> So what you get is lots of interesting small to medium size companies - often started in concert with the strong UK academic sector, and/or diaspora from prev

> So what you get is lots of interesting small to medium size companies - often started in concert with the strong UK academic sector, and/or diaspora from previous successes - and very few transitions to global players. In my view the biggest reason for the difference in success between UK/EU tech companies and US ones is simply the sheer size of the US market. Particularly for the current set of big-tech incumbents which are largely consumer focussed. The creation EU Single Market (in which ironically the UK played a large part) was an attempt to compete, but while larger and having greater regulatory uniformity in many areas than the US, different EU countries speak different languages and have a less integrated culture than the US. This makes it harder to grow companies to the size they might in the US.