22 ms·

I’m leaving London for NYC and taking my tech startup

143 points by cesarosum 5y ago

DocTomoe 5y ago
As an European, I am quite happy with a less aggressive sales tactic - it makes companies focus on quality over whoever gets the loudest sales guy.
moab 5y ago
A little off-topic, but I find it strange to brand the company around the "Eigen" name when it's already a super well-known C++ numerical library: https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
- blackbear_ 5y ago
  "super well-known" totally depends on which bubble you live in. "Eigen" immediately made me think at the eigendecomposition [1], which is a relatively common operation in AI, and probably served as inspiration for the names of both the C++ library and the company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigendecomposition_of_a_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigendecomposition_of_a_matrix
ricardobayes 5y ago
Not sure I get the part of talent pool. Exactly which part of AI research or development can't be done as remote work?
- nivenkos 5y ago
  You still need a tax office to hire people as employees though. But yeah, they could easily operate in both countries if they're willing to move everything like this!
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    Just bring them on as contractors, problem solved...
aaa_aaa 5y ago
Summary: He received free money from EU. Now that he could not get enough from UK government, he is leaving.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  And not to the EU, but the US.
- jstx1 5y ago
  This is misleading. Their staff having EU-funded PhDs is very different from receiving free money from the EU.
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    Technically correct, though he is directly benefiting from EU funding. Or was.
  - simsla 5y ago
    In the EU industry PhDs are fairly common. In this case, the PhD student does R&D work for a company, and gets paid through an EU PhD grant. For some companies, it's an indirect way to get funding, because it provides for cheaper highly skilled labour. (Anecdote incoming) For example, many years ago at the end of my industry internship, the company offered to continue the project as a PhD, pursuant grant funding. When I declined, they offered a well paid full-time job to do the same.
- artembugara 5y ago
  Literally each part of this sentence is false
- callamdelaney 5y ago
  He’s almost certainly just re-hashing open source AI anyways.
someonewhocar3s 5y ago
Because you started off an apolitical asshole, but it turns out 'marine blue' matches your eyes, and you can say 'I love how the King stretches me' because the commonwealth fits your ideals like a glove. Now you're absolutely down with the peculiarchie and Celtic subject laws. Of course, you couldn't phantom not to have to pick a partner military - that was just a little bit too adventerious for you. Oh, ok, I got it the wrong way around. ("Why I'm leaving, (trading) London for NYC, (and getting a tax break works anyway)") he's wrong to go to NYC. Their earlier Bitcoin regulations state it well enough. Incapable.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aigo 5y ago
> Almost my entire R&D team who received PhDs from British universities had them funded by the European Union Well, there you go.
- agent008t 5y ago
  Was the UK not a net contributor to the EU budget? And therefore, why cannot the UK fund PhDs more effectively than the EU? I would've thought being less removed from the universities and research groups would make funding more effective.
  - user568439 5y ago
    That's the Brexiters logic, but it turns out UK was not only contributing to the EU but also trading. Now it doesn't need to contribute anymore but it also lost exports, access to talent and so on.
    - agent008t 5y ago
      Fine, but my point is there is no reason for Brexit to be a net negative when it comes to the funding of PhDs - if anything, it offers an opportunity to be more effective at funding. Same when it comes to the specific issue of access to talent - nothing in principle stopping the UK from making it extremely easy for talent to come to the UK.
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        Anything remotely related to the EU is toxic as far as the current government is concerned. This includes immigration which they successfully tied to the EU in voters minds.
      - roomey 5y ago
        The point is that there was both scales of economy due to the Erasmus program and a lot of pan European research grants.. Being able to pull from a Europe wide talant pool was a huge benefit to the UK and her universities. So there was massive, irreplaceable benefits just for universities lost due to the Brexit project. Along with that Brexit has cost the UK a ton of money.. this net contributer stuff was literal propaganda. The UK is worse off now, with less funding to go around.
jgrahamc 5y ago
Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively. The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from Cloudflare’s perspective our London-based EMEA sales team has been spectacularly effective. Early in Eigen’s history there were many London-based employees who prioritised technological purity over commercial success; it was almost fatal for us. However hard it is, the UK needs to transform its cultural attitude to sales. I think that’s a leadership issue not about “London”. The team we built in London was/is all about commercial success.
- waihtis 5y ago
  Personal anecdote - depends on where you are on the technology adoption bell curve. Innovative, a bit "out-there" things seem to be better received in the US.
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  London does sales well, if you want a sales office you open it in london. What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea. Even less so to someone with a crap idea. Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else. They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised. To back up the point that John is making, "Technical purity" above all else is a symptom of leadership not explaining the business needs well enough. (or not putting in place an engineering team with enough pragmatism to translate business to tech. )
  - jgrahamc 5y ago
    I mean, good luck to him moving his HQ to NYC etc. but if I were an employee in London HM The Queen's tea cup in Windsor would be shaking from the sonic boom after I lit the reheats on my CV.
mg 5y ago
Are there any European websites in the Alexa top 50? https://www.alexa.com/topsites https://www.alexa.com/topsites For all I know, Europe mostly missed the internet. Will the same happen with AI, data centers, solar, crypto and biotech?
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  We are dumb, here in Europe. We don't know anything about Internet or computers on this side of the pond. We did't make any advances in science and technology. US did everything by itself, without importing brains from other countries. We are humbly grateful the Usians gave us Google Ads, Facebook, iPhones and PornHub, things which are absolutely essential to any being not living in a cave.
- dgellow 5y ago
  VK.com is European if you’re talking about the continent. Though not if you’re talking about the EU.
- czzr 5y ago
  The web was invented in Europe. Still, you’re right, few big internet successes in Europe. Problem is almost entirely addressable market size.
  - mg 5y ago
    What hinders Europeans to address big markets?
    - dukeyukey 5y ago
      More limited home markets, in both a regulatory and cultural way.
      - mg 5y ago
        Since we are talking about internet companies - why is the home market important?
jstx1 5y ago
I wonder how you move a company with about 200 employees to a different country and time zone.
- soco 5y ago
  Especially when they prioritize technological purity over commercial success. Okay irony aside, you kick (most of) them out and hire new folks.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  Fire UK engineers, hire US sales people.
ageitgey 5y ago
I run a US-based start-up with a distributed team, but I personally live in London. I'd say a lot of this is true. I don't personally know how Brexit has or hasn't affected talent availability yet, but everything else lines up with my experience. US investors throw money around and European investors are much more traditional. But I'd like to offer a different perspective on this quote from the article: > I am not alone in believing Europe has a problem with founders and investors, who lack ambition in comparison to the best of Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. While I have been blessed with my European investors, who are very much the exception to this rule and share my ambition, I have seen this lack of boldness during my various fundraising processes with many other investors. The US VC market right now is very "frothy", as the VCs say. It's so frothy, you might as well say the froth has churned into butter. The article says that European investors lack "boldness", but one might instead say that US investors are lacking outlets for their ample capital and will throw money at nearly anything right now. I guess it depends on your point of view. But the truth remains - it's a whole lot easier to raise money in the US right now.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  How do you manage a company from across the Atlantic? What does your tax situation look like? Do you personally enjoy living in London or are you there in spite of your interests?
  - ageitgey 5y ago
    1. One day at a time. But in all seriousness, a good co-founder and team. Also, we started the company during COVID which I think made the VCs less worried a about a full remote situation. 2. US citizen but UK tax resident. So two income tax returns. It's a pain, but thankfully the tax treaty means one offsets the other and it works out in the end. 3. Personally want to live in London
    - tixocloud 5y ago
      Feel your pain. Canadian citizen who previously founded startup in London and had to pay double taxes. Enjoyed the life in London though. Would love to go back some day.
stillblue 5y ago
I'm slightly confused. Is the traditional way not the stable way to go about things instead of how it is done in the US? These seem more like positives than negatives to me.
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Bye Bye!
soco 5y ago
I really like the way he describes Europe. Pretty much the way I see it as well.
goldcd 5y ago
I work for a company head-quartered in one continent, listed on another and I work in a third (the UK) - and sales are based all over. Not for one moment saying there aren't local issues/idiosyncrasies - but I'm unsure how moving your company solves them, and article seems to overlook all manner of problems: Aren't you going to lose staff when you move? Is everybody going to have to get up really early to talk to Europe? Won't new employees cost more in NA? i.e. Why not just hire a US based sales rep to sell to your US customers, in the style that works there? (and a native speaking, convervative, tech-enabled one for Germany etc) Or just register yourself at a Missouri PO, list in the US, seek US investors etc?
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  Well precisely Moving to NYC/silicon valley is going to mean fishing in a very over fished pool. There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour. Even if you don't loose staff, operating an engineering team over large distances is a challenge unless you know what your doing. Given that he's blaming the engineers for concentrating on "technical purity" when I assume he was in charge, I suspect he's not really of the right mindset to be responsive enough to make the changes needed. Still, best of luck. I look forward to the updates on progress.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Facebook recruiting in London feel about as desperate to fill their pipeline as Google did ten years ago these days. London has many great qualities, but tech hiring here is also really challenging.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      > Facebook recruiting in London feel about as desperate to fill their pipeline as Google did ten years ago these days. I'd say it's more size than desperation. Yeah, recruiting in London probably gives you lower bang for the buck than tapping other labor markets. But once you reach a certain size, you're going to be recruiting in basically every market, since good people are a small proportion of the population and you have a huge need for good people. For example, Google has had great success in hiring Serbian developers. They also hire developers in Brazil, Poland, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, France, etc - 40 different countries. To exclude England would be kinda weird. Facebook being a few years behind Google makes sense, and they'll end up in a similar position, basically hiring everywhere.
black_13 5y ago
Well awe shucks.
matthewmorgan 5y ago
It's pretty common in Europe for people to get a socially-funded education then go off to the USA. It's called brain drain and has been happening for a while, not sure why this guy needs to write an article pretending that's not what's happening here.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  You don't really have a choice do you? Is he supposed to refuse to go to college for free/low cost because he pays taxes to be able to do that?
- dbolgheroni 5y ago
  I also see a lot of brain drain in Brazil. Most are from public colleges, and they go mostly to Europe.
  - stayfrosty420 5y ago
    I thought this was because lots of Brazilians are eligible for Portuguese passports
    - f6v 5y ago
      Many come straight to Germany or other more rich EU countries.
      - te_chris 5y ago
        If you've got a European passport then you can go anywhere in the EU.
      - gpderetta 5y ago
        A portuguese passport would allow just that. So would an Italian passport (many South Americans, especially from Brazil and Argentina would qualify).
        5y ago
setgree 5y ago
> Advances in the type of small data AI we do — AI created without vast data sets — would have only been possible here in Europe, with its deep and diverse technical and mathematical talent. This would have been difficult in Silicon Valley given US tech’s reluctance to experiment and innovate, beyond the conventional “big data AI” approach. Can anyone expand on what the author is saying here/validate it with personal experience? I have never thought of AI advances as “only” being possible in Europe, or of the US tech scene as reluctant to innovate.
- liuyipei 5y ago
  He is talking about work that involves a deep understanding of the domain and data, on smaller datasets that require a lot more framing to make sense of. I understand the author to be saying that "small data AI" activities as a fraction of all AI work in the US is lower, because in the US it is so much easier to make more money doing big-data work instead.
c7DJTLrn 5y ago
Sounds like the author is upset that Brexit has closed the valve on the pipeline of cheap labour from EU workers. There's no shortage of talent in London trust me, it's just that you're going to have to start paying more than a pittance to get it. Brexit so far has been a positive thing for tech workers' salaries.
- Veen 5y ago
  Yes, I voted remain but I suspect the businesses yelling that they can't hire really mean they can't hire for what they were accustomed to paying before Brexit. It's particularly prevalent in lower paid areas like transport, coffee shops, and agriculture. If the success of your business depended on low wages Brits won't accept, you're likely to be in trouble.
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    The issue isn't pay itself but companies not knowing how to operate with higher wages (i.e. how to economise on labour usage) and not knowing how to deal with tight labour markets. In agriculture, you have farmers complaining about no labour whilst they are failing to use machines that could replace the labour (and, unf, agriculture in the UK has turned into one massive IHT avoidance scheme...so most of the operators are clueless). In retail, you still have companies doing multi-day interviews with logical reasoning tests, team-working tests, problem solving exercises for shelf stacking positions (which, btw, they are getting people to do for free with no training on welfare-to-work programs). I am not sure if I agree with the original post. Is it completely off though? No. Not at all.
- brianmcc 5y ago
  "cheap EU labour" tends to apply more to fruit pickers than AI PhDs I suspect
  - kranke155 5y ago
    Nope. Eastern European brilliant minds would flock to London and get paid far lower salaries than they were worth. Ukranians, Lithuanians. The legacy of communist math is alive and well - they were generally better than any western european talent you could get and cheaper. They would always get the top jobs, but the regular influx of new blood meant salaries were stuck.
varjag 5y ago
Likely a prequel to "leaving NYC for SF".
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Wherever he goes his problems will follow him. The US won't be a utopia when it comes to hiring PhD's with sales skills either.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    I can't think of a worse group of people to try and make do sales. Good sales requires cultivating the right environment for good sales people. That means you need good pipeline. Sales people are blood-thirsty mercenaries who go wherever the most pipeline is so that they can maximize their personal income. They're short-term minded people who only care about results over the next quarter. Ph.Ds are inherently delayed-gratification types of people. Salespeople are thrill-seekers (aka, always crash the sales department's parties if you want to have the best time).
  - 0x4d464d48 5y ago
    "PhD's with sales skills..." Sounds expensive.
xyzzy123 5y ago
My 2c theory for the difference in investor outlook is "old money" vs "new money". Old money is more risk averse - avoiding capital loss is more important than making the biggest gains. It's probably not possible to preserve a fortune for hundreds or thousands of years without this kind of attitude. There are a LOT of really old money families in Europe (and they are a big part of the ruling class) and I believe this colours the entire investment outlook. In China the money is even newer than the US (practically no billionaires by inheritance for fairly obvious reasons), so would expect them to be even more aggressive and this seems to play out. One place I see the cracks in this idea are former Soviet states. It seems like their billionaires should be more willing to back moonshot investments than they actually are. Perhaps it is because many of their billionaires are politically connected oligarchs and don't back growth plays in the same way (more about gaining and keeping control of existing pie). An alternative would be that it's cultural in some more complex way and proportion of inherited wealth is either a factor or actually a consequence of other things going on.
NetBeck 5y ago
There's EU draft regulation regarding AI utilization. Prohibited AI would be described as, "...systems or applications that manipulate human behaviour in order to circumvent the free will of the users."[0] [0] https://www.ey.com/en_ch/ai/eu-draft-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence https://www.ey.com/en_ch/ai/eu-draft-regulation-on-artificia...
an9n 5y ago
Not particularly convinced about the Brexit angle or the comments on sales - for example, you can bet that The City has some highly aggressive salesmen/women given its status. But from my perspective Europe suffers from a problem of culture - there is seriously old money here and, I'd assert, a related, outdated zero-sum/dog in the manger mentality. Anything like FAANG, Tesla, SpaceX etc that seriously threatens to disrupt the status quo is either stillborn, strangled at birth or shortly thereafter as this guild's dead hand does its work.
- dogman144 5y ago
  interesting perspective i have not heard before but make sense as a narrative. wonder what data is behind that - seriously old elites shutting down innovation.
drumhead 5y ago
I dont understand, does he want the technical staff to sell because he doesnt have a sales team or is it that the staff were not creating a commercial project? If thats was the case then why didnt he or other management step in and do something about it? If Brexit was a problem why didnt they just relocate to Berlin, Paris or Stockholm? Or is this all to do with the much higher ratings tech companies receive in the US?
m0zg 5y ago
Highest effective tax in the US, insanely expensive real estate and rents, high and rising crime [1]. Good luck, you're gonna need it. [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1006/nypd-citywide-crime-statistics-september-2021 https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1006/nypd-citywide-cri...
kingcharles 5y ago
Trying to start a business in the UK: "What are you doing? You'll fail! You'll go bankrupt! You'll be homeless! Why don't you get a nice civil service job with a government pension?" Trying to start a business in the USA: "Rock on, bro! You're going to be the next Zuckerberg/Gates/Bezos!"
- mdda 5y ago
  Failing at a business in the UK: "Told you so! And now everybody knows you're a failure." Failing at a business in the US: "Every success has a few failures on the journey : If you have another go, it'll prove that you're a fighter!" Succeeding at a business in the UK: "Who did you screw over to make that money?" Succeeding at a business in the US: "Awesome! Let me pitch you my idea..."
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  >Trying to start a business in the USA: "Rock on, bro! You're going to be the next Zuckerberg/Gates/Bezos!" Same person, few years later: "I don't care you are homeless and have nothing to eat. I didn't force you make stupid things. Get of my lawn, I'll have guests later!"
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    I'm in the USA. I generally think of Americans as incredibly selfish when compared to other cultures. But I was homeless and hungry and I've been surprised at the generosity of strangers to help me out.
unobatbayar 5y ago
Best of luck.
Quarrelsome 5y ago
So what does he mean exactly? He just says some vague stuff about "bad at sales" and smth about the "culture" without actually giving any examples of what he really means. He mentions Brexit, mentions hiring then says it's not as big a deal as "sales". Then mentions EU funding for workers, then stops talking. So what does he mean? Do British sales people not bother contacting anyone, do all British customers hate sales people and tell them to sod off? This is like Brexit all over when someone mentions some vague thing and everyone starts commenting with their own interpretation of what it means but nobody bothers to pin down what it actually means. What does it mean? I have no clue at all. I felt like I knew more before I read this article than after.
eggy 5y ago
Hopefully crime goes back down. I was born and raised in Brooklyn during some of NY's worst crime waves. It appears to be heading back that way again with inflation and crime. Felonious assaults are up over 18% since 2020, and robbery is up by 15.8% compared to 2020. His startup sounds like any other tech-based company. He needs techs, mathematicians, AI, data sci., etc. With the great work-from-home experiment due to COVID, and tech not really needing to be physically present in NYC, why move there for the high rents and cost of living? I ran a business in the tri-state area for 9 years, but I catered to artists and shows, manufacturing, and designed and built physical objects with tech interfaces or controls. I had to be in the area. Now I do more consultation, design, and engineering and I work around the world from a nice NY town 45 to 60 min. from NYC on the Hudson. Wouldn't go back to NYC if you paid me. Thinking on going back to live in the rice fields of Indonesia or another bucolic place to enjoy my family more in a nice environment, if I can swing it.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > since 2020 Isn’t that just because nobody was out on the streets in 2020?
  - eggy 5y ago
    It has gone up from years previous too. I was only citing the year-to-year. I grew up with friends who became NYC cops, and they and others have let me know their hesitancy to be very proactive due to all the negativity towards their profession and liability risks. If you don't think 'defund the police' and bail out 'protestors' with long criminal track records doesn't give a green light to those considering doing something lawless, let me tell you the story of my already-bad neighborhood when the blackout of 1977 occurred. If you haven't been in a riot or mass looting, you don't have the same fear of lawlessness and vulnerability that simply occurs when the lights go out. People getting sucker punched will be the last of your worries.
- mdaidc 5y ago
  I am personally betting 80% of the people that left NYC will be back. Plus a lot more that will move to NYC for the first time. It sounds great to live in a cottage... but once you realize there's nothing interesting going on there, and you essentially live your life through a screen and a microphone... it's not what most people want long term. Google just bought (not rent) an extra building for $2B. They said that when they give new hires a choice, NYC ranks #1 in their preference. I live in NYC and I can tell you there are more people on the streets than pre-covid. And international travel/tourism is just getting started.
jb1991 5y ago
This article basically explains what most of us already know. American tech firms in general are much more concerned with raw profit than with the actual quality and purpose of the enterprise. It’s definitely a different culture.
- nnoitra 5y ago
  This is not true. The reason is that EU is simply left behind and there is no willingness whatsoever to change.
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
I’m not sure I get it. This just sounds like someone wanting to move to NY and coming up with a rational for it. The company still seems to be selling and recruiting in London. A ‘poor sales culture’ in London won’t effect a companies ability to hire good sales people and get sales unless they’re a bad company to work for. Brexit will have an impact on recruitment but there is no problem (at least there wasn’t a few years ago) getting work permits for people with AI related phds to work in a company serving financial and legal companies in the city in the UK.
ldehaan 5y ago
I didn't read it because who cares, right? However, fuck NY, move to Texas or Colorado, you'll have more fun :)
Barrin92 5y ago
>The sad truth is that there are no listed trillion-dollar tech companies in Europe. Given Europe’s market size and depth of its talent pool, this is a surprise. Deliveroo, for example, had an extremely challenging IPO, trading at much lower multiples than some of its American peers despite better metrics. Is that really a sad truth other than for VCs who want to exit based on future expectations? If you have better metrics and you make money you're employing people and you're paying wages and you're growing things seem fine. No doubt the US has many great tech companies but if you see some of the inflation in terms of funding rounds and evaluations slapped on companies that aren't profitable is that really necessary to emulate?
DeathArrow 5y ago
>We’re in good company making this step: SaaS giant UiPath moved its headquarters to New York in 2017 to be closer to its international customer base. UiPath moved offices in the US because it is easier to finance a business in US. But even if the offices were moved most of the work it is still done in Romania.
- biztos 5y ago
  There was just recently a thread about this, apparently it's no longer the case that most of their work is done in Romania. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29319776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29319776
madis 5y ago
Good for you (or bad, I don't care anyway). But why the hell you post about it here? I took my shit to the toilet today, and saw no need to post about it here (just did it to illustrate the vanity)
- celeduc 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing bro
easytiger 5y ago
None of that makes sense. The language is certainly sending off grifter alarm bells. The talent pool shrunk... So I'm going to upend the entire thing and start again? How does that make sense? What talent do you need? I would wager that the investment graft is drying up and thus is a play to secure funding for more US biased sources Perhaps slapping AI all over your generic document product is dying a little as a strategy too.
bob331 5y ago
From one truly awful city to another. Who cares
habosa 5y ago
Clearly America is the place to be if you want to make billions in tech. The bigger question is why every single company needs to target billions of dollars. You can still build a very successful company in London and get quite wealthy, you just might not get your own private space program. Meanwhile in London your workers will have free healthcare, their kids will have free higher education, etc. He's totally right about Brexit though. The talent pool in London is never going to be the same.
- carnitine 5y ago
  Higher education in England is definitely not free. I imagine most well-funded startup employees have good healthcare plans in the US too.
  - ddek 5y ago
    It's relatively low cost, though. Tuition maxes at <£10k/y, usually financed with a reasonable repayment rate (5% earnings over ~£25k, I can't remember for sure), and the option to pay off early if you're willing. Most employees in well-funded organisations in the UK will have private healthcare too. My plan costs me ~£14pm, which is actually tax rather than a premium, with no deductible/copay/excesses.
    - uzakov 5y ago
      Your numbers are not quite correct, which changes the dynamic of the argument. > Tuition maxes at <£10k/y For the majority of courses offered at the BSc level they are more or less fixed accross the board. For example, it doesnt matter from the cost perspective if you do BSc CS at Kings uni in London, Manchester uni or Aston university, since the fee is exactly the same £9250. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/computer-science-bsc https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/computer-s... https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/2022/00560/bsc-computer-science/ https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/202... https://www.aston.ac.uk/study/courses/computer-science-bsc/september-2022 https://www.aston.ac.uk/study/courses/computer-science-bsc/s... Additionally, by saying "Tuition maxes at <£10k/y" you could imply to some that fees are in a certain range below 10k, where in fact they are generally speaking very close to £10k. > Most employees in well-funded organisations in the UK will have private healthcare too While this might create debate I think it's worth pointing out that there is a BIG difference between UK and US private healthcare.
rmbyrro 5y ago
That's a good example of how a sub-par article with catchy title generates a sub-par discussion.
oxymoran 5y ago
NYC is not the right choice though. Ridiculously expensive office space and wages compared to pretty much everywhere else in the US except California. The coasts are beautiful, but the idea of living there…eww. Midwest for life. Good luck.

143 points by cesarosum 5y ago

As an European, I am quite happy with a less aggressive sales tactic - it makes companies focus on quality over whoever gets the loudest sales guy.

moab 5y ago

A little off-topic, but I find it strange to brand the company around the "Eigen" name when it's already a super well-known C++ numerical library: https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

blackbear_ 5y ago
"super well-known" totally depends on which bubble you live in. "Eigen" immediately made me think at the eigendecomposition [1], which is a relatively common operation in AI, and probably served as inspiration for the names of both the C++ library and the company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigendecomposition_of_a_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigendecomposition_of_a_matrix

ricardobayes 5y ago

Not sure I get the part of talent pool. Exactly which part of AI research or development can't be done as remote work?

nivenkos 5y ago
You still need a tax office to hire people as employees though. But yeah, they could easily operate in both countries if they're willing to move everything like this!
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  Just bring them on as contractors, problem solved...

aaa_aaa 5y ago

Summary: He received free money from EU. Now that he could not get enough from UK government, he is leaving.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
And not to the EU, but the US.
jstx1 5y ago
This is misleading. Their staff having EU-funded PhDs is very different from receiving free money from the EU.
- me_me_me 5y ago
  Technically correct, though he is directly benefiting from EU funding. Or was.
- simsla 5y ago
  In the EU industry PhDs are fairly common. In this case, the PhD student does R&D work for a company, and gets paid through an EU PhD grant. For some companies, it's an indirect way to get funding, because it provides for cheaper highly skilled labour. (Anecdote incoming) For example, many years ago at the end of my industry internship, the company offered to continue the project as a PhD, pursuant grant funding. When I declined, they offered a well paid full-time job to do the same.
artembugara 5y ago
Literally each part of this sentence is false
callamdelaney 5y ago
He’s almost certainly just re-hashing open source AI anyways.

someonewhocar3s 5y ago

Because you started off an apolitical asshole, but it turns out 'marine blue' matches your eyes, and you can say 'I love how the King stretches me' because the commonwealth fits your ideals like a glove. Now you're absolutely down with the peculiarchie and Celtic subject laws. Of course, you couldn't phantom not to have to pick a partner military - that was just a little bit too adventerious for you. Oh, ok, I got it the wrong way around. ("Why I'm leaving, (trading) London for NYC, (and getting a tax break works anyway)") he's wrong to go to NYC. Their earlier Bitcoin regulations state it well enough. Incapable.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aigo 5y ago

> Almost my entire R&D team who received PhDs from British universities had them funded by the European Union Well, there you go.

agent008t 5y ago
Was the UK not a net contributor to the EU budget? And therefore, why cannot the UK fund PhDs more effectively than the EU? I would've thought being less removed from the universities and research groups would make funding more effective.
- user568439 5y ago
  That's the Brexiters logic, but it turns out UK was not only contributing to the EU but also trading. Now it doesn't need to contribute anymore but it also lost exports, access to talent and so on.
  - agent008t 5y ago
    Fine, but my point is there is no reason for Brexit to be a net negative when it comes to the funding of PhDs - if anything, it offers an opportunity to be more effective at funding. Same when it comes to the specific issue of access to talent - nothing in principle stopping the UK from making it extremely easy for talent to come to the UK.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Anything remotely related to the EU is toxic as far as the current government is concerned. This includes immigration which they successfully tied to the EU in voters minds.
    - roomey 5y ago
      The point is that there was both scales of economy due to the Erasmus program and a lot of pan European research grants.. Being able to pull from a Europe wide talant pool was a huge benefit to the UK and her universities. So there was massive, irreplaceable benefits just for universities lost due to the Brexit project. Along with that Brexit has cost the UK a ton of money.. this net contributer stuff was literal propaganda. The UK is worse off now, with less funding to go around.

jgrahamc 5y ago

Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively. The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from Cloudflare’s perspective our London-based EMEA sales team has been spectacularly effective. Early in Eigen’s history there were many London-based employees who prioritised technological purity over commercial success; it was almost fatal for us. However hard it is, the UK needs to transform its cultural attitude to sales. I think that’s a leadership issue not about “London”. The team we built in London was/is all about commercial success.

waihtis 5y ago
Personal anecdote - depends on where you are on the technology adoption bell curve. Innovative, a bit "out-there" things seem to be better received in the US.
KaiserPro 5y ago
London does sales well, if you want a sales office you open it in london. What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea. Even less so to someone with a crap idea. Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else. They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised. To back up the point that John is making, "Technical purity" above all else is a symptom of leadership not explaining the business needs well enough. (or not putting in place an engineering team with enough pragmatism to translate business to tech. )
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  I mean, good luck to him moving his HQ to NYC etc. but if I were an employee in London HM The Queen's tea cup in Windsor would be shaking from the sonic boom after I lit the reheats on my CV.

mg 5y ago

Are there any European websites in the Alexa top 50? https://www.alexa.com/topsites https://www.alexa.com/topsites For all I know, Europe mostly missed the internet. Will the same happen with AI, data centers, solar, crypto and biotech?

DeathArrow 5y ago
We are dumb, here in Europe. We don't know anything about Internet or computers on this side of the pond. We did't make any advances in science and technology. US did everything by itself, without importing brains from other countries. We are humbly grateful the Usians gave us Google Ads, Facebook, iPhones and PornHub, things which are absolutely essential to any being not living in a cave.
dgellow 5y ago
VK.com is European if you’re talking about the continent. Though not if you’re talking about the EU.
czzr 5y ago
The web was invented in Europe. Still, you’re right, few big internet successes in Europe. Problem is almost entirely addressable market size.
- mg 5y ago
  What hinders Europeans to address big markets?
  - dukeyukey 5y ago
    More limited home markets, in both a regulatory and cultural way.
    - mg 5y ago
      Since we are talking about internet companies - why is the home market important?

jstx1 5y ago

I wonder how you move a company with about 200 employees to a different country and time zone.

soco 5y ago
Especially when they prioritize technological purity over commercial success. Okay irony aside, you kick (most of) them out and hire new folks.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Fire UK engineers, hire US sales people.

ageitgey 5y ago

I run a US-based start-up with a distributed team, but I personally live in London. I'd say a lot of this is true. I don't personally know how Brexit has or hasn't affected talent availability yet, but everything else lines up with my experience. US investors throw money around and European investors are much more traditional. But I'd like to offer a different perspective on this quote from the article: > I am not alone in believing Europe has a problem with founders and investors, who lack ambition in comparison to the best of Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. While I have been blessed with my European investors, who are very much the exception to this rule and share my ambition, I have seen this lack of boldness during my various fundraising processes with many other investors. The US VC market right now is very "frothy", as the VCs say. It's so frothy, you might as well say the froth has churned into butter. The article says that European investors lack "boldness", but one might instead say that US investors are lacking outlets for their ample capital and will throw money at nearly anything right now. I guess it depends on your point of view. But the truth remains - it's a whole lot easier to raise money in the US right now.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
How do you manage a company from across the Atlantic? What does your tax situation look like? Do you personally enjoy living in London or are you there in spite of your interests?
- ageitgey 5y ago
  1. One day at a time. But in all seriousness, a good co-founder and team. Also, we started the company during COVID which I think made the VCs less worried a about a full remote situation. 2. US citizen but UK tax resident. So two income tax returns. It's a pain, but thankfully the tax treaty means one offsets the other and it works out in the end. 3. Personally want to live in London
  - tixocloud 5y ago
    Feel your pain. Canadian citizen who previously founded startup in London and had to pay double taxes. Enjoyed the life in London though. Would love to go back some day.

stillblue 5y ago

I'm slightly confused. Is the traditional way not the stable way to go about things instead of how it is done in the US? These seem more like positives than negatives to me.

TheGigaChad 5y ago

Bye Bye!

soco 5y ago

I really like the way he describes Europe. Pretty much the way I see it as well.

goldcd 5y ago

I work for a company head-quartered in one continent, listed on another and I work in a third (the UK) - and sales are based all over. Not for one moment saying there aren't local issues/idiosyncrasies - but I'm unsure how moving your company solves them, and article seems to overlook all manner of problems: Aren't you going to lose staff when you move? Is everybody going to have to get up really early to talk to Europe? Won't new employees cost more in NA? i.e. Why not just hire a US based sales rep to sell to your US customers, in the style that works there? (and a native speaking, convervative, tech-enabled one for Germany etc) Or just register yourself at a Missouri PO, list in the US, seek US investors etc?

KaiserPro 5y ago
Well precisely Moving to NYC/silicon valley is going to mean fishing in a very over fished pool. There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour. Even if you don't loose staff, operating an engineering team over large distances is a challenge unless you know what your doing. Given that he's blaming the engineers for concentrating on "technical purity" when I assume he was in charge, I suspect he's not really of the right mindset to be responsive enough to make the changes needed. Still, best of luck. I look forward to the updates on progress.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Facebook recruiting in London feel about as desperate to fill their pipeline as Google did ten years ago these days. London has many great qualities, but tech hiring here is also really challenging.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > Facebook recruiting in London feel about as desperate to fill their pipeline as Google did ten years ago these days. I'd say it's more size than desperation. Yeah, recruiting in London probably gives you lower bang for the buck than tapping other labor markets. But once you reach a certain size, you're going to be recruiting in basically every market, since good people are a small proportion of the population and you have a huge need for good people. For example, Google has had great success in hiring Serbian developers. They also hire developers in Brazil, Poland, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, France, etc - 40 different countries. To exclude England would be kinda weird. Facebook being a few years behind Google makes sense, and they'll end up in a similar position, basically hiring everywhere.

black_13 5y ago

Well awe shucks.

matthewmorgan 5y ago

It's pretty common in Europe for people to get a socially-funded education then go off to the USA. It's called brain drain and has been happening for a while, not sure why this guy needs to write an article pretending that's not what's happening here.

oh_sigh 5y ago
You don't really have a choice do you? Is he supposed to refuse to go to college for free/low cost because he pays taxes to be able to do that?
dbolgheroni 5y ago
I also see a lot of brain drain in Brazil. Most are from public colleges, and they go mostly to Europe.
- stayfrosty420 5y ago
  I thought this was because lots of Brazilians are eligible for Portuguese passports
  - f6v 5y ago
    Many come straight to Germany or other more rich EU countries.
    - te_chris 5y ago
      If you've got a European passport then you can go anywhere in the EU.
    - gpderetta 5y ago
      A portuguese passport would allow just that. So would an Italian passport (many South Americans, especially from Brazil and Argentina would qualify).
      - 5y ago

setgree 5y ago

> Advances in the type of small data AI we do — AI created without vast data sets — would have only been possible here in Europe, with its deep and diverse technical and mathematical talent. This would have been difficult in Silicon Valley given US tech’s reluctance to experiment and innovate, beyond the conventional “big data AI” approach. Can anyone expand on what the author is saying here/validate it with personal experience? I have never thought of AI advances as “only” being possible in Europe, or of the US tech scene as reluctant to innovate.

liuyipei 5y ago
He is talking about work that involves a deep understanding of the domain and data, on smaller datasets that require a lot more framing to make sense of. I understand the author to be saying that "small data AI" activities as a fraction of all AI work in the US is lower, because in the US it is so much easier to make more money doing big-data work instead.

c7DJTLrn 5y ago

Sounds like the author is upset that Brexit has closed the valve on the pipeline of cheap labour from EU workers. There's no shortage of talent in London trust me, it's just that you're going to have to start paying more than a pittance to get it. Brexit so far has been a positive thing for tech workers' salaries.

Veen 5y ago
Yes, I voted remain but I suspect the businesses yelling that they can't hire really mean they can't hire for what they were accustomed to paying before Brexit. It's particularly prevalent in lower paid areas like transport, coffee shops, and agriculture. If the success of your business depended on low wages Brits won't accept, you're likely to be in trouble.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  The issue isn't pay itself but companies not knowing how to operate with higher wages (i.e. how to economise on labour usage) and not knowing how to deal with tight labour markets. In agriculture, you have farmers complaining about no labour whilst they are failing to use machines that could replace the labour (and, unf, agriculture in the UK has turned into one massive IHT avoidance scheme...so most of the operators are clueless). In retail, you still have companies doing multi-day interviews with logical reasoning tests, team-working tests, problem solving exercises for shelf stacking positions (which, btw, they are getting people to do for free with no training on welfare-to-work programs). I am not sure if I agree with the original post. Is it completely off though? No. Not at all.
brianmcc 5y ago
"cheap EU labour" tends to apply more to fruit pickers than AI PhDs I suspect
- kranke155 5y ago
  Nope. Eastern European brilliant minds would flock to London and get paid far lower salaries than they were worth. Ukranians, Lithuanians. The legacy of communist math is alive and well - they were generally better than any western european talent you could get and cheaper. They would always get the top jobs, but the regular influx of new blood meant salaries were stuck.

varjag 5y ago

Likely a prequel to "leaving NYC for SF".

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Wherever he goes his problems will follow him. The US won't be a utopia when it comes to hiring PhD's with sales skills either.
- busterarm 5y ago
  I can't think of a worse group of people to try and make do sales. Good sales requires cultivating the right environment for good sales people. That means you need good pipeline. Sales people are blood-thirsty mercenaries who go wherever the most pipeline is so that they can maximize their personal income. They're short-term minded people who only care about results over the next quarter. Ph.Ds are inherently delayed-gratification types of people. Salespeople are thrill-seekers (aka, always crash the sales department's parties if you want to have the best time).
- 0x4d464d48 5y ago
  "PhD's with sales skills..." Sounds expensive.

xyzzy123 5y ago

My 2c theory for the difference in investor outlook is "old money" vs "new money". Old money is more risk averse - avoiding capital loss is more important than making the biggest gains. It's probably not possible to preserve a fortune for hundreds or thousands of years without this kind of attitude. There are a LOT of really old money families in Europe (and they are a big part of the ruling class) and I believe this colours the entire investment outlook. In China the money is even newer than the US (practically no billionaires by inheritance for fairly obvious reasons), so would expect them to be even more aggressive and this seems to play out. One place I see the cracks in this idea are former Soviet states. It seems like their billionaires should be more willing to back moonshot investments than they actually are. Perhaps it is because many of their billionaires are politically connected oligarchs and don't back growth plays in the same way (more about gaining and keeping control of existing pie). An alternative would be that it's cultural in some more complex way and proportion of inherited wealth is either a factor or actually a consequence of other things going on.

NetBeck 5y ago

There's EU draft regulation regarding AI utilization. Prohibited AI would be described as, "...systems or applications that manipulate human behaviour in order to circumvent the free will of the users."[0] [0] https://www.ey.com/en_ch/ai/eu-draft-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence https://www.ey.com/en_ch/ai/eu-draft-regulation-on-artificia...

an9n 5y ago

Not particularly convinced about the Brexit angle or the comments on sales - for example, you can bet that The City has some highly aggressive salesmen/women given its status. But from my perspective Europe suffers from a problem of culture - there is seriously old money here and, I'd assert, a related, outdated zero-sum/dog in the manger mentality. Anything like FAANG, Tesla, SpaceX etc that seriously threatens to disrupt the status quo is either stillborn, strangled at birth or shortly thereafter as this guild's dead hand does its work.

dogman144 5y ago
interesting perspective i have not heard before but make sense as a narrative. wonder what data is behind that - seriously old elites shutting down innovation.

drumhead 5y ago

I dont understand, does he want the technical staff to sell because he doesnt have a sales team or is it that the staff were not creating a commercial project? If thats was the case then why didnt he or other management step in and do something about it? If Brexit was a problem why didnt they just relocate to Berlin, Paris or Stockholm? Or is this all to do with the much higher ratings tech companies receive in the US?

m0zg 5y ago

Highest effective tax in the US, insanely expensive real estate and rents, high and rising crime [1]. Good luck, you're gonna need it. [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1006/nypd-citywide-crime-statistics-september-2021 https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1006/nypd-citywide-cri...

kingcharles 5y ago

Trying to start a business in the UK: "What are you doing? You'll fail! You'll go bankrupt! You'll be homeless! Why don't you get a nice civil service job with a government pension?" Trying to start a business in the USA: "Rock on, bro! You're going to be the next Zuckerberg/Gates/Bezos!"

mdda 5y ago
Failing at a business in the UK: "Told you so! And now everybody knows you're a failure." Failing at a business in the US: "Every success has a few failures on the journey : If you have another go, it'll prove that you're a fighter!" Succeeding at a business in the UK: "Who did you screw over to make that money?" Succeeding at a business in the US: "Awesome! Let me pitch you my idea..."
DeathArrow 5y ago
>Trying to start a business in the USA: "Rock on, bro! You're going to be the next Zuckerberg/Gates/Bezos!" Same person, few years later: "I don't care you are homeless and have nothing to eat. I didn't force you make stupid things. Get of my lawn, I'll have guests later!"
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I'm in the USA. I generally think of Americans as incredibly selfish when compared to other cultures. But I was homeless and hungry and I've been surprised at the generosity of strangers to help me out.

unobatbayar 5y ago

Best of luck.

Quarrelsome 5y ago

So what does he mean exactly? He just says some vague stuff about "bad at sales" and smth about the "culture" without actually giving any examples of what he really means. He mentions Brexit, mentions hiring then says it's not as big a deal as "sales". Then mentions EU funding for workers, then stops talking. So what does he mean? Do British sales people not bother contacting anyone, do all British customers hate sales people and tell them to sod off? This is like Brexit all over when someone mentions some vague thing and everyone starts commenting with their own interpretation of what it means but nobody bothers to pin down what it actually means. What does it mean? I have no clue at all. I felt like I knew more before I read this article than after.

eggy 5y ago

Hopefully crime goes back down. I was born and raised in Brooklyn during some of NY's worst crime waves. It appears to be heading back that way again with inflation and crime. Felonious assaults are up over 18% since 2020, and robbery is up by 15.8% compared to 2020. His startup sounds like any other tech-based company. He needs techs, mathematicians, AI, data sci., etc. With the great work-from-home experiment due to COVID, and tech not really needing to be physically present in NYC, why move there for the high rents and cost of living? I ran a business in the tri-state area for 9 years, but I catered to artists and shows, manufacturing, and designed and built physical objects with tech interfaces or controls. I had to be in the area. Now I do more consultation, design, and engineering and I work around the world from a nice NY town 45 to 60 min. from NYC on the Hudson. Wouldn't go back to NYC if you paid me. Thinking on going back to live in the rice fields of Indonesia or another bucolic place to enjoy my family more in a nice environment, if I can swing it.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> since 2020 Isn’t that just because nobody was out on the streets in 2020?
- eggy 5y ago
  It has gone up from years previous too. I was only citing the year-to-year. I grew up with friends who became NYC cops, and they and others have let me know their hesitancy to be very proactive due to all the negativity towards their profession and liability risks. If you don't think 'defund the police' and bail out 'protestors' with long criminal track records doesn't give a green light to those considering doing something lawless, let me tell you the story of my already-bad neighborhood when the blackout of 1977 occurred. If you haven't been in a riot or mass looting, you don't have the same fear of lawlessness and vulnerability that simply occurs when the lights go out. People getting sucker punched will be the last of your worries.
mdaidc 5y ago
I am personally betting 80% of the people that left NYC will be back. Plus a lot more that will move to NYC for the first time. It sounds great to live in a cottage... but once you realize there's nothing interesting going on there, and you essentially live your life through a screen and a microphone... it's not what most people want long term. Google just bought (not rent) an extra building for $2B. They said that when they give new hires a choice, NYC ranks #1 in their preference. I live in NYC and I can tell you there are more people on the streets than pre-covid. And international travel/tourism is just getting started.

jb1991 5y ago

This article basically explains what most of us already know. American tech firms in general are much more concerned with raw profit than with the actual quality and purpose of the enterprise. It’s definitely a different culture.

nnoitra 5y ago
This is not true. The reason is that EU is simply left behind and there is no willingness whatsoever to change.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

I’m not sure I get it. This just sounds like someone wanting to move to NY and coming up with a rational for it. The company still seems to be selling and recruiting in London. A ‘poor sales culture’ in London won’t effect a companies ability to hire good sales people and get sales unless they’re a bad company to work for. Brexit will have an impact on recruitment but there is no problem (at least there wasn’t a few years ago) getting work permits for people with AI related phds to work in a company serving financial and legal companies in the city in the UK.

ldehaan 5y ago

I didn't read it because who cares, right? However, fuck NY, move to Texas or Colorado, you'll have more fun :)

Barrin92 5y ago

>The sad truth is that there are no listed trillion-dollar tech companies in Europe. Given Europe’s market size and depth of its talent pool, this is a surprise. Deliveroo, for example, had an extremely challenging IPO, trading at much lower multiples than some of its American peers despite better metrics. Is that really a sad truth other than for VCs who want to exit based on future expectations? If you have better metrics and you make money you're employing people and you're paying wages and you're growing things seem fine. No doubt the US has many great tech companies but if you see some of the inflation in terms of funding rounds and evaluations slapped on companies that aren't profitable is that really necessary to emulate?

DeathArrow 5y ago

>We’re in good company making this step: SaaS giant UiPath moved its headquarters to New York in 2017 to be closer to its international customer base. UiPath moved offices in the US because it is easier to finance a business in US. But even if the offices were moved most of the work it is still done in Romania.

biztos 5y ago
There was just recently a thread about this, apparently it's no longer the case that most of their work is done in Romania. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29319776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29319776

madis 5y ago

Good for you (or bad, I don't care anyway). But why the hell you post about it here? I took my shit to the toilet today, and saw no need to post about it here (just did it to illustrate the vanity)

celeduc 5y ago
Thanks for sharing bro

easytiger 5y ago

None of that makes sense. The language is certainly sending off grifter alarm bells. The talent pool shrunk... So I'm going to upend the entire thing and start again? How does that make sense? What talent do you need? I would wager that the investment graft is drying up and thus is a play to secure funding for more US biased sources Perhaps slapping AI all over your generic document product is dying a little as a strategy too.

bob331 5y ago

From one truly awful city to another. Who cares

habosa 5y ago

Clearly America is the place to be if you want to make billions in tech. The bigger question is why every single company needs to target billions of dollars. You can still build a very successful company in London and get quite wealthy, you just might not get your own private space program. Meanwhile in London your workers will have free healthcare, their kids will have free higher education, etc. He's totally right about Brexit though. The talent pool in London is never going to be the same.

carnitine 5y ago
Higher education in England is definitely not free. I imagine most well-funded startup employees have good healthcare plans in the US too.
- ddek 5y ago
  It's relatively low cost, though. Tuition maxes at <£10k/y, usually financed with a reasonable repayment rate (5% earnings over ~£25k, I can't remember for sure), and the option to pay off early if you're willing. Most employees in well-funded organisations in the UK will have private healthcare too. My plan costs me ~£14pm, which is actually tax rather than a premium, with no deductible/copay/excesses.
  - uzakov 5y ago
    Your numbers are not quite correct, which changes the dynamic of the argument. > Tuition maxes at <£10k/y For the majority of courses offered at the BSc level they are more or less fixed accross the board. For example, it doesnt matter from the cost perspective if you do BSc CS at Kings uni in London, Manchester uni or Aston university, since the fee is exactly the same £9250. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/computer-science-bsc https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/computer-s... https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/2022/00560/bsc-computer-science/ https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/202... https://www.aston.ac.uk/study/courses/computer-science-bsc/september-2022 https://www.aston.ac.uk/study/courses/computer-science-bsc/s... Additionally, by saying "Tuition maxes at <£10k/y" you could imply to some that fees are in a certain range below 10k, where in fact they are generally speaking very close to £10k. > Most employees in well-funded organisations in the UK will have private healthcare too While this might create debate I think it's worth pointing out that there is a BIG difference between UK and US private healthcare.

rmbyrro 5y ago

That's a good example of how a sub-par article with catchy title generates a sub-par discussion.

oxymoran 5y ago

NYC is not the right choice though. Ridiculously expensive office space and wages compared to pretty much everywhere else in the US except California. The coasts are beautiful, but the idea of living there…eww. Midwest for life. Good luck.