How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital

I am completely biased but I think London is one of the best places to live in the world, everything considered.

There's a guy on Instagram who spins a wheel for a random country and goes to eat that cuisine somewhere in London. There are maybe 1 or 2 places in the world you can do that. It's an incredible feat of human diversity to pack hundreds of global cuisines into a 10 mile radius.

Is this really surprising? London picks up all the advantages of the UK (legal system is sound, eg in contract law, native speakers of English, the lingua franca of business, strong university tradition) and adds in its special sauce: access to the City, global-tier culture, excellent public transport (I know we moan about it, but it really is excellent), and a timezone location that easily serves the US and Asia markets.

The awkwardness for founders in London is that when they want to IPO, London doesnt have nearly as deep a pool of capital as the US, so they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table.

I live in a big continental European city that also has a start-up hub. The companies here are also small, creative, solving problems, but don't necessarily aim for an exit and growth at all costs, many of them want to create a sustainable business solving a need that people have.

I think, to the economist, these are just SMEs and a start-up is about making money, an IPO, an exit, the unicorns. And of course London as one of the largest financial hubs will be a good place to start such a business.

But I've always thought of these "SME"-type start-ups as belonging to the start-up category too; after all they "start up" a company and often have ambitious goals and creative, tech driven approaches to solving problems. This is how I've thought it would work when I was younger, and it is how I still think it'd be good to do today, and how I'd try to build a company if I have a good idea to pursue.

Anyways, the point I want to make re the article is that I think the definition is narrow, leaves out a bunch of interesting companies, and thus skews the picture towards London. There are plenty of innovative places around Europe, it's just a different model of doing start-ups. IMO this overly financially motivated view onto the start-up world is quite a bit less interesting than a the broader (maybe harder to quantify) picture.

Smells like marketing stuff.. there are plenty of other places that i think are better.

Yup, London has consistently showing up in geographic hotspots in my job postings data. I think it could be also be due to success of companies like DeepMind.

https://jobswithgpt.com/blog/global_software-engineering_job...

Bruder, komm nach Berlin or frère, allez à Paris

A different perspective: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005

TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.

Funny how San Francisco can't fit the chart they have. League of its own I guess.

This checks out. I live in Silicon Valley but now work for a startup in London. Same vibe, less attitude.

They are not the same. The energy/resources in SF/SV are 5x at a minimum - but London has it going on.

London is tax hell. When tou start to have a family it quickly escalates to the mosr expensive place on earth by far

I wonder who are these people willing to work in London and transfer 60% of their net income directly to landlord. Maybe money doesn't matter because most of the time they spend in work and commuting?

While startup capital flows in, the growth story is very different, and for those living in the UK, it isn't what it seems.

There aren't any jobs in the UK and most are offshored to other low CoL countries.

Young people, founders are leaving for other places like Dubai, Singapore and even SF for higher paying jobs.

That's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors.

London seems equally incredible & terrible.