Just to get the ball rolling, whilst I'm biased (Londoner) I still think the UK is a good place to start a business. For one London/Manchester are fantastic pl

Just to get the ball rolling, whilst I'm biased (Londoner) I still think the UK is a good place to start a business. For one London/Manchester are fantastic places to find a quality working space and good talent and at prices far more reasonable than say Silicon Valley which is an incredibly expensive place to get a startup going. Furthermore as far as investment opportunities go, the sudden drop in the £ (~20%) has made UK assets like property (and startups) proportionately cheaper - as a result UK startups are more attractive for foreign investors. It's one of the reasons the UK property market at least is still strong and why the other shoe hasn't (yet) dropped. One issue however with having a SaaS type startup in the UK is that if you're purchasing a large amount of cloud capacity in $ terms you're going to find yourself disadvantaged compared to your American competitors. A way to mitigate that might be to have your customers pay in $s rather than £s. Regarding the surveillance laws issue I think the UK/US face the same problems. Governments are able to make sealed requests to companies for data without being challenged in both countries and it seems to take an Amazon or Apple to be able to push back. I doubt many small American companies have as much success saying 'no' to government subpoenas. From what I hear Germany is meant to be much more privacy friendly than the UK or US, so if your startup is contingent upon that then I think Berlin might be the place to go. These are pretty dark days across the world unfortunately and the pendulum of company regulation and personal liberty swings back and forth from country to country. Sometimes making the most of the location you're in can be the best choice. Best of luck.