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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

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.
- t43562 4y ago
  I think this just means that the UK VCs are far far far too late. And they're late for some reason - it doesn't take insight to follow a well established trend.

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.

t43562 4y ago
I think this just means that the UK VCs are far far far too late. And they're late for some reason - it doesn't take insight to follow a well established trend.