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How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital
https://archive.ph/ebA1T https://archive.ph/ebA1T
- nullfield 8mo agoSo how do I get a Sr. Dev job in London from US public sector?
- jacquesm 8mo agoThat's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors.
- ctrlmeta 8mo ago> That's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors. One after another? The only one that closed office was Andreessen Horowitz. What's the "another"? I don't know why all the London threads attract this kind of dishonest comments!
- claude_sh_1959 8mo agoSmells like marketing stuff.. there are plenty of other places that i think are better.
- paradox460 8mo agoSand Hill road
- arjie 8mo agoThat would be pretty funny to say. Where are America's startups founded? Principally the San Francisco Bay Area. What about the Rest of the World? Oh, principally the San Francisco Bay Area. It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
- kaashif 8mo agoIt's not based on marketing, it appears to be based on metrics like amount of venture capital raised.
- alephnerd 8mo agoHaving a London domicile often leads to an overstating in venture capital raised for the UK ecosystem. For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications. Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors. [0] - https://www.ft.com/content/926f4969-fda7-4e78-b106-4888c8704bda https://www.ft.com/content/926f4969-fda7-4e78-b106-4888c8704...
- fakedang 8mo agoStartups like Builder AI use London because a.) they want to raise money from filthy rich Arab investors and b.) those guys are not known for doing much due diligence. They go more by vibes and hype and who's on the existing cap table. Also c.) they are very comfortable with London because it was so much easier back in the day to launder or siphon away funds from their home countries. London is an extremely popular destination for Gulf Arabs. You'll get a lot of shady startups of that kind in London for this reason.
- alephnerd 8mo agoNot all Arab investors are bad - for example, funds associated with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (eg. ADIA, Mubadala) has been extremely successful in their investments explicitly because Tahnoon studied engineering in San Diego (and rolled at Gracie's gym) back in the day. Additonally, for every failed investment like builder.ai a fund like QIA and MS Ventures has had multiple other successful investments. The perception of "shadiness" in the London VC scene arises simply because a subset of non-American VC simply does not care about value investing and product-led growth. Additonally, it's not like the UK doesn't have good VCs and Growth Equity investors - for example Index Ventures and Ballie Guiffold both have a solid track record. Being overly congratulatory and being overly pessimistic about the UK scene does more harm than good.
- dukeyukey 8mo agoFor you specifically that may be true, but the numbers say London dominates by far.
- personjerry 8mo agoI'm waiting for the yearly "Waterloo is the Silicon Valley of Canada" article that always fails to deliver its promise. I grew up in Waterloo but it's just not it lol.
- captain_coffee 8mo agoCould you give only a few examples from those PLENTY of other places that are better? Like the first 10 that come to your mind, you made me very curious!
- quentindanjou 8mo agoNot the person you asked but I am thinking of France and Germany. France has Station F (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_F). There are also Portugal, Spain and Romania that are rising contenders. I am also very dubious of UK being "world first"
- flawn 8mo agoBruder, komm nach Berlin or frère, allez à Paris
- lifestyleguru 8mo agoCome to Germany, the letters from Rundfunkbeitrag and Waldorf Frommer are already waiting for you!
- haspok 8mo agoYou've not heard of the UK's TV license then.
- another_twist 8mo agoOh come on. You get the BBC for that money. I gladly pay it byt then I work in tech.
- renewiltord 8mo agoI arrive in 2026. Decide to start a startup. By the year 2038, the state mandated reader of legal documents has finished reading out aloud to me and my co-founder. Now we find a VC. His documents need to be read to us both. But the Y2K38 problem strikes. He thinks we are in the year 1970. He needs to read us the "ancient company addendum". While he's reading he chokes and keels over, dead from the emissions from his Volkswagen. Our ARR may be zero, but what about our government grants? Also zero. My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.
- michaelscott 8mo agoThis was crafted with a subtlety that captures the continental combination of infrastructural petrification and untethered pride perfectly. Wonderful
- romanhn 8mo agoA different perspective: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005 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.
- philipwhiuk 8mo agoThere's an argument that some of these takeovers should have been blocked.
- dukeyukey 8mo ago> enabled by London’s shrinking public markets That doesn't seem to be true?
- alephnerd 8mo agoIt is - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/london-drops-out-of-top-20-ipo-markets-after-69-plunge-in-fundraising https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/london-dr... Edit: can't reply The majority of IPOs in 2025 were in 4 markets - US, China, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea [0]. It's really hard to exit in the LSE currently, and this article is self congratulatory while ignoring major recent (past 2-3 years) mistakes that negatively impacted the entrepreneurship scene in the UK (eg. the revocation of funding for Tech Nation [1] and the ongoing leadership crisis at Monzo [2] which makes no one look good). [0] - https://www.ey.com/en_pt/insights/ipo/trends https://www.ey.com/en_pt/insights/ipo/trends [1] - https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down [2] - https://www.ft.com/content/3405c6f3-931b-4fe3-a169-a9665a132d48 https://www.ft.com/content/3405c6f3-931b-4fe3-a169-a9665a132...
- dukeyukey 8mo agoNo it isn't, London's IPOs in 2025 were mostly towards the end of the year, after that article was written. London ended up about 8th worldwide for issuances in 2025 - https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/research-commentary/2025/london-has-strongest-year-for-ipos-since-2021-with-a-strong-q4-f.html https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/research-com... Plus, the FTSE 100 returned 25.8% last year. That is not a shrinking market! EDIT: I'd prefer you not change the subject away from your capital markets claim, but to address the other links: 1. I didn't say London was a top 4 IPO location, just that it's market aren't shrinking. 2. Tech Nation still exists, and still administers that visa. I don't know why you posted a very out of date article about it. 3. It's not ideal that such a high profile company is having issues like that, but hey, stuff happens. OpenAI had a whole goddamn coup and counter-coup happen!
- edogrider 8mo agoThis 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.
- HPMOR 8mo agoYeah SF is 10x every other place in earth. People that think things are comparable have never lived here.
- qweiopqweiop 8mo ago10x more insufferable tech bros too? I've never lived there true, but I've spent some time there to know this place isn't for me.
- bbarn 8mo agoWorking for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
- Quarrelsome 8mo agobest reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not. I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic: > it's not ideal is it? or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the: > as you say sir > very good sir with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0] Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s03Fq1nsbng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s03Fq1nsbng (The full scene is around 11:30 in the first episode and I think its captures a conversation of subtext and indirectness quite well).
- _tgxm 8mo agoYup, 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_jobs_january_2026/ https://jobswithgpt.com/blog/global_software-engineering_job...
- philipwhiuk 8mo agoAnother British company swallowed by the US :(
- brokencode 8mo agoAt least Elon Musk didn’t end up getting it, which he tried before Google swooped in.
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- sjhuda 8mo agoYeah, lots of examples of that happening. Runna was the latest one I can remember. I won't be suprised at all if ElevenLabs is bought out by a big US player soon.
- throwaway7783 8mo agoFunny how San Francisco can't fit the chart they have. League of its own I guess.
- alephnerd 8mo agoIt truly is. I've seen multiple pre-seed startups and founders burn significant amounts of personal capital in order to land an O-1A visa because of how much capital and mentorship is available here.
- JumpinJack_Cash 8mo agoIs the juice worth the squeeze? Then you'd feel like it's not you/your idea/your company but the ecosytem at large
- lifestyleguru 8mo agoI 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?
- ojhughes 8mo agoIsn’t it the same deal in every major tech hub?
- lifestyleguru 8mo agoIn other European "tech hubs" you're not going to find a job or will not be able to rent anything.
- LunaSea 8mo agoOr you can come to SF and live in your car or at the gym.
- retinaros 8mo agoLondon is #1 at that. You earn a bit more than rest of europe but everything is way more expensive
- dangus 8mo agoThe math works out for almost every HCOL area. Your salary is higher. Rent is high too but people either choose to live further away or accept a smaller apartment/condo. London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
- lifestyleguru 8mo agoThere goes another 15% of your net income on train tickets. Eating out every time (because have no time for proper value shopping) and you are basically working in exchange of food, housing, and commute.
- kjellsbells 8mo agoIs 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.
- hadlock 8mo agoStartups might thrive there, but business investment in England (particularly in mature businesses) has not exactly been lively ever since Brexit. I can't recall the last time I heard someone talking favorably about investing in England, or at all, really.
- funkyfiddler369 8mo agoright, people will just tell you the best places and things to invest in ... during a game of chess: "hey why'd you make that move?"
- coldcity_again 8mo ago"hey why'd you make that bid?" is a valid question that must be answered during a game of bridge..
- funkyfiddler369 8mo agoI don't know bridge and I did not google. Would you be so kind to be verbose? Your comment made me curious ... but I was busy
- pyuser583 8mo agoOr since the anti-corruption reforms of 2015-2018. Which frustratingly overlap with Brexit, making it hard to tell whether this is “good driving business away” or “bad driving business away.”
- walthamstow 8mo agoI 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.
- lifestyleguru 8mo agoThere is only so much of food one can eat and after all potatoes and steak do the job as well.
- marbro 8mo ago[dead]
- CatMustard 8mo agoIt's okay not to be that into food, but a bit odd to expect everyone else to be the same. If I had to eat steak and potatoes every day I'd be miserable by day 2.
- stackbutterflow 8mo agoConversely it's true for the parent comment. Being able to eat food from any country is a plus only to those who are into that hobby. Personally it ranks pretty low in my list of things that make a city a great city. And if we're talking about food, access to fresh, high quality and affordable produce is way more important than being able to eat Afghan food at 3am. These criteria are arbitrary and don't make a city better than another imho.
- lifestyleguru 8mo agoCompletely agree. "All food of the world at 3am" wears out pretty quickly. Much higher priority for me is access to fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat at a good price.
- tremarley 8mo agoLondon seems equally incredible & terrible.
- colesantiago 8mo agoWhile 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.
- dukeyukey 8mo agoThis doesn't seem true, I work in a UK tech company and it's an incredibly international team. My team has three Brits (including me), a Norwegian, a Swede, a Pole, and an American. The CEO is Irish, the CTO is German/American. Obviously that's just one data point, but every tech company is similar.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo agoThis is generally how it is. For the entry level market you have a realistic choice of 5 companies like Barclays, BT, Amazon, SKY for limited positions while competing against the world for them. A fresh linkedin job post for tech even for no-name companies gets a 100+ applicants in under an hour starting at 30k salaries. I'm not even sure which startups are hiring graduates except maybe from Oxbridge. It is obvious a lot of people commenting particularly in this thread are ultra-privileged expats where "London" is just zone 1 for them and are well connected in the industry. They probably don't even know what Morley's is. Living costs along with the high tax rates alone will eat up your income and I know British people who work in international bank's at senior positions complaining about these things and about mass immigration all the time.
- retinaros 8mo agoLondon is tax hell. When tou start to have a family it quickly escalates to the mosr expensive place on earth by far
- fhennig 8mo agoI 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.
- altacc 8mo agoI think you're right that the ambitions in Europe are smaller and I'd say more likely healthier for those involved and maybe the world in general. I have spent some time working in a start up hub in Scandinavia and there was the usual talk of innovation, disruption, work hard, etc... but by 4:30 the offices were empty and people had gone home to their families. Work life balance still came first.
- eloisant 8mo agoIt's not that the founders have smaller ambitions, it's that they can't find fundings to really grow the size of US tech companies. And when they do find fundings, it's in US so they move their company there.
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- notepad0x90 8mo agoThe big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms. For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc... Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"? On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified. It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes. Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts. If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
- hardlianotion 8mo agoSounds more like a company problem than a London problem. Wages also - the distribution is very wide.
- slgeorge 8mo agoDo you have an experience working in Europe or the UK? > I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality. My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency. Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
- ebiester 8mo agoAs a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?
- martinald 8mo agoThere's a lot of problems with bureaucracy there (I've lived in London and Lisbon). It's a great city but the government is insanely inefficient (compared to the UK IME). Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all. In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues. It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there. The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.
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- TuringNYC 8mo agoI cant speak to all this, but as an American doing a lot of work in London, wow transportation is incredibly great. Shockingly impressive. Traveling to London, and getting around London, and doing a lot of meetings in a small trip, is easier than anywhere in the US now because of how beautifully their transit system works (despite occasional delays which can be expected.) The rollout of the Elizabeth Line from Heathrow airport is also eye-opening. In NYC we speak about new subways lines with hundred-year plans (recall the 2nd ave subway extension) but in London the smoothly operating Elizabeth Line seemed to be introduced out of thin air.
- interludead 8mo agoAnd for a city that wants to be a global startup hub, that kind of frictionless mobility matters way more than people realize
- amadeuspagel 8mo agoWhen I visited London for the first time (from germany) I was impressed by how you can pay for the tube by swiping your credit card at the entry and exit. It's not just a great experience for the rider, but it also gives the transit agency the resources and the incentive to improve. A new line is not a question of politics, it's just profitable.
- oceansky 8mo agoI've visited Paris and London a few months ago as a tourist. I am really impressed by London public transport, both the classical red double deck buses and the subway.
- techterrier 8mo agohaving done a lot of work on it in a previous career, I can confirm that it was born out or no shortage of blood, sweat and signalling snafus.
- sjhuda 8mo agoThin air? It was delivered 3 years late and cost £5bn more than it should have. While projects like HS2 to the North are scaled back. The UK uses other parts of the county as a piggy bank to fund London projects. I have a dog in this fight as I'm quite close to the public transport industry in the North and it's pretty disheartening to see politicans use us as some sort of "policy win" and then never follow through with it. Manchester only recently got devolved powers meaning the region did not have to get approval from Westminster on how they use their money and the bus and tram system has completely improved in the sapce of a couple of years (unified tickets, tap and go) with the suburban rail to come into that this year. What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better.
- cong-or 8mo agoSurprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom?
- TuringNYC 8mo ago>> Surprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom? thinking about comparisons, in SF the average 1B is $3300 https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-francisco-ca/?bedrooms=1 https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-fran... In NYC it is similar. SF's challenge is that the business distract is split across 2 areas (SF, SV) 50mi apart, with extremely sparse public transit in SV. Everything is doable, just be prepared for $100 Uber bills as you go between meetings. In NY the business district is thankfully mostly centralized. However, poor commuter train service outside of Manhattan makes everything more expensive as there is insatiable appetite in central areas to avoid the commuter trains.
- agentcoops 8mo agoYeah, I've lived in London, New York and San Francisco for work and the first had the lowest cost of living in absolute terms. Local developer salaries are, however, shockingly low outside of finance and consulting to US eyes. The public transportation point is definitely key: London is just so unspeakably large spatially and it's all more or less well-connected that there isn't the same scarcity of commutable apartments as in NYC/SF. It wasn't uncommon for older colleagues to even commute in from Kent or elsewhere in the English countryside -- and often their morning train wasn't much longer than my own.
- short_sells_poo 8mo agoThe issue is that wages in London are much lower for tech than in SF or NY. If you want to make good money in London, you have to work in finance, and preferably in the investment business. London is a very expensive city, and the median income is actually very low compared to it. There is a high concentration of people who are very well off, but everyone else is struggling.
- interludead 8mo agoSo London feels less like a Silicon Valley replacement and more like the world's best startup nursery
- slgeorge 8mo agoLondon's basically great for: 1. Startups 2. Scaling/Growth 3. Existing company expanding from USA->Europe or Europe->USA It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA. For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around. For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA. For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.
- metaPushkin 8mo agoWhat about taxes ?
- drdrek 8mo agoHub / City Area,Total Tech Startups,Total Funding (2025 Est.),Total Residents (Metro),Startups per 1k Residents,Money per 1k Residents San Francisco (Bay Area),"18,052",$122.0 Billion,7.7 Million,2.34,$15.84 Million New York City,"15,000+",$45.0 Billion,19.5 Million,0.77,$2.31 Million London,"8,900",$26.0 Billion,9.0 Million,0.99,$2.89 Million Tel Aviv (Area),"2,996",$12.0 Billion,4.2 Million,0.71,$2.86 Million Beijing,"2,350",$18.0 Billion,21.9 Million,0.11,$0.82 Million Paris,"3,200",$10.0 Billion,13.1 Million,0.24,$0.76 Million Bangalore,"3,500",$12.0 Billion,14.0 Million,0.25,$0.86 Million
- m00dy 8mo agoI personally think Wyoming will be the capital of startups, especially 30 N Gould Str is going to be the street of world's startups.
- erratic_chargi 8mo agoNo no you simple minded USAmerican. It's obviously going to be Uruguay, its on it's way to transform from MonteVideo to MonteLLM /s
- m00dy 8mo agoI'm not an american :)
- realty_geek 8mo agoWhich makes me all the more disappointed that Birmingham (close to me) doesn't have a better startup ecosystem. It is an ideal place to benefit from London (little over an hour away) without the crazy prices. Anyone here based around the midlands, say hello / "alright bab"....
- jmyeet 8mo agoLondon is the money laundering capital of Europe [1]. The entire London property market has been propped up by Russian kleptocrats [2]. I'm not saying startup money is (necessarily) illegal or at least dubious in origin. I am saying that London's banking and legal system heavily favors companies and invetors. And that's the point. It's the same reason Delaware is the de facto standard for incorporation for American companies. Granted, English is widely spoken in London and that's factor for cross-pollination of talent between the US and the UK. It also has an easier visa situation than the US. On top of that, salaries in tech in London are much lower than the US [3]. The cost of living in London is actually pretty awful. London's biggest problem is that the UK is no longer in the EU. Long term I see this as a strategic problem because (IMHO) the EU is going to be incentivized and ultimately forced to make their own versions of key US tech companies in much the same way as China has. And the EU won't want that outside of EU jurisdiction. It defeats the point. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/nearly-40-of-dirty-money-is-laundered-in-london-and-uk-crown-dependenies https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/nearly... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/06/how-london-became-the-place-to-be-for-putins-oligarchs https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/06/how-london-b... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17462135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17462135
- webdevver 8mo agowell, the split is both ways. lets not forget that depite a lot of talk and wish-casting, the EU is still largely impotent. I know for sure that I am envious of my colleagues in the US. but europe? hmm... regarding the Russian kleptocrat situation, you can't knock London for having a Profitable Business Arrangement. The biggest enemy of any Russian oligarch are other Russian oligarchs. it makes sense then, to keep your dragon hoard where none of them can touch it (possibly not even you!) ofcourse it becomes even funnier when all of them get the same idea, converging on the same optimal strategy... indeed any and all mafiosos are welcome to safeguard their assets in London banks (for a price, and not neccesarily monetary.) whatever happened to the venezuelan gold? if that then serves to subsidize the rest of the UK ordinary citizenry, hey, you could say the UK in the business of karmic repayment.
- robotburrito 8mo agoCan a software engineer afford to buy a home on a London salary? Or is it a similar experience to living in the Bay Area?