How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital
economist.com
economist.com
I think, to the economist, these are just SMEs and a start-up is about making money, an IPO, an exit, the unicorns. And of course London as one of the largest financial hubs will be a good place to start such a business.
But I've always thought of these "SME"-type start-ups as belonging to the start-up category too; after all they "start up" a company and often have ambitious goals and creative, tech driven approaches to solving problems. This is how I've thought it would work when I was younger, and it is how I still think it'd be good to do today, and how I'd try to build a company if I have a good idea to pursue.
Anyways, the point I want to make re the article is that I think the definition is narrow, leaves out a bunch of interesting companies, and thus skews the picture towards London. There are plenty of innovative places around Europe, it's just a different model of doing start-ups. IMO this overly financially motivated view onto the start-up world is quite a bit less interesting than a the broader (maybe harder to quantify) picture.
And when they do find fundings, it's in US so they move their company there.
Naturally as soon as the need is covered, and there are no new people to sell the product to, the exponential growth every year mentality bursts into entshitification, or firing half of the company because the targets weren't reached, but no worries at least the shareholders are happy.
Maybe it is my European mindset that cannot grasp this MBA mindset into creating /destroying jobs as if people didn't matter.
A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business.
A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.
A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.
How can you assign a name to something based on what might happen in < 5 years ?
For example if I open a restaurant I'm 100% guaranteed not to be valued 100M in 5 years.
If I target to be the next social network and compete with TikTok, then it's a startup.
Goal, ability to scale, global business from the onset, etc. are things you can perceive today without being able to read the future.
A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?
Businesses that don't have the ambition to grow very quickly should not take venture capital. It's a waste of everyone's time and energy
14 years ago now: https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Of course, this culture is less helpful for individuals and cities, who have to live with the volatility.
The rollout of the Elizabeth Line from Heathrow airport is also eye-opening. In NYC we speak about new subways lines with hundred-year plans (recall the 2nd ave subway extension) but in London the smoothly operating Elizabeth Line seemed to be introduced out of thin air.
I am really impressed by London public transport, both the classical red double deck buses and the subway.
I have a dog in this fight as I'm quite close to the public transport industry in the North and it's pretty disheartening to see politicans use us as some sort of "policy win" and then never follow through with it. Manchester only recently got devolved powers meaning the region did not have to get approval from Westminster on how they use their money and the bus and tram system has completely improved in the sapce of a couple of years (unified tickets, tap and go) with the suburban rail to come into that this year.
What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better.
it's the exact opposite
Imagine what we achieve if we invested London levels of money in transport across the rest of the country
Transport spending in London was £1,313 per capita in 2023/24, compared with just £368 per head in the East Midlands[0] - nearly 4x the investment. Over the decade to 2022/23, if the North had received the same per person transport spending as London, it would have received £140 billion more[1]. The East Midlands got just £355 per person, the lowest of every nation and region[1].
Yes, London generates a fiscal surplus, but that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. London receives the highest investment spending for both economic and non-economic areas, relative to population size[2]. In 2022, infrastructure construction spend in London was £8.8 billion, whilst Scotland came second with £3.6 billion[3].
It's circular logic:
* invest heavily in London
-> infrastructure drives productivity
-> higher productivity generates more tax revenue
-> claim London 'subsidises' other regions
-> use this to justify more London investment.
Infrastructure investment enhances productive potential[4], but all other regions are systematically denied it.
London has returns on investment because it's the only place that actually gets proper investment. You can't starve regions of infrastructure for decades, watch their productivity stagnate, then point to London's tax surplus as proof they are subsidising others, that's fucking stupid.
---
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134495/transport-spendi...
[1] https://www.ippr.org/media-office/ippr-north-and-ippr-reveal...
[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
[3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity...
[4] https://www.bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/blog/what-role-infrastru...
it is not
> Yes, London generates a fiscal surplus
thank you
the only regions of the UK that generate a net return to the treasury are London, the South East and East of England
(the East of England certainly has reasons to be upset, they have naff all infrastructure AND are a net payer)
> You can't starve regions of infrastructure for decades, watch their productivity stagnate, then point to London's tax surplus as proof the system works, that's fucking stupid.
fortunately I didn't claim that
please put the strawman down
London's surplus exists because the entire country funded its infrastructure for decades. You've just admitted London got massively more investment - then you point at the returns from that investment as proof London subsidises everyone else. That's absurd.
Where did the £140 billion extra that London received come from? National taxation. Including taxes from the regions that got a fraction of the spending. They funded your infrastructure, then you claim the resulting productivity is you being generous.
You're not subsidising the UK. You're taking credit for returns on investment the entire country paid for, but only London received. That's not generosity, that's just spending other people's money on yourself then acting smug about the results.
The 'net return to the treasury' you're celebrating was built with everyone's taxes concentrated in one place. London isn't the benefactor, it's the beneficiary masquerading as an altruistic donor.
you are arguing against a point I never made
(and no, I don't live in London, I live in an underfunded region too)
I think north of 62% of elizibeth line spending was spent with companies outside the M25, for example building the trains kept a chunk of Derby in work when the factory would have otherwise closed (more than once!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cew407745jko
What data is this based on?
https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/how-productive-a...
https://data.london.gov.uk/blog/the-state-of-london-report-2...
I wouldn't say thin air, exactly.
Fair but have you seen how long things take in the US? The original proposal for the 2nd ave line was in 1920 and they have only managed to deploy four stops. I read about it in the news when I was in 5th grade and still read about it now, 40yrs later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
Similar for the Hudson tunnel which is supposed to allow commuter trains to function w/o the current madness...
Even the reverse commute in the evening is annoying but then it's quite straightforward to go home. There are usually reasonable parking options. Personally, not sure I'd use it outside of rush-hour in and back.
I also rode the subway in Paris some years ago and it wasn't anything to write home about.
The US is huge. If you were take a 300mph (nearing 500kph) train (which would make it the fastest train in the world), it would be OVER an 8 hour trip from New York to LA. (Again, about 2500 miles or 4000k)
Even in some of the densest areas, the trip times end up being pretty long due to distances: dc to New York? 600 kilometers or almost 400 miles.
Sprawling, low density, single use zoning, combined with parking minimums, have much more to do with it.
Here’s a video that explores the topic if you’re curious https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
Most people ARE interested in coast to coast travel. It is called flyover country for a reason.
There are a few exceptions like the Baltimore corridor, or the San Francisco peninsula, and these are in fact serviced by good trains.
It is always shocking to me when I land at an airport in the US and there no public transport available.
It is common for conversations about good local public transport to have a retort in some sub-thread about how big the US is, as if the feasibility of long distance travel affected the feasibility of other modes of local travel.
You mention the SF peninsula. When I first moved there, I lived in the westside of SF and had friends living in Sunnyvale. On a weekend, it took 4 hs to get to Mountain View (~40miles, at the time, checking now it seems like Caltrain weekend service might have improved, so the same trip would take about 2hs), and then had to be picked up by car to finish the rest of the trip. It was faster (~3:30hs, if more expensive) to go from Paris to Amsterdam (>300miles) by train.
Let's take a hypothetical scenario:
- 5 hours flight time (average for NY and LA), 2 hours on each side to get to and from the airport to the actual city. Total is 9 hours.
- 10 hours train time and 1 hour on each end (which is generous given the proximity of train stations to city centers), 12 hours.
The difference is not that much, and a train ride is so much less faff than a flight that it's not even funny. Little to no security theater, you don't get fondled by security agents, you don't have to stand hours in line with silly passport controls and luggage checkins/pickups. And the list goes on.
A good train infrastructure can be vastly more pleasant than a good air infrastructure. Where air wins out is intercontinental flights where trains are truly not an option anymore.
You're losing an entire day on the train. You still have to deal with luggage pains, now you're eating on the transportation which will be inferior, and will have similar problems with last mile transportation.
Flying is currently not a great 8 hour experience, but it beats losing an entire day. I can do LA to NY for a weekend trip. (I personally wouldn't but there are some that would for sure)
Trains can and do make sense even in the US, and we do ourselves great harm by underinvesting in them, but there will always be a place for plane travel.
We're building a fast train from Toronto to Quebec city in Canada. It's going to be a lot more comfortable and way faster than driving. A MP in my family takes the train from Montreal to Ottawa very frequently, they don't want to bother with parking in the capital and they can work on the train.
I've ridden the Wolverine, it isn't half bad.
I 100% agree trains might be underfunded in the US. The LA to NY flight will stay preferred to a hypothetical high speed train due to time. It is unlikely ever to be less than 10 hours.
For train rides under 4 hours, and if you can get trains running smoothly (less stops), the time spent on the train and the overall integration of trains is a lot better as a mode of transportation.
The proper point of comparison here is more medium length trips. There's no reason not to have a high speed train for Portland - Seattle - Vancouver, for example.
It gets a lot of things right and is great if it has a good route for the trips you want to make when you want to make it, but mostly it shines because the situation is so much worse in any other American city that's not New York and maybe Chicago.
Fair. But what is also expensive is every single citizen taking $100 Uber rides to the airport, like in NYC. In NJ, the transit service has become so volatile and sporadic and opaque that people have reduced NJTransit use for Newark airport in favor of simply driving.
Last time I went to NYC I took the AirTrain to Jamaica station and then an express train to Penn. it took like 35 minutes total.
Though the platforms are huge, as the trains are long, you have to really make a conscious decision on which exit to use as they come up very far from each other. Unlike other tube stations, where if you don't pick the most optimal exit, you just have to cross the road.
I used to live near the Central line. The station near home was open air and the exit was at the very end of the platform, so I always wanted to make sure I entered the train from the correct end. Service on the Central line is frequent enough (24 trains per hour off-peak), that, if I hopped off the train from the wrong end, the time it took me to walk the length of the platform was long enough for the next train to arrive.
“If I stand here on the platform, then the door will open right in front of me, and I’ll be exactly at the exit of the next platform where I need to change…”
It's not perfect. It's late sometimes, pollution sucks, and often crowded - but people here who like to criticise it really don't recognise how much better they have it than lots of other places.
Same with travel from here to Europe (by train), is just awesome.
My dad was a tunnels engineer and worked on Crossrail feasibility studies at several points in his career across decades.
London is is many ways one of the less impressive subway systems simply because much of it is so old, with small trains running in Victorian era tunnels. Not as bad as the Glasgow one, which feels like travelling on a 2/3 scale model of a subway with alarmingly narrow platforms.
It is however a point of contention within the UK that London public transport is better than public transport in almost every other city, due to being properly nationalized.
Very few, if any. They may not have escalators (Covent garden, for eg., but no-one in their right mind uses that - just use Leicester Square and walk on the street) but there are almost always ways of getting up to the street, and assistance is signposted for people with problems.
> platforms are often at a significant offset from the underground cars
Not sure what you mean here - mind the gap? Typically less on the Piccadilly than some other lines - Bank on the Central is particularly scary.
Based on living 30-odd years in London, most of it using the Piccadilly line on my daily commute and to get to LHR.
Sounding like a TfL groupie here, but it is a pretty good transit system, given geographic and budgetary constraints.
Agree that the Underground is good in general. I've used it a lot. That particular trip was just a case of having heavier luggage than I usually carry and I should have handled things differently.
In 1906, people travelling with three suitcases would likely have servants carrying them, and no one cared particularly about comfort of servants.
But total wealth was a lot lower than today, while clothes were much more expensive relative to the average income than today. Many people wore their best clothes on Sundays only, and street photos from the same period show that an average person was dressed rather simply.
I don't even think that the tube was affordable to average working class public. When I read historic accounts from much later (the 1930s), they mention that fare on public transport was expensive enough that you had to choose between a breakfast and a ride.
For anyone who's not aware, the Glasgow Subway is literally smaller - the track gauge is 4ft (85% of standard gauge), and the rolling stock (trains) is similarly scaled down, to the point that you probably have to duck if you're over 6ft.
The three modern lines are spacious and high-capacity.
Transportation in Japan is a whole other level compared to my experiences in Germany and Austria.
I've never been to England, though, so can't make that comparison.
Tokyo is just on another level entirely.
30% of all Americans have never left the North Western hemisphere.
Here in Seattle, you can basically see the zoning boundaries as you drive around the city, because development always goes right up to the edge, as hard as it can. Without the arbitrary limits imposed by the zoning code, there would be a whole lot more condos built (and lived in!), and those edges would be a lot softer, shaped by ebbs and flows of market demand rather than the sharp lines of law.
I genuinely feel I can't even discuss this with many Americans. They stalwartly believe car culture is superior in every single aspect, any deviation from this narrative is simply met with 'you don't understand'.
I recall in Ireland they asked an American on public TV what he thought of one of the few pedestrians only streets in Dublin (Liffey Street). He pointed out that he would be sorry for the loss of the trade on that street for the business involved compared to if cars were allowed to drive on it. It's then pointed out they make way more money since the transition as it's a city centre location with enormous footfall.
He just counters that's not possible and cited some example in the US.
On the other hand a lot of European cities were laid out in the time of horse and cart.
China built an entire national high speed rail network while America was waiting to see if the Hyperloop was anything.
The awkwardness for founders in London is that when they want to IPO, London doesnt have nearly as deep a pool of capital as the US, so they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table.
during a game of chess: "hey why'd you make that move?"
Which frustratingly overlap with Brexit, making it hard to tell whether this is “good driving business away” or “bad driving business away.”
Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 - outlawed bearer shares
UK PSC Registry 2016
Action Plan for Anti‑Money Laundering and Counter‑Terrorist Finance 2017-2022
Money Laundering Regulations 2017
Sanctions and Anti‑Money Laundering Act 2018
Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people (other than people like DHH).
The big problem with London is that it is very, very expensive.
I am not sure everything else is reasonable if groceries alone have been going up by as much as 100% throughout the world, heh. Maybe on an SWE salary it is reasonable, sure.
But after some research it is indeed true that house prices are, to a lesser extent, also going down, at least in real terms, if not nominal.
London house prices are falling quite a lot in real terms.
Have you ever considered adding more countries?
Its coming down but from a very high level in London.
I do not know about other countries, but movements do tend to be wide spread (at least across similar economies). We are seeing higher interest rates in a lot of countries and they are the main determinant of the multiple of income properties sell at.
Cultural diversity is not a draw. Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia are all culturally and ethnically diverse. No one moves to any of these places.
The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity, which is ironically usually only made possible by ethnic homogeneity. This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), China, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Target cities become “culturally diverse” due to the arrival of migrant labor. The migrant labor itself is not seeking this diversity out for its own sake. New migrants have their movements facilitated by networks of already-landed migrants, who provide knowledge of the immigration process, employment opportunities, and material assistance to their coethnics.
These people are not moving to London because they can find people like themselves there (there are already plenty in their country of origin), nor are they moving to London because they want to experience other cultures (this was a form of conspicuous consumption that went out of fashion years ago). At best you could say they hope that the relative ethnic heterogeneity will distract from their own foreignness, but that still doesn’t amount to being drawn to diversity.
The USA was never a colony of britain. The american colonies were.
> The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity
Then tokyo or singapore or dubai would have been even greater draws. But they are not.
What becomes a "tech capital" is primarily a political decision. If london is a major tech center, it's because of political decisions within britain but primarily outside of britain ( the US ).
This is inane.
> Then tokyo or singapore or dubai would have been even greater draws. But they are not.
This doesn’t logically follow, but even if it did, Tokyo is an attractive destination for immigrants, even with the Japanese being notoriously xenophobic. Japan is homogenous and economically prosperous, the difference is that it restricts migrants from entering. Singapore has a huge population of day laborers that live in Malaysia and commute to Singapore. The majority of Dubai’s population is comprised of foreign laborers.
> If london is a major tech center, it's because of political decisions within britain but primarily outside of britain ( the US ).
And how do those decisions get made in the absence of a cohesive society capable of making them?
It's not inane. It's the truth. Tell me when the USA was a colony of britain? What year?
> This doesn’t logically follow
If you knew how to read, it would logically follow. I responded directly to this statement: "The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity". There was a time when tokyo was the most prosperous city in the world. Singapore is one of the most prosperous cities in the world today. So "economic prosperity" was not the main draw. It was something else.
> And how do those decisions get made in the absence of a cohesive society capable of making them?
What about my statement made you respond with this nonsense? Did I say there was an "absense of a cohesive society capable fo making them".
Something triggered you for no reason and you decided to read into things and respond with garbage.
And I would say that one reason for that is the elements I mention is something an individual can take seriously and integrate into their own world, while enclaves stay perpetually from the vantage of exoticism rather than integration.
The UK has been run by blithering idiots for decades at this point, but London has survived so far
> What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
As for its relevance: "native speakers on English", etc.
One of them is Kurt Caz.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46809291)
You should watch the video someone linked that exposes one of his many shady stuff.
I was surprised the first time I got into volunteer work. Figured that these wives have never spoken English in their home country. So when they moved to London, they learnt English from scratch and picked up the local accent and speaking style. Their grammar may not be perfect sometimes but whose is?
What this is, is a racist meme pretending that the significant fraction of immigrants to London who may occasionally speak their native language to each other in public is somehow a problem. Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish.
Absolutely false. My god! Have you even been to London? Stop consuming propaganda from Twitter/X and Facebook. It isn't good for your mental health.
I do not use Twitter nor Facebook. I watch YouTube videos. These YouTubers have >1M subscribers.
I see you have not been around in London for over 10 years. How was it back when you were in London? I've been in London for 10 years, so I probably came when you left. Never once I have been in any part of London where English was not the lingua franca. Yes, people speak their native languages too among themselves but I haven't met anyone anywhere in my 10 years who couldn't speak English. I don't think this is any different from any other megacity of the world.
Edit: Changed to link I like a bit more
Certain people would rather fearmonger though.
The net (and the UK has decades of experience in this, eg with the South Asian immigrants that arrived in the 1950s-1970s) is that while the first generation may only get to decent levels of English, their children are bilingual or monolingual in English, not monolingual in their ancestral tongue.
Occasionally you will get someone with a political axe to grind who visits an area with a lot of immigrants, doesnt hear a lot of English, and posits that there are ethnic monolingual enclaves where they cannot go. I think this is more likely to be a failure of understanding.
There's a guy on Instagram who spins a wheel for a random country and goes to eat that cuisine somewhere in London. There are maybe 1 or 2 places in the world you can do that. It's an incredible feat of human diversity to pack hundreds of global cuisines into a 10 mile radius.
It's not even top 10 on most lists. Europe, Australia has way better cities.
Example Sydney, life expectancy is at least 5 years more.
The poverty rate in London, 26%, is double of Sydney at 13%.
E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2025/06/18/the...
Have you lived in London and Sydney both, or are you just reading numbers off of Google and "best city" lists? Sydney is boring and in the middle of nowhere.
Places I have lived in: London, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, New York, San Francisco.
It is hard to reconcile this with having actually lived there. The only benefit to the weather in London is it rarely gets very cold. Other than that, it gets very dark winters, it’s rarely sunny, when it gets too hot it’s unbearable because nowhere has aircon, and it’s usually drizzling.
The weather is appalling.
To say it’s pleasant year round is probably a bit of a stretch for most.
The Global Liveability Index is, essentially, highlighting the most middle of the road cities. London (as with New York) has huge disparities and that guarantees it will never rank well on the Global Liveability Index. The people who choose to live in London and love London (as with the people who choose to live in New York and love New York) do not choose it because it is average.
I have lived in London and Sydney and many other cities. I have fallen out of love with London. I would rather live in Sydney than London. I still cannot imagine ever describing Sydney as a better city than London. Just as I can't imagine describing Copenhagen better than London.
Healthcare in London is world class. A city is crowded. The weather is very average for Europe.
People from Sydney who move to London come to hate it, once the novelty wears off, just as they would with New York, because the Australian way of life is very different. Sydney is closer to island life than city life.
Even with London's ongoing decline due to the U.K's inexplicable self sabotage, it still has something to offer.
Just sharing a different perspective, I'm from Sydney and have lived in all 3 and don't agree with this generalisation. I know plenty of Sydney-raised people who've lived in London or New York for decades, love those places, and don't plan to move back to Sydney any time soon if at all.
Though personally I find it pretty enough.
It was alright in my twenties. Built a career, made a ton of money before the IR35 reform, but you sort of felt like everyone had an expiration date, was there to build a career and then move away. It's not that interesting outside of zone 1, it's the same high street full of Prêts/Nerro/Itsu (If you're lucky) or Paddy Power/Chicken shop/charity shop, and rows of small, drafty and moldy terraced houses.
I wouldn't live there, but Paris is infinitely more charming, and keep getting more pleasant as they remove the cars from the city. It's a place that feels lived in, that encourages and rewards you for wandering.
This is probably good enough for the anglosaxons or the nordics, but food is just a small part of what makes a good dining experience.
I spent a couple days walking 40+ km around the city and usually I just ended up eating at Istu or Greggs or one of those similar chains. The same thing in NYC or Paris gets you an infinitely better food experience.
It seems like a great city to be rich and have dinner reservations though.
Walking is imo one of the big "secret" ways to get to know a city. I fondly recall just getting lost on purpose in major cities, and at the end of the day take a taxi, or bus, or tuk-tuk back to the place I was staying. So many things seen, and tried, and random people encountered from all walks of life, it's one of the best things.
Agreed that walking is the best way to see a city, for sure. I have done similar one day walks across Brooklyn, Manhattan, etc. and always really enjoy the experience. Usually I have a kind of set goal, like “walk entirely across X place.” I think in Istanbul though I mostly just wandered for 100km (over the course of a week.)
This past summer I walked about 124km around Paris over 5-6 days, going in a spiral through all the arrondissements. That was a great way to discover some new neighborhoods.
Another favourite of mine is cycling around a neighbourhood to get to know it; you get a totally different feel for things than from a car - things typically go by slower, and you are somehow just far more able to observe things.
I had an extremely difficult time finding places with those requirements. Everything seemed to require sitting down for at least 20-30 minutes, which didn’t fit my walking schedule.
I didn’t have the same problem in NYC or Paris, where it’s very easy to find a variety of places to grab a kebab, baguette sandwich, pizza slice, dumplings, etc.
For example, going here tomorrow at lunch time https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/food-and-drink/southbank-c... - will work out what I'll eat when I get there.
Bizarre take. Zone 1 is the absolute worst part of London, full of tourists and unimaginative morons.
Paris is ruthlessly segregated by race and class, not what I'd call charming.
> Paris is ruthlessly segregated by race and class, not what I'd call charming.
As opposed to London, where you famously are as likely to see people of all walks of life and income comingle in a tesco in Dagenham as you are in Kensington.
There are even middle class professionals in Barking & Dagenham - it's well covered by the new Elizabeth line.
As an example, the LA metro Area (LA, OC, SB), 46% latino, 27% white, 15% asian 7% african, 3% mixed
There huge sections of those cities, several kilometers long where you drive for miles and see majority one culture. Several areas majority korean, chinese, japanese, vietnamese, middle eastern, african,
Food depends a lot on what you go for. You won’t find much good Mexican food in London, but on the other hand, you can by a better croissant in a supermarket here than you can find in most of the US.
Tokyo 10/1000
LA 3/1000
London 1/1000Compared to London and Paris where you're guaranteed a good meal in any random place as long as the google reviews are ~3.5+. And even for the lower, the complaints are usually that the service is slow or rude, not that the food is shit tier quality. I mean 4.9 noted places with ramen that tastes like margarine and uses canned vegetables, or where the meat tastes bad.
as Tyler Cowen says, Tokyo has the best food in the world, and the best French food in the world.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-brooks-2/
Tokyo has even won best pizza as judged by the Italian pizza competition in Italy several years
Paris has almost no East Asian food and what I did see when trying to find some was all in porcelain trays like slightly fancier Panda Express.
London I found a few good places in Soho but just slightly out of the center it was a food desert
This is simply not true. Are you sure you were in Paris, France? French people absolutely adore East Asian, and especially Japanese cuisine. There are the meh fast food options, yes, but the majority are definitely sushi places. And you have tons of others like Korean, Korean barbecue, more traditional japanese, etc.
The Japanese restaurants are concentrated around rue St Anne; the Chinese ones around rue Volta. But not exclusively.
As a fun exercise, Japanese is the highest represented origin (country) category in the Michelin guide. After that is Italian with slightly less. (The first category is "modern" which can mean anything).
For example, there are 4 Uyghur restaurants just on my cycle to work. According to Google, Paris has 1 and Berlin has 0.
Only NYC can compare for population, density and diversity.
San Francisco (Bay Area),"18,052",$122.0 Billion,7.7 Million,2.34,$15.84 Million
New York City,"15,000+",$45.0 Billion,19.5 Million,0.77,$2.31 Million
London,"8,900",$26.0 Billion,9.0 Million,0.99,$2.89 Million
Tel Aviv (Area),"2,996",$12.0 Billion,4.2 Million,0.71,$2.86 Million
Beijing,"2,350",$18.0 Billion,21.9 Million,0.11,$0.82 Million
Paris,"3,200",$10.0 Billion,13.1 Million,0.24,$0.76 Million
Bangalore,"3,500",$12.0 Billion,14.0 Million,0.25,$0.86 Million
https://jobswithgpt.com/blog/global_software-engineering_job...
TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
That doesn't seem to be true?
Edit: can't reply
The majority of IPOs in 2025 were in 4 markets - US, China, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea [0]. It's really hard to exit in the LSE currently, and this article is self congratulatory while ignoring major recent (past 2-3 years) mistakes that negatively impacted the entrepreneurship scene in the UK (eg. the revocation of funding for Tech Nation [1] and the ongoing leadership crisis at Monzo [2] which makes no one look good).
[0] - https://www.ey.com/en_pt/insights/ipo/trends
[1] - https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/3405c6f3-931b-4fe3-a169-a9665a132...
Plus, the FTSE 100 returned 25.8% last year. That is not a shrinking market!
EDIT: I'd prefer you not change the subject away from your capital markets claim, but to address the other links:
1. I didn't say London was a top 4 IPO location, just that it's market aren't shrinking.
2. Tech Nation still exists, and still administers that visa. I don't know why you posted a very out of date article about it.
3. It's not ideal that such a high profile company is having issues like that, but hey, stuff happens. OpenAI had a whole goddamn coup and counter-coup happen!
After a long period in the doldrums.
The Kraken story is one to follow to see if this changes...https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/news...
Also UK contract law is well established and it's easy to find experienced transatlantic lawyers and firms (there's a reason UK lawyers can practice in NY and why both Hong Kong and the Emirate of Dubai kept poaching British judges with contract dispute into their business judiciary).
In most cases when we'd invest in a startup abroad, the founder would often structure their startup as a subsidiary of a US, UK, Singapore (especially Indian/Chinese startups), or Cayman Islands (it's a BOT so you basically get it for free) corporation.
Ironically, this ease of financial access is what makes it difficult to seed a lasting DeepTech startup in the UK because capital would often be deployed to invest in other startup ecosystems. I wrote about this before on HN as well [0][1][2]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42768018
Not to mention location of IPO not being all that important. But that's a whole separate thing.
That is not an accurate recollection of history. Freetrade raised money at a £700 million valuation at the very top of the market when money was plentiful, then, when the money dried up, and they were forced to go from losing money to making money, and they cut all advertising, they were able to just about scrape profitability. At the point of the acquisition, Freetrade either needed more investment to fund more advertising, or get acquired. After 10 years, a dozen rounds of fundraising and capital drying up, £160M is a good exit. Freetrade was significantly overvalued at £700 million.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/investing/article-142962...
thinking about comparisons, in SF the average 1B is $3300 https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-fran...
In NYC it is similar.
SF's challenge is that the business distract is split across 2 areas (SF, SV) 50mi apart, with extremely sparse public transit in SV. Everything is doable, just be prepared for $100 Uber bills as you go between meetings.
In NY the business district is thankfully mostly centralized. However, poor commuter train service outside of Manhattan makes everything more expensive as there is insatiable appetite in central areas to avoid the commuter trains.
The public transportation point is definitely key: London is just so unspeakably large spatially and it's all more or less well-connected that there isn't the same scarcity of commutable apartments as in NYC/SF. It wasn't uncommon for older colleagues to even commute in from Kent or elsewhere in the English countryside -- and often their morning train wasn't much longer than my own.
London is a very expensive city, and the median income is actually very low compared to it. There is a high concentration of people who are very well off, but everyone else is struggling.
I wonder what's you definition of struggling, especially "everyone else"
High rents encourages startups to be founded by those who haven't coupled up and who choose to live together.
A company of 3 single founders in their mid twenties that rent a two bed flat and then live and breath nothing but their startup collapsing on the couch each night can make two $50k angel cheques go a long way.
Edit: SEIS allows a friends and family seed round if up to £250k in London that the government will rebate 78% of in taxes (50% immediately and 28% if the company eventually goes bust).
I've lived in London for 8 years now as a student (undergaduate masters then PhD) and have lived on around £20k a year (post tax) and it's completely fine tbh. I earn more through extra work but save pretty much all of it.
Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all.
In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues.
It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there.
The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.
London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
and it certainly isn't now that I'm quite a bit older, and I earn a multiple of what I did then
But yeah you’re right dude, we live in a society. We work to support ourselves. What a shocking surprise.
I just checked how much I pay for travel. My monthly travel expenses is £150 total. That's like between 2% to 3% of someone's net income (depends on how much net income you make).
Do you know it is impossible to 15% of your net income in travel because there is a weekly fare cap: https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/find-fares/capping
Worst case scenario, you are traveling too much every week to max out the fare cap across all travel zones. Your monthly total would be £244. That's like 3% to 6% of your net income. But this is the worst case scenario. If you are spending 6% of your net income on travel, maybe you should reconsider which zone you live in.
So seriously where are you pulling out this ridiculous 15% number from?
yes, you can quite easily live 50 miles out and be at your desk in under an hour
Then you'd feel like it's not you/your idea/your company but the ecosytem at large
They are not the same. The energy/resources in SF/SV are 5x at a minimum - but London has it going on.
I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:
> it's not ideal is it?
or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:
> as you say sir
> very good sir
with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]
Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s03Fq1nsbng
(The full scene is around 11:30 in the first episode and I think its captures a conversation of subtext and indirectness quite well).
We say "interesting" for that
My stock joke is that one of these countries is a feudal warrior culture and former empire that's obsessed with tea and saving face, and the other is Japan.
Oh jeez, I've literally just typed out a message on Teams to describe a situation where someone deployed breaking DB changes without the accompanied app changes as "a less-than-ideal scenario". Sometimes I forget I have to translate from British for the benefit of everyone else on the team (half in India, half in US, one German)
The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.
I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.
Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.
I suspect it's because people on PAYE tend to think of their basic salary + bonus + income tax, but disregard NICS, pension, paid holidays, and other benefits. They end up reporting a total package that's 10-20% lower than it actually is.
Upper ranges for all levels accross the very highest paying employees are £100-400k when including bonuses usually. Usually these are quant/quant-dev jobs and FAANG.
My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.
For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc...
Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"?
On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified.
It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes.
Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts.
If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree
Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.
My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.
Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
No UK employer has ever asked about it, to my knowledge.
Granted, English is widely spoken in London and that's factor for cross-pollination of talent between the US and the UK. It also has an easier visa situation than the US.
On top of that, salaries in tech in London are much lower than the US [3]. The cost of living in London is actually pretty awful.
London's biggest problem is that the UK is no longer in the EU. Long term I see this as a strategic problem because (IMHO) the EU is going to be incentivized and ultimately forced to make their own versions of key US tech companies in much the same way as China has. And the EU won't want that outside of EU jurisdiction. It defeats the point.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/nearly...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/06/how-london-b...
regarding the Russian kleptocrat situation, you can't knock London for having a Profitable Business Arrangement. The biggest enemy of any Russian oligarch are other Russian oligarchs. it makes sense then, to keep your dragon hoard where none of them can touch it (possibly not even you!)
ofcourse it becomes even funnier when all of them get the same idea, converging on the same optimal strategy...
indeed any and all mafiosos are welcome to safeguard their assets in London banks (for a price, and not neccesarily monetary.) whatever happened to the venezuelan gold? if that then serves to subsidize the rest of the UK ordinary citizenry, hey, you could say the UK in the business of karmic repayment.
It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications.
Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/926f4969-fda7-4e78-b106-4888c8704...
You'll get a lot of shady startups of that kind in London for this reason.
Additonally, for every failed investment like builder.ai a fund like QIA and MS Ventures has had multiple other successful investments.
The perception of "shadiness" in the London VC scene arises simply because a subset of non-American VC simply does not care about value investing and product-led growth.
Additonally, it's not like the UK doesn't have good VCs and Growth Equity investors - for example Index Ventures and Ballie Guiffold both have a solid track record.
Being overly congratulatory and being overly pessimistic about the UK scene does more harm than good.
I have yet to see one direct startup investment from Mubadala do well. Compare that to a regional fund like BECO or Wamda (both composed of ex founders).
Until a couple years ago, it was difficult for someone without a SSN to create a Delaware C-Corp and even despite current political instability, the depth of IP, capital, and R&D available in the US is difficult to replicate outside China, Japan, and maybe India.
That said I don't know anyone doing a startup in London. But I know dozens in Berlin without even thinking about it.
VC in London is harsh, both for the start-ups and for the VCs. What does happen is that a company manages to stay alive long enough to raise a secondary round in the USA, but then you can't really make the original claim in the TFA.
We are using different meanings for the same phrase. SV is the best place to raise, IF YOU CAN AND ARE WILLING TO RAISE THERE. But not everyone can, nor does everyone want to. And of the locations that are not in the US, London dominates.
And hell, Americans raise in Boston, Seattle, NYC, and so on. Not even all Americans move to SV, let alone people who may not even get a visa to enter the US.
I grew up in Waterloo but it's just not it lol.
There are also Portugal, Spain and Romania that are rising contenders. I am also very dubious of UK being "world first"
1. Startups
2. Scaling/Growth
3. Existing company expanding from USA->Europe or Europe->USA
For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.
For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.
For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.
One after another? The only one that closed office was Andreessen Horowitz.
What's the "another"? I don't know why all the London threads attract this kind of dishonest comments!
There aren't any jobs in the UK and most are offshored to other low CoL countries.
Young people, founders are leaving for other places like Dubai, Singapore and even SF for higher paying jobs.
Obviously that's just one data point, but every tech company is similar.