I'm calling a 'time of death' for London's Internet startup industry

>> "maybe I've fallen so in love with my new home in San Francisco"

I think perhaps you're in the epicenter of a bubble now (SF). Unless it's a $20million investment for a twitter based replyBot, it looks lame.

Meanwhile, plenty of people in the UK (And everywhere else) are building profitable online businesses quietly, just as they have done for years.

One thing that has always seemed weird to me is how companies who announce they've "won $Xm in funding" seem to be 'rated' higher than companies that are making modest profits and growing fast. IMHO "winning" investment just means you convinced someone to give you some money. Whereas a company that's profitable and growing fast, you've proven your business model - far more impressive than convincing a handful of people to give you some cash.

Much as I hate a lot of what 37signals have to say, when URL shorteners, twitter crawlers, etc getting millions in funding, you have to ask yourself if that's a good thing, impresive, or just the sign of a large bubble that will burst pretty soon. Building a business on top of another unproven business - is anyone doing any sort of risk assessment here? Or even thinking about business models? Or are they just hyping up the hype to the next level and taking the easy investment money. There's a lot to be said for just being a quietly profitable startup without all the hype+glitz+bs.

Just my 2p.

Perhaps the startups that are doing well arent going to the same self congratulatory parties and meetups as Paul Carr types are.

Far too many of the popular London events are overwhelmed with social-media-enterprise-consultants and as such those who do have snuck away into smaller lesser known events and are doing their best not to invite the flotsam.

Paul Carr just enjoys writing controversial headlines to stir up the pot. I think his statements are just as valid for many Web 2.0 businesses frankly, around the world, not just London. Things that aren't successful will naturally die. There are no shortages of businesses here in the UK and across Europe that are doing well and getting funded accordingly. Of course the volume overall is lower than Silicon Valley but that doesn't mean thing here are much different than elsewhere in the world.

Of course all this has been discussed at great length by PG, not specifically to London but generally SV vs anywhere else.

The fact is that London has most of the ingredients to be a successful startup hub: capital, talent, location, and plenty of potential exit targets. What it needs is some sort of catalyst.

AFAIK London has never claimed to be some sort of startup mecca though, so I really don't know what his point is.

Seriously, I almost gave up in the middle of the third paragraph and I regret not having done it.

This guy goes on and on and on about parties he's been to, champagne, tiny bits of cow on sticks and the state of his liver. Total waste of bandwidth.

I'm writing up an email to this guy (since he asks for it at the end)... Of course, it all depends on your definition of dying. After all, we're all gonna die some day, the question is, how late can you push it back? :-)

what always gets me, is why in this day and age we are still stuck on localizing everything. In this day and age, you should be able to run everything from a small village in spain from your iPhone.

Teleconferencing with investors and other CEOs, having programmers work remotely, etc. Instead the culture is so localized that everyone is pretty much expected to go to SV.