11 ms·

UK Has ‘No Chance in Hell’ of Making Its Own Tech Champs: ARM Founder

128 points by xqcgrek2 4y ago

Kalanos 4y ago
hmm. alpha fold guys were london-based, but if this is about sovereignty it doesn't matter
Doches 4y ago
Reading between the lines, this is actually one of the side-goals of the zombie Online Safety Bill. Require all apps with user-created content to use a UK-approved 'identity provider' for age verification, and only issue approval to a handful of home-grown companies. Et voila, a whole thriving tech /sector/ where the UK can legitimately claim to be world-leading, even if they did invent the whole thing out of whole cloth and pointlessness.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  The assumptions underpinning that legislation are from about 2016. A Tory government apparently can't achieve much in six years but the Internet changed considerably. The technical mechanisms described (DNS blocking to force UK users to use UK approved sites) are no longer achievable, which means the budgetary impact goes up very considerably, for this programme which would be unpopular. Now, if a government thinks a few decrepit Tory voters picking a new PM counts as a fresh mandate for radical economic strategies, maybe they also think a $10B pa budget line item for "Block Facebook?" is a good idea. So maybe they'll do this anyway. But it won't work.
  - Mindwipe 4y ago
    I'm afraid "it won't work" is not something British politicians care about very much, as we can see today.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    > A Tory government apparently can't achieve much. You could just stop there. I've yet to see, in decades of Tory rule, much but decline, neglect, and scandal. Tax cuts and service cuts. That's all everyone needs apparently. Unfortunately, labor seems so incompetent at gaining power that it seems almost like a "managed opposition." Maybe I'm being too generous to their electorate as well. The UK is a tourism attraction at this point, a historical relic found in a curio shop or flea market. Or soon will be at its current clip.
- MisterSandman 4y ago
  I don't think there's ever been an industry created by government nationalistic policies that hasn't eventually led to stagnation of said industry
pasabagi 4y ago
Reading between the lines of his quote, my guess is he's angling for some cash from the government, by securitizing the tech sector. It won't work, because the treasury feels that spending money, like eating people, is always wrong. It won't cost any politicians anything when the bits and pieces of the UK tech sector go down the pipes, because their fortunes rest entirely on house prices, and the opinions of the fine people at Sky News. So expect another ten years of meaningless and toothless 'initiatives', sound and fury, signifying nothing, while the UK continues into another decade of death spiral.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  > It won't cost any politicians anything when the bits and pieces of the UK tech sector go down the pipes, because their fortunes rest entirely on house prices, People want to live (and buy housing) where there are good jobs.
  - f1shy 4y ago
    > People want to live (and buy housing) where there are good jobs. That sentence is fundamental.
    - pasabagi 4y ago
      If demand is what is driving prices, sure. Except the government has shown time and time again there are mechanisms (e.g reducing stamp duty) that can prop up prices while demand is weak. If you look at the last few years of housing policy, you see a picture of increasingly dramatic measures to artificially inflate house prices, independent of the actual value of the houses to the people who live in them.
- jsty 4y ago
  > the treasury feels that spending money, like eating people, is always wrong I feel the Treasury would be more likely to hand out free soylent green than start spending money
- origin_path 4y ago
SilverBirch 4y ago
It sounds to me like he doesn't actually say that. In the article: >The UK has “no chance in hell” of becoming technologically sovereign Well which is it, having our own Tech champs or being technologically sovereign? Because they're totally different things. To be honest I'm not sure any country apart from China stands any chance of becoming technologically sovereign. Like what does that mean? Do we need to mine our own Lithium, do we need to build our own foundries, are we planning on building a competitor to ASML to source machines to build our foundries? And look at Oil prices, the UK isn't massively dependent on Oil and we have our own resources but we still got absolutely slammed by the war in Russia because we operate in a global market. So do we need our own Lithium mines and export controls to stop them being bid up on the international market when there's some exogenous event?
- Zigurd 4y ago
  No nation, anywhere on the planet, is by itself technologically sovereign. The ability to get by in the world is a cooperative venture for everyone, even the US. What makes first tier technological nations different is the alliances of which they are active contributing members. Those alliances make trade flow smoothly and securely. That is what creates prosperity in an interconnected world. That is especially important in evaluating China's ability to achieve technological first tier status. China has one formal alliance. It is with North Korea. This is remarkable. China cannot rely on Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, nor even any country with a land border with China as an ally. China's neighbors are threatened by China, are hostile to China, or are just extremely wary of China. China's navy cannot project power beyond the island nations off China's coast. China's position and prospects are less advantageous than it seems to many people.
  - fooker 4y ago
    > China has one formal alliance. This is a geopolitical trope about 20 years out of date. Don’t be surprised when dozens of African and Asian countries choose China over Western interests if push comes to shove.
    - 4y ago
pelagicAustral 4y ago
Don't hold back.
AtomicOrbital 4y ago
For newcomers ARM cpu was/is designed in the UK ... Say nothing about Alan Turing who first conceived of how digital computation can happen using hardware then went on to help design and build one of the first computers and yes he coded it to use a Bayesian algorithm... Not to mention Thomas Bayes, De Morgan, Charles Baggage and Boole of boolean logic fame just for starters
- Jweb_Guru 4y ago
  I am neutral on the position of UK "technological sovereignty" but I don't think listing a bunch of people who died before 1900 really helps demonstrate your point.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    Alan Turing didn't die before 1900. Agree he isn't exactly relevant to the question of a modern tech sector, but these examples are at least interesting for what they show isn't the problem. A comment above AtomicOrbital's argues it's to do with a "deferential, hierarchical society" and that "bureaucracy is great for running an empire". That clearly can't be the case, given that Britain churned out computing pioneers when it was at the height of its imperial power. I think the actual reasons are a lot simpler than some imputed aspect of the British national character. Obviously, struggling to compete with US tech supremacy isn't limited to the UK. Specifically: 1. Outside the USA there's no real culture of granting equity to early stage employees. Interestingly, ARM was one of the very few exceptions. Incentivized and passionate employees are considered non-negotiable for US startups, not so elsewhere. 2. The USA and California specifically has some laws that happen to be really good for founding successful internet startups e.g. banning non-competes, at will employment, the first amendment, and so on. UK and EU have the opposite: lots of laws that make it difficult or risky. 3. The USA benefits from a large internal market with homogenous language and timezones. When British computer companies tried to expand into the USA all kinds of logistical issues got in the way of them scaling up, both in the USA and Europe. It's much easier for a company to get big in the US and then start picking off local markets one by one. The first two problems often combine. Try setting up an employee equity scheme for a new startup in Europe. You'll find the tax systems often make it absurdly complicated or even impossible, and accountancy/legal firms are usually inexperienced with it. I'm going through this problem right now. I asked for a US style straight equity vesting scheme - no options even - and got back some wacky alternative that involves buyback clauses, contractual promises to continue granting equity even after termination for cause and contains nonsensical statements. Justification is local tax law. Sigh.
donmcronald 4y ago
I don’t know anything about ARM, but is the IP ownership a big deal compared to the manufacturing? My first reaction was to think I’d do everything possible to keep ARM as a domestic company, but does it even make a difference if they don’t actually produce (ex:) CPUs? I can’t run my workload on IP. The expertise is worth something though. We’ve seen that in Canada with companies like Nortel. Once those companies are gone, the local expertise quickly follows and you become dependent on a foreign company, which is regulated by a foreign government, for part of your critical infrastructure. It’s extremely short sighted IMO and most people don’t even realize what’s being lost.
- f1shy 4y ago
  > but is the IP ownership a big deal compared to the manufacturing? Yes, it is.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > I don’t know anything about ARM, but is the IP ownership a big deal compared to the manufacturing? Apple manufactures nothing, all they have is IP
dqpb 4y ago
Every dollar you spend on an effort, moves you one decision token closer to achieving your goal.
rvz 4y ago
He's right you know. We've waited long enough for the UK to come up with one for 40 years and the only one people can think hard enough of an example is ARM, which that has become a acquisition football by NVIDIA, Softbank and having the UK government getting involved in the ordeal. (No, Imagination Technologies is also gone before you mention that.) So there are no credible candidates worthy for being a tech giant in the UK.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  Don’t forget Autonomy for $11B which turned out to be a fraud. Herman Houser and Mike Lynch are still good friends.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Amazing how slow the wheels of justice turn for rich people. He was ruled to be extraditable in summer 2021, lost his appeal in Dec 2021, the UK Home Secretary approved it in Jan 2022, and as of Sep 2022, still has not been extradited or seen a day of prison. For crimes committed in 2011 or before! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Lynch_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Lynch_(businessman)
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      Not for everyone. I knew his CFO's wife and that guy went to jail for a bit. Entertaining stuff, for sure.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  ARM and Imagination Technologies were worthy companies. They could have been giants if they had access to the kind of financial muscle that the US market provides
killjoywashere 4y ago
So that we can enjoy a higher standard of living and, and, and ... gasp ... be prepared to defend our democratic way of life, we need our own engineering and manufacturing workforces?! I wonder if these same politicos might suggest we should improve our K-12 education systems?
Etheryte 4y ago
https://archive.ph/U6BUV https://archive.ph/U6BUV
throwayyy479087 4y ago
The problem is a hierarchical, deferential culture. Ex-UK countries that have been successful have thrown that yoke off - India is currently struggling to do so - and moved to a model less concerned with status and offense. Bureaucracy is great for running an empire, terrible for fostering startups. This is the same reason the hinterlands are so neglected and Ireland hates the English so much, by the way. The caste/Eton-focused system means that power will always be concentrated in London, and newcomers are not welcome. One day it will crumble, but that day has yet to come.
t43562 4y ago
Well, the nerds aren't the super rich here. It's still about public schools and old money and people who studied law or the classics or at least graduated from Oxbridge. The big money in software is all from the world of finance and there's nothing tech about them - no heart or vision except how to make a faster trade. So who will foster a company that's not going to make money for 10 years? I think there's also an attitude here that "having failed ever" is a black mark against a person. We really need to believe that experience is helpful and that would require some kind of cultural/personality change which I think are difficult. Occado is potentially interesting - a lot of technology there - but it has had a lot of the "praise and then trash" kind of attention and it probably just needs to invest a lot more. Arrival is another interesting one which might or might not make it but we should be hoping that it does and trying hard to enable it.
- Veen 4y ago
  > The nerds aren't super-rich here. It's still about public schools and old money and people who studied law or the classics At tech companies? I think not.
  - DoughnutHole 4y ago
    I don't think he's talking about tech employees - he's talking about capitalists. The tech industry in the US is mature enough that there plenty of "rich nerds" who made their fortune in the early days of the industry and today invest in tech startups. Hardly anyone with the money to jumpstart a startup in the UK has any interest or involvement in tech as an industry. The capitalist class in the UK is very old and very established, and likes to invest in old and established industries. If they're not just passively extracting rent from their assets they might go as far as to let their friends in the city play with more interesting financial instruments. Pumping money into different probably doomed startups in the hope that they'll land a unicorn isn't really their style.
    - origin_path 4y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. There are quite a few venture capital firms in the UK that invest in the software world. The problem is more that, especially in the past 10 years or so, the sheer number of failures you need to absorb in order to get one success seems out of whack to the historical norm. The VC firms in the UK and rest of Europe (really, everywhere that's not California) can only afford relatively small investments for relatively large chunks of equity. To get VC firms on the scale of a16z or YC you need to have at least one mega hit, ideally several, and then you make big investments in hundreds of ropey startups in the hope that another one comes good. That's the US approach. The UK hasn't had an equivalent of a Google or Netscape that could kickstart whole new VC funds. The past 10 years feels especially poor for non-US VC because so much money flooded into the market that there are dozens of venture backed "tech firms" for every obvious idea, so companies outside the US just get outspent into oblivion. How on earth would a UK firm have competed against Uber for example? The sums of money burned were astronomical. Blockchain firms also sucked up vast amounts of talent and capital in the UK due to its adjacency to finance, but with relatively little to show for it all. It feels like in the era where the big US funds were made, companies were risky but still on a reasonable scale. Google/Facebook etc became profitable within a small number of years. You didn't get funds willing to pump money into firms for a decade+ with no ROI in sight.
sgt101 4y ago
I've spoken with Hauser about this - his point (in 2012 when I had the conversation) was that the UK simply did not have access to a market big enough to support a global champion. I said (given the date) but what about the EU and he said no, because in fact the single market is fractured and filled with barriers. I asked well, what about French and German Tech companies? Hauser looked at me and said : yes.
- oblio 4y ago
  > I've spoken with Hauser about this - his point (in 2012 when I had the conversation) was that the UK simply did not have access to a market big enough to support a global champion. Samsung, Hyundai/Kia, TSMC, Toyota, etc. A lot of local brands have figured out that you can bootstrap a product locally and then just focus relentlessly on the American market, after which you can practically conquer the world. Asian companies for some reason do this well. European companies fail horribly.
  - distortedsignal 4y ago
    The South Korean companies that you're thinking of (Samsung, LG, Hyundai) might have had a leg-up from some friendly government policies. Check out the history of Chaebol [1] in S. Korea. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
    - oblio 4y ago
      Doesn't matter. So do the zaibatsu of Japan. There are European companies that are just as big, in various fields, they just don't have the same mindset.
  - sgt101 4y ago
    The market that they access is essentially the USA. They got allowed in for political reasons and the USA can tolerate that.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >I asked well, what about French and German Tech companies? >Hauser looked at me and said : yes. What does "Yes" mean?
jschveibinz 4y ago
UK investment in R&D, largest ever, is £39.8 billion R&D budget for the period 2022-2025: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-announces-plans-for-largest-ever-rd-budget https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-announces-plan... US federal annual budget for R&D for 2022 is $180 billion: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22322 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22322
melagonster 4y ago
...just think more than thousand internet company when 2000s, they just incorporated into Google, because they are not Western company.
marc_rich 4y ago
America gave us OpenAI. The UK gave us Stable Diffusion.
- AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
  I had a look into that claim. The original work and most of the research heavy lifting seems to have been done at the LMU Munich. The main British participation appears to have been Stability AI lending computing power. https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
thom_ 4y ago

128 points by xqcgrek2 4y ago

hmm. alpha fold guys were london-based, but if this is about sovereignty it doesn't matter

Reading between the lines, this is actually one of the side-goals of the zombie Online Safety Bill. Require all apps with user-created content to use a UK-approved 'identity provider' for age verification, and only issue approval to a handful of home-grown companies. Et voila, a whole thriving tech /sector/ where the UK can legitimately claim to be world-leading, even if they did invent the whole thing out of whole cloth and pointlessness.

tialaramex 4y ago
The assumptions underpinning that legislation are from about 2016. A Tory government apparently can't achieve much in six years but the Internet changed considerably. The technical mechanisms described (DNS blocking to force UK users to use UK approved sites) are no longer achievable, which means the budgetary impact goes up very considerably, for this programme which would be unpopular. Now, if a government thinks a few decrepit Tory voters picking a new PM counts as a fresh mandate for radical economic strategies, maybe they also think a $10B pa budget line item for "Block Facebook?" is a good idea. So maybe they'll do this anyway. But it won't work.
- Mindwipe 4y ago
  I'm afraid "it won't work" is not something British politicians care about very much, as we can see today.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  > A Tory government apparently can't achieve much. You could just stop there. I've yet to see, in decades of Tory rule, much but decline, neglect, and scandal. Tax cuts and service cuts. That's all everyone needs apparently. Unfortunately, labor seems so incompetent at gaining power that it seems almost like a "managed opposition." Maybe I'm being too generous to their electorate as well. The UK is a tourism attraction at this point, a historical relic found in a curio shop or flea market. Or soon will be at its current clip.
MisterSandman 4y ago
I don't think there's ever been an industry created by government nationalistic policies that hasn't eventually led to stagnation of said industry

pasabagi 4y ago

Reading between the lines of his quote, my guess is he's angling for some cash from the government, by securitizing the tech sector. It won't work, because the treasury feels that spending money, like eating people, is always wrong. It won't cost any politicians anything when the bits and pieces of the UK tech sector go down the pipes, because their fortunes rest entirely on house prices, and the opinions of the fine people at Sky News. So expect another ten years of meaningless and toothless 'initiatives', sound and fury, signifying nothing, while the UK continues into another decade of death spiral.

im3w1l 4y ago
> It won't cost any politicians anything when the bits and pieces of the UK tech sector go down the pipes, because their fortunes rest entirely on house prices, People want to live (and buy housing) where there are good jobs.
- f1shy 4y ago
  > People want to live (and buy housing) where there are good jobs. That sentence is fundamental.
  - pasabagi 4y ago
    If demand is what is driving prices, sure. Except the government has shown time and time again there are mechanisms (e.g reducing stamp duty) that can prop up prices while demand is weak. If you look at the last few years of housing policy, you see a picture of increasingly dramatic measures to artificially inflate house prices, independent of the actual value of the houses to the people who live in them.
jsty 4y ago
> the treasury feels that spending money, like eating people, is always wrong I feel the Treasury would be more likely to hand out free soylent green than start spending money
origin_path 4y ago

SilverBirch 4y ago

It sounds to me like he doesn't actually say that. In the article: >The UK has “no chance in hell” of becoming technologically sovereign Well which is it, having our own Tech champs or being technologically sovereign? Because they're totally different things. To be honest I'm not sure any country apart from China stands any chance of becoming technologically sovereign. Like what does that mean? Do we need to mine our own Lithium, do we need to build our own foundries, are we planning on building a competitor to ASML to source machines to build our foundries? And look at Oil prices, the UK isn't massively dependent on Oil and we have our own resources but we still got absolutely slammed by the war in Russia because we operate in a global market. So do we need our own Lithium mines and export controls to stop them being bid up on the international market when there's some exogenous event?

Zigurd 4y ago
No nation, anywhere on the planet, is by itself technologically sovereign. The ability to get by in the world is a cooperative venture for everyone, even the US. What makes first tier technological nations different is the alliances of which they are active contributing members. Those alliances make trade flow smoothly and securely. That is what creates prosperity in an interconnected world. That is especially important in evaluating China's ability to achieve technological first tier status. China has one formal alliance. It is with North Korea. This is remarkable. China cannot rely on Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, nor even any country with a land border with China as an ally. China's neighbors are threatened by China, are hostile to China, or are just extremely wary of China. China's navy cannot project power beyond the island nations off China's coast. China's position and prospects are less advantageous than it seems to many people.
- fooker 4y ago
  > China has one formal alliance. This is a geopolitical trope about 20 years out of date. Don’t be surprised when dozens of African and Asian countries choose China over Western interests if push comes to shove.
  - 4y ago

pelagicAustral 4y ago

Don't hold back.

AtomicOrbital 4y ago

For newcomers ARM cpu was/is designed in the UK ... Say nothing about Alan Turing who first conceived of how digital computation can happen using hardware then went on to help design and build one of the first computers and yes he coded it to use a Bayesian algorithm... Not to mention Thomas Bayes, De Morgan, Charles Baggage and Boole of boolean logic fame just for starters

Jweb_Guru 4y ago
I am neutral on the position of UK "technological sovereignty" but I don't think listing a bunch of people who died before 1900 really helps demonstrate your point.
- origin_path 4y ago
  Alan Turing didn't die before 1900. Agree he isn't exactly relevant to the question of a modern tech sector, but these examples are at least interesting for what they show isn't the problem. A comment above AtomicOrbital's argues it's to do with a "deferential, hierarchical society" and that "bureaucracy is great for running an empire". That clearly can't be the case, given that Britain churned out computing pioneers when it was at the height of its imperial power. I think the actual reasons are a lot simpler than some imputed aspect of the British national character. Obviously, struggling to compete with US tech supremacy isn't limited to the UK. Specifically: 1. Outside the USA there's no real culture of granting equity to early stage employees. Interestingly, ARM was one of the very few exceptions. Incentivized and passionate employees are considered non-negotiable for US startups, not so elsewhere. 2. The USA and California specifically has some laws that happen to be really good for founding successful internet startups e.g. banning non-competes, at will employment, the first amendment, and so on. UK and EU have the opposite: lots of laws that make it difficult or risky. 3. The USA benefits from a large internal market with homogenous language and timezones. When British computer companies tried to expand into the USA all kinds of logistical issues got in the way of them scaling up, both in the USA and Europe. It's much easier for a company to get big in the US and then start picking off local markets one by one. The first two problems often combine. Try setting up an employee equity scheme for a new startup in Europe. You'll find the tax systems often make it absurdly complicated or even impossible, and accountancy/legal firms are usually inexperienced with it. I'm going through this problem right now. I asked for a US style straight equity vesting scheme - no options even - and got back some wacky alternative that involves buyback clauses, contractual promises to continue granting equity even after termination for cause and contains nonsensical statements. Justification is local tax law. Sigh.

donmcronald 4y ago

I don’t know anything about ARM, but is the IP ownership a big deal compared to the manufacturing? My first reaction was to think I’d do everything possible to keep ARM as a domestic company, but does it even make a difference if they don’t actually produce (ex:) CPUs? I can’t run my workload on IP. The expertise is worth something though. We’ve seen that in Canada with companies like Nortel. Once those companies are gone, the local expertise quickly follows and you become dependent on a foreign company, which is regulated by a foreign government, for part of your critical infrastructure. It’s extremely short sighted IMO and most people don’t even realize what’s being lost.

f1shy 4y ago
> but is the IP ownership a big deal compared to the manufacturing? Yes, it is.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> I don’t know anything about ARM, but is the IP ownership a big deal compared to the manufacturing? Apple manufactures nothing, all they have is IP

dqpb 4y ago

Every dollar you spend on an effort, moves you one decision token closer to achieving your goal.

rvz 4y ago

He's right you know. We've waited long enough for the UK to come up with one for 40 years and the only one people can think hard enough of an example is ARM, which that has become a acquisition football by NVIDIA, Softbank and having the UK government getting involved in the ordeal. (No, Imagination Technologies is also gone before you mention that.) So there are no credible candidates worthy for being a tech giant in the UK.

cjbgkagh 4y ago
Don’t forget Autonomy for $11B which turned out to be a fraud. Herman Houser and Mike Lynch are still good friends.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Amazing how slow the wheels of justice turn for rich people. He was ruled to be extraditable in summer 2021, lost his appeal in Dec 2021, the UK Home Secretary approved it in Jan 2022, and as of Sep 2022, still has not been extradited or seen a day of prison. For crimes committed in 2011 or before! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Lynch_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Lynch_(businessman)
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    Not for everyone. I knew his CFO's wife and that guy went to jail for a bit. Entertaining stuff, for sure.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
ARM and Imagination Technologies were worthy companies. They could have been giants if they had access to the kind of financial muscle that the US market provides

killjoywashere 4y ago

So that we can enjoy a higher standard of living and, and, and ... gasp ... be prepared to defend our democratic way of life, we need our own engineering and manufacturing workforces?! I wonder if these same politicos might suggest we should improve our K-12 education systems?

Etheryte 4y ago

https://archive.ph/U6BUV https://archive.ph/U6BUV

throwayyy479087 4y ago

The problem is a hierarchical, deferential culture. Ex-UK countries that have been successful have thrown that yoke off - India is currently struggling to do so - and moved to a model less concerned with status and offense. Bureaucracy is great for running an empire, terrible for fostering startups. This is the same reason the hinterlands are so neglected and Ireland hates the English so much, by the way. The caste/Eton-focused system means that power will always be concentrated in London, and newcomers are not welcome. One day it will crumble, but that day has yet to come.

t43562 4y ago

Well, the nerds aren't the super rich here. It's still about public schools and old money and people who studied law or the classics or at least graduated from Oxbridge. The big money in software is all from the world of finance and there's nothing tech about them - no heart or vision except how to make a faster trade. So who will foster a company that's not going to make money for 10 years? I think there's also an attitude here that "having failed ever" is a black mark against a person. We really need to believe that experience is helpful and that would require some kind of cultural/personality change which I think are difficult. Occado is potentially interesting - a lot of technology there - but it has had a lot of the "praise and then trash" kind of attention and it probably just needs to invest a lot more. Arrival is another interesting one which might or might not make it but we should be hoping that it does and trying hard to enable it.

Veen 4y ago
> The nerds aren't super-rich here. It's still about public schools and old money and people who studied law or the classics At tech companies? I think not.
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  I don't think he's talking about tech employees - he's talking about capitalists. The tech industry in the US is mature enough that there plenty of "rich nerds" who made their fortune in the early days of the industry and today invest in tech startups. Hardly anyone with the money to jumpstart a startup in the UK has any interest or involvement in tech as an industry. The capitalist class in the UK is very old and very established, and likes to invest in old and established industries. If they're not just passively extracting rent from their assets they might go as far as to let their friends in the city play with more interesting financial instruments. Pumping money into different probably doomed startups in the hope that they'll land a unicorn isn't really their style.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. There are quite a few venture capital firms in the UK that invest in the software world. The problem is more that, especially in the past 10 years or so, the sheer number of failures you need to absorb in order to get one success seems out of whack to the historical norm. The VC firms in the UK and rest of Europe (really, everywhere that's not California) can only afford relatively small investments for relatively large chunks of equity. To get VC firms on the scale of a16z or YC you need to have at least one mega hit, ideally several, and then you make big investments in hundreds of ropey startups in the hope that another one comes good. That's the US approach. The UK hasn't had an equivalent of a Google or Netscape that could kickstart whole new VC funds. The past 10 years feels especially poor for non-US VC because so much money flooded into the market that there are dozens of venture backed "tech firms" for every obvious idea, so companies outside the US just get outspent into oblivion. How on earth would a UK firm have competed against Uber for example? The sums of money burned were astronomical. Blockchain firms also sucked up vast amounts of talent and capital in the UK due to its adjacency to finance, but with relatively little to show for it all. It feels like in the era where the big US funds were made, companies were risky but still on a reasonable scale. Google/Facebook etc became profitable within a small number of years. You didn't get funds willing to pump money into firms for a decade+ with no ROI in sight.

sgt101 4y ago

I've spoken with Hauser about this - his point (in 2012 when I had the conversation) was that the UK simply did not have access to a market big enough to support a global champion. I said (given the date) but what about the EU and he said no, because in fact the single market is fractured and filled with barriers. I asked well, what about French and German Tech companies? Hauser looked at me and said : yes.

oblio 4y ago
> I've spoken with Hauser about this - his point (in 2012 when I had the conversation) was that the UK simply did not have access to a market big enough to support a global champion. Samsung, Hyundai/Kia, TSMC, Toyota, etc. A lot of local brands have figured out that you can bootstrap a product locally and then just focus relentlessly on the American market, after which you can practically conquer the world. Asian companies for some reason do this well. European companies fail horribly.
- distortedsignal 4y ago
  The South Korean companies that you're thinking of (Samsung, LG, Hyundai) might have had a leg-up from some friendly government policies. Check out the history of Chaebol [1] in S. Korea. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
  - oblio 4y ago
    Doesn't matter. So do the zaibatsu of Japan. There are European companies that are just as big, in various fields, they just don't have the same mindset.
- sgt101 4y ago
  The market that they access is essentially the USA. They got allowed in for political reasons and the USA can tolerate that.
TMWNN 4y ago
>I asked well, what about French and German Tech companies? >Hauser looked at me and said : yes. What does "Yes" mean?

jschveibinz 4y ago

UK investment in R&D, largest ever, is £39.8 billion R&D budget for the period 2022-2025: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-announces-plans-for-largest-ever-rd-budget https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-announces-plan... US federal annual budget for R&D for 2022 is $180 billion: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22322 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22322

melagonster 4y ago

...just think more than thousand internet company when 2000s, they just incorporated into Google, because they are not Western company.

marc_rich 4y ago

America gave us OpenAI. The UK gave us Stable Diffusion.

AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
I had a look into that claim. The original work and most of the research heavy lifting seems to have been done at the LMU Munich. The main British participation appears to have been Stability AI lending computing power. https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion

thom_ 4y ago