It’s painful to do a tech startup in London

There are brilliant programmers in places like Italy and Poland and they feel stifled in their home countries, so they escape to London. Many of them would prefer to go to the USA but the USA's strict immigration policies keep them out. As EU citizens they have a right to move to London, so that is where they go. London is bigger than San Francisco and it is also bigger than New York. London is also much more international than just about anywhere: this place used to be the capital of an empire that held 25% of humanity. The phrase "The sun never sets on the British Empire" used to be literally true. London is nowadays the favored playground for Russian investors and Saudi princes and Brazilian entrepreneurs. The amount of money in the city, waiting to be invested, is beyond imagining. And also the amount of programming talent, drawn from all over Europe, is of the highest caliber imaginable. At some point these 2 things, the vast pool of investors and the vast pool of talent, must inevitably spark something, and when that happens the results will be great.

"Actually I continue to fight with myself not to expose two individuals in particular who have been completely toxic to the very infant ecosystem which needs the exact opposite."

"I’ve been in San Francisco for 23 days now. In these 23 days I’ve been here, I’ve met with some of the brightest names in technology angel investing, signed customers, partnered my company with a team of MBAs for an entrepreneurial project, and have had more productive business development meetings than in 10 months in London."

This reads like parody but it seems to be serious. Please be careful mbesto

Whilst the UK has had it's moments - remember when Acorn and Sinclair ruled the bedroom? - we often revert to the enthusiastic amateur, responsible for the breakthrough but never quite capitalising on it. Indeed Mike uses the word amateurish in describing the scene himself. Also I get the impression that both for cultural and legal reasons the hire-and-fire approach to staffing doesn't happen in the UK which might be a necessary component in establishing an available pool of talent with the right risk mindset. We are also a terribly cynical bunch here in the UK which isn't the ideal frame of mind.

For the record, I'm a UK developer working for tech startups in Manchester which is 200 miles north of London (that's regarded as a long way in England) and all of the above is personal conjecture based on 45 years of being a cynical, amateur Londoner who got lost in The North and never went home.

The London Hacker News meetup is a SV investors wet dream. 500 like-minded people turning up every month to discuss amazing ideas and woefully struggling to get investment to fund their passion.

No doubt, some things are a bit rubbish - for example my old agency moved to "silicon roundabout" then had to pay an absolute fortune to get bespoke fibre put in - because it's not even available there.

Maybe your experiences are genuinely indicative of the differences in possibilities but I don't hold it against people for not jumping on your idea with absolute enthusiasm. The onus is on you to prove that your idea has legs. Given some of the things that have been funds over the last few years, I think a little bit more scepticism might be healthy.

Good luck with this.

Side note:

How can London startups hiring "rockstar" devs offer 40k? Have they seen the rent prices here?

I can earn at least x2 in the City and x3 contracting. It's just not acceptable.

But I wouldn't give up on London. It takes time for eco-systems to grow and mature. London's tech startup scene may well be amateurish but it's also incubating world-class companies like Mind Candy, Huddle, King.com and Spotify. Silicon Valley-based startups are coming to London to acqui-hire companies like CrashPadder and Lightbox.

London's already the best place in the world to start a company in certain segments (e.g. fin.tech) and it's often the first choice for companies looking to establish their first international office.

And it's going to keep getting better because there are people here who want to see it get better.

Thanks Michael, your feedback is appreciated. We wish you all the best in Silicon Valley.

I think the biggest difference between here and the US is there is no stigma attached to having a failed start-up. It's almost the natural run of events in the US. You simply dust yourself off and on with the next idea.

In the UK we seem to attach a stigma to failure and this runs the full spectrum from start-up entrepreneurs to investors. It's a tricky mindset to break.

I spent the last 3 years working in Shoreditch and most of the startup founders I came across were either bootstrapping to the extreme (spending nothing but sweat capital on their project) or freelancing at least 2-3 days a week to cover costs. I think in practice this makes a lot of the work look more amateurish in comparison to seed/angel funded teams in the US. In practice, you would see a technically very talented founder without the right UI/design, a visually polished MVP with no user traction, a businessy founder outsourcing technical work to East Asia etc.

> Dear London, it's not you, it's me

Er, except the next 1500 words are a very muddled and occasionally misspelt attack on London, and not you.

> I left you for another women. Her first name is Silicon and her last name is Valley. I’m not sure why I believed you for so long, but you lied to me. You told me Tech City is the next Silicon Valley, and it isn’t. You told me you were going to lead the UK out of a slump and you didn’t. I wanted edgy. I wanted mobile. I wanted hip. I wanted cool. You were boring, conservative, and expensive. So what did I do? I left. I left you because my new girlfriend knows how to support me.

Ignoring the painful rhetoric here, Tech City is not going to be the next Silicon Valley, and nobody said it would be. You thought the global economic recession's impact on London, the financial capital of the world, would be lessened by the government putting ten people in an office and asking them to talk about startups? I'm not sure what the output was which you were expecting from this input, but it's clear that you were misguided. Maybe you think SVASE is going to help the homeless in San Francisco?

London is expensive. A bit cheaper than SF, though. Boring and conservative? Make grand plans and I think you'll find people willing to back you. We did.

> When we launched our MVP in march my thoughts were “yes, let’s be part of this tech city revolution”. My thoughts now, “What revolution?”

I've run a venture-backed startup in London for nearly 3 years. I also think "what tech city revolution?" because a common hallmark of the successful / venture-backed startups in the UK (you seem to conflate the two) is that they don't really go in for the bullshit: networking, accelerators where you get a communal office and access to a shitty lawyer, ec. The good startups in the UK don't obsess over Tech City News or go to networking events with cold pizza and warm white wine. They work out whether there's an opportunity in a market, raise capital, and build things.

> Without sounding completely derogatory – London’s tech startup scene is very amateurish.

I've read your article a couple of times and I'm still not clear on what facets strike you as amateurish.

> the developer talent isn’t exactly amateur. For example, take a stroll into a TechHub campus or the Innovation Warehouse and it’s buzzing.

I'm not sure that the "buzz" of an engineer is the best way to evaluate his or her amateur/pro status. If you want to assess software engineers, you need to meet them and work with them. Also, you're again talking about going into incubators and shared offices to assess the health of companies in a city. A bit weird.

> I met a number of young and hungry developers, technical and online savvy who struggled to find good companies to work for.

That's odd: I know at least one YC company in addition to us who find it very hard to find great software engineers. We're constantly advertising positions and recruiting through our networks. Whenever I speak to other venture-backed companies the biggest challenge is finding talent. Not all engineers are created equally.

For established world class talent the attraction has traditionally been San Francisco, whether you're in Europe or America. But look at people like Nikolaj Nyholm: built a fantastic software company (which now powers facial recognition in most of Apple's products), sold it, and now back in Europe working with startups.

> Here in SV, that match is almost nearly always met. I even met a women tech founder, yes one of this “pink” unicorns SV is biting it’s hands off to use as a poster child, who lacked a support network.

Trying to decrypt this sentence. You met a female founder in SV, or in the UK? What "support network" was she lacking?

  > The bottom line is this – the right people aren’t leading the pack. I’m not suggesting a personal nomination, but it was still clear there aren’t enough of the right people in the system. Could have I waited it out and became one of those people? Sure, but one thing you learn in tech is that time is not on your side.

   This is so muddled. What are you saying, exactly?

At last, something we can all agree with!

> As far as I am concerned this community doesn’t exist in London.

Simply put this is wrong. London's major problem is that startups have become more popular and readily accessible due to a stronger proclivity to invest at the seed stage amongst people in the financial services. If you cannot raise £150k for your startup's seed round in London, you're doing something wrong.

The big challenge has been at the seed through to Series A stage. Because of a lack of major institutions in the UK with large funds, the institutional backers tend towards later stage deals. A few are actively correcting that and one or two great funds have sprung up to specifically tackle this problem (Profounder, Hoxton Ventures, Passion), but the challenge is the same: because there isn't competition in the funds, only in the startups, there's less likely to be money trickling down to riskier ventures and those who are between seed and Series A.

> Are there high net worth individuals in tech investing in companies in London? Yes, but as a whole, it is neither the correct group nor right number of people to become critical mass.

There should be some kind of rule against asking yourself easy questions so you can look like a genius in a blog post. There are a great many HNWI and UHNWIs in London.

The good point you veer towards making but manage to miss, is that there aren't the high number of $1bn exits in Europe which lead to HNWIs with tech backgrounds investing in companies. I agree with that. But I've also found that there are some, and they're interested in hearing from credible entrepreneurs.

I got bored of the rest of this but here's my tl;dr:

1. Yes there are good reasons to found a startup in San Francisco and not in London. 2. There are also good reasons to found a startup in London and not San Francisco (another topic for a different time). 3. I believe that if you truly have a disruptive idea and the capacity to make it happen, you will not have a problem raising capital. But it tends to be at the higher end of the spectrum (£1bn+ idea) that you will have an easier time raising.

I wish you well in San Francisco but I don't think London was the problem here. I think you had mismanaged expectations. Feel free to ping me if you want to meet for a coffee next time you're in London so we can compare notes on SF vs. London -- address is in profile.

Just kidding, but it's very refreshing to hear that things in London look just as bad as in Paris.

I’ve been in San Francisco for 23 days now. [...]

The California niceness is superficial. Europeans tell you, point-blank, that they think your idea sucks. Californians say "Let's keep in touch" or "If you can find a co-lead, we're definitely in". They kick the rejection can down the road and it can cost you months. New Yorkers are between the two on that spectrum: not as blunt and harsh as Europeans, but closer to it than Californians.

For example, if you're not from Harvard, Stanford, or MIT, you're a second-class citizen in the Valley. Here's the thing, though. Unlike European-style snobbery, which is overt but actually relatively harmless, you're never told that and unless you're unusually attuned, you'll have no idea what's going on. You just aren't as likely to get good projects, promotions, or introductions that make your career what it should be.

The VC-funded, Silicon Valley game is also a Good Ol' Boy network. Don't let the fact that they dress poorly fool you.