Hacker News Reader

Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

Did they have to? My impression is British companies sell out as soon as they can these days. Is this something that could be changed with policy? Does Germany incentivise running companies more? Or is this cultural, e.g. British people are more risk averse?

View on HN

I suspect it has more to do with Germany’s industrial scale in the automotive space (as opposed to incentives or culture).

Yeah. Traditional car makers have enormous demand for EV innovations. Germany has more and bigger traditional car makers.

It's very difficult to raise late stage capital in the UK, especially for deep tech. We invent so much but our capital ecosystem is all tied up in land and our pensions providers don't want to know.

The UK is by far the best country to raise venture capital in Europe, and is the third largest market in the world after the US and China...

> UK is by far the best country to raise venture capital in Europe

For late stage? Continental Europe has its banks and industrial policy. America and China have their deep pockets. Scaling out of the UK is incredibly hard, doubly so post Brexit, that’s why they sell early.

>Continental Europe has its banks

UK has City of London that dwarfs the banks of continental Europe. we're talking big banks, Fintech, HFT, etc. When you deal with Austrian banks you realize they're 10-20 years behind the UK.

> and industrial policy

Continental Europe has a large but somewhat inefficient(compared to Asia) and heavily subsidized industrial policy, acting more a a jobs program for politicians chasing votes and state subsidies, that the UK gave up on during Thatcher(for better and worse), and stayed in the niche, low volume but highly important aerospace and defense parts that dwarfs that of continental Europe.

Ofc that also means the labor market in UK is very K-shaped. Highly paid skilled niche jobs in London and the university research centers, and then a wasteland everywhere else.

I think continental Europe has nothing on the UK when it comes to banks and financial markets. The UK has the deepest pockets in Europe because it is a hub for global capital. Brexit does not seem to have made a difference:

https://www.uktech.news/funding/late-stage-funding-surges-as...

Regarding AI (since that's the hot thing of the day), but IMO indicator of where the money is:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/funding-ai-...

[In the EU] "Most late-stage capital comes from the US and UK."

Now, regarding YASA, it isn't surprising that they were acquired by a car manufacturer. And, well, the UK has virtually none at this point...

To be clear, I think there is a tone of late-stage capital in the UK that gets invested in the U.S. I’d love to see data for total late-stage money raised by British versus EU companies.

I think Germany has tax rules that make exits harder, whereas it's very easy in the UK to sell. If you have a more free market next to protective ones it makes sense that your IP is going to flow in that direction.

It’s cultural. It is not difficult to raise a lot of money in the UK. The problem is that the UK (government, investors, employees and employers) got so high on the margins of services and finance in the 90s, that it has never recovered from this all-consuming addiction. Everything else simply attracts no interest comparatively, economic diversification be damned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com