A culture that promotes self-actualization and risk-taking at the expense of your family or future family.
YC
Centralized (location) and relatively easy to access angel money. Don't talk to me about the VC in London, nobody cares. It's an insider's club. I can walk out the door today and start bumping my side project for seed money (Mountain View). I can't do that in London.
Strong culture of entrepreneurship in alumni organizations (Stanford LOVES this stuff)
Lots of high quality incubators besides YC (my last startup I served as CTO at incubated at StartX)
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You're not going to get me to move to the UK unless there's an aggressive visa program and seed money involved.
> Don't talk to me about the VC in London, nobody cares. It's an insider's club. I can walk out the door today and start bumping my side project for seed money (Mountain View). I can't do that in London.
Silicon Valley VC money is a tiny speck compared to the money flowing through the capital markets of The City. So that begs the question: why is it harder to just walk out the door and round up seed money in London?
Rich money managers are not good angel investors. Slow to act, risk averse, no value add.
London has plenty of rich people, but they're usually old money heirs, or Russians/Middle-Easterners/etc. who didn't make money from tech, or people who work in the City. Not people who got rich by being employee 1-500 at Google, Yahoo, eBay, etc.
(Frankly, UK banks are obsessed with property, which is one of the things that holds back the UK economy: small business lending in the UK is throttled by growth in house prices because the only reliable way for small business startups to raise seed capital is by mortgaging their personal property. Hence a stop-go economy which lurches between over-expansion and contraction as the property market goes from boom to bust.)
A culture that promotes self-actualization and risk-taking at the expense of your family or future family.
YC
Centralized (location) and relatively easy to access angel money. Don't talk to me about the VC in London, nobody cares. It's an insider's club. I can walk out the door today and start bumping my side project for seed money (Mountain View). I can't do that in London.
Strong culture of entrepreneurship in alumni organizations (Stanford LOVES this stuff)
Lots of high quality incubators besides YC (my last startup I served as CTO at incubated at StartX)
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You're not going to get me to move to the UK unless there's an aggressive visa program and seed money involved.