large UK cities.

Agreed about bootstrapping, but even that is easier in the US where people are more conditioned to pay for services, consultants, etc.

I can't say I've experienced anything like what you've talked about. What places in the UK and the US are you talking about/comparing ? My experiences have been in London, Bournemouth and Phoenix.

My original comment was tongue in cheek, but if you seriously believe this than you are cuckoo.

I know people who have started a video company, another who's started a money saving card, another who's selling phone apps, another who's started a social musician site, another who's doing a website monitoring service. All living within 1/2 hour of me.

I also know people who have started more traditional businesses, trying to disrupt mortgage brokers and the like.

No-one's ever said 'oh noes, woe is me, the government is out to get me'. They're all 'dammit find customers, find customers, find customers'. Which is normal.

And on. And on. There's even some bio startup centre near me which I only heard about last week, http://www.biocity.co.uk/.

Yesterday I was sitting round a table with 5 others for a 'launch it' club.

As another commentor has said, perhaps funding's what you're talking about, I wouldn't know as I've not tried, but for actually creating and running a business? What are you on about? In the end the new paradigm is low cost startup using incubators and surprise, they're in the UK too.

I don't even live in London/Cambridge/Bristol which are the known cities for startups in the UK.

You can find people anywhere who have started businesses to test their ideas, the issue is scaling those businesses past a certain point.

There are many brilliant people in the UK, yet the UK has no equivalent to Google, Facebook, Oracle, Apple, etc - why? Why does the BusinessWeek Top 100 (http://www.businessweek.com/it100) have 1 UK company and 40+ US companies, if there are not intrinsic differences between US and UK attitudes towards building and growing businesses?

I am not trying to make a qualitative assessment of the two countries, or predict what will happen in the future - but the statistics bear out that if you want to build something on a world-class scale, the US still provides far greater opportunities to do so (it'll also crush you if you aren't lucky and end up on the bottom of the pile, but that's a whole other discussion).

You've gone from saying it's impossible to start a business in the UK to talking about some totally random list of 'top' IT companies that seems to have plucked out of the author's ass.

BT has a bigger operating income than most of the 'top' companies but somehow it doesn't count. But Verizon and China Mobile do?

What about ARM? You know, that Cambridge, UK company? We're talking about the hottest company in processors right now. That 'equivalent' that doesn't exist?

Oh yeah, not on the list.

Netflix is there, but Lovefilm isn't. Because....

Last.fm? Spotify? And they're just the ones I know about personally.

And, um, exactly where on that list is Microsoft?

Maybe it's a little US centric because maybe, and I'm guessing here, it's written by an American. Just a hunch.

Heh, so the list by BusinessWeek isn't very quantitative then, is it?

Didn't say it was impossible, just harder. ARM is a good example, so let's use that.

ARM is tiny compared to, say, Intel (1,700 employees vs 82k, GBP406m revenue vs GBP27 billion), despite having great technology for many decades and being, as you say, the hottest thing in processors right now.

It should be much larger, but it is not because the UK as a culture does not value or nurture entrepreneurial talent to the anywhere near the extent that the US does. If it did, then shouldn't ARM be much closer in size to Intel, Texas Instruments (GBP8bn rev), AMD (GBP4bn rev) or nVidia (GBP2.1bn rev)?

Again, I am not saying that there are no entrepreneurs, startups or successful companies in the UK, but that the odds are significantly better for US companies.

Ach, believe what you want. If you want to actually get a proper idea of why the UK's not leading the world in processors watch 'Micro Men' for a précis. They shot themselves in the foot, nothing to do with people not valuing or nurturing them. That's where the ARM comes from and it's taken this long to recover from their personal rivalry.

Or you can keep claiming that only in the US do you have people who want to be entrepreneurs. But you sound like a prat as the UK is known for it's innovation fostering.

You seem to be totally missing my point; the UK has plenty of people who want to be entrepreneurs and plenty of innovation - it just fails to capitalize on it and our greatest products languish in obscurity, while they should be leading the world.

I totally agree with you that the UK has incredible innovators. UK companies build products that are light years ahead of the rest of the world, but that are unknown outside of the UK (Spectrum, BBC Micro, Amstrad, Acorn, Psion, Teletext?).

This is a good place to wrap up, as we clearly have a very different picture of our mutual homeland - which is why you're happy there and why I am happy not being there.

Best of luck to you, and I really mean that (even though you called me a prat :) ).

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