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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Very true. But the UK does have founders, startups and money. Not nearly as much as the US, and no cluster approaching the valley, but the network is a surmountable problem. One could probably get government sponsorship for a regular meetup/conference with speaker honoraria, etc. This would go some way to fixing this problem. Not all the way, but it'd be a start. jlees is looking at this from a Scottish perspective, so maybe getting Scottish Enterprise to sponsor monthly Techcrunch UK shindigs in Edinburgh would be an idea. Again, Scotland suffers the substantial disadvantage of not being London, or within the Golden Triangle. If I were attempting this I'd probably go to one of the Science Enterprise Centres at various UK universities, and attempt to get them to host a monthly meetup, get them to do it in co-operation with the Business School. Again, London would be best.

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The thing is, is a monthly meetup the right solution? I go to a lot of events up here; we have a monthly tech-focused meetup and open coffee club, the University of Edinburgh runs a lot of courses and events, and their entrepreneurship club invites a lot of cool speakers over from the valley and elsewhere.

This sort of ongoing network/atmosphere is great on one level but on another it doesn't really provide the pressure cooker 'kickstart' that something like YC does. I think we have all the ingredients for a YC, but they're too disparate right now, perhaps.

I was just noting davidw's point on the speakers, the network. If U. Edinburgh can get speakers over from the valley on a semi-regular basis this isn't that big a problem. Yet again, London's better because the number of cool intersting people passing through will be orders of magnitude higher so you can piggy-back off of that, more and better speaker opportunities.

But your point is well taken, meetups are not a big problem, and the lack of them is relatively easy to overcome.

A proper YC clone probably requires (a)Angels, plural, successful ones, with personal experience of startups (b)20-50K per round, so assuming 2 rounds a year, and three years to get some form so others will back you thereafter, ~120K min.

I think that's it, and if you're lucky you could get away with less. Here, government might be useful. 60K isn't chickenfeed but it is doable in grant aid. If you could find someone willing to pony up 60K, you could get matching funds from a local authority somewhere in the UK, or from one of the enterprise incubators.

A speaker going to talk at a university is a lot different from a speaker talking to a small, focused group of people in a no-holds-barred sort of environment (those talks are not recorded and are not public, afaik). The YC dinners are weekly, too, not monthly, and not just some random thing that anyone can show up to.

Almost everyone who gives speeches on a (semi)regular basis will be used to some hostile questions at the end, and I really don't think you get to that level without being able to defend your ideas in other less formal contexts.

Sure, the YC dinners are weekly, no-holds-barred, and have a select audience, but if you have a proper YC clone going you will be able to get speakers on a weekly basis. Probably not of the same quality, or with the same ease, but you can get speakers. The other points fall under All discussions follow Chatham House Rules

The sorts of talks to entrepreneurship clubs etc are more the small, focused group of people than big recorded lecture sort anyway. Though I suppose it depends on the club.

hi jlees, glasgow hn-er here. would love to chat - email is in profile.

but sadly I can't see it!

added mine to mine. :)

sorry didn't realise the email field was hidden from other users. cheers i'll send you a message :)

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