4 ms·
Bad article that shows fundamental misunderstanding of the startup scene in London. The tech funding gap in London isn't at the growth stage but rather at seed
by ig1 14y ago
Bad article that shows fundamental misunderstanding of the startup scene in London.
The tech funding gap in London isn't at the growth stage but rather at seed stage (where SVB don't get involved). Once you're making money and you're looking at growth funding there's plenty of angels and VC which would be interested (and SVB provides a valuable alternative).
- swombat 14y agoThat being said, most UK banks suck (having tried a few, I know), and I am in fact seriously considering switching my company's bank account from Lloyds to these guys, since presumably they are not ass-backwards retarded when it comes to simple tech things that you expect in 2012.
- ig1 14y agoProbably the most useful thing SVB could do for seed-stage startups is to offer painless merchant accounts structured with startups in mind (i.e not requiring a 100k deposit if you're only going to be processing 30k in payments, etc.)
- swombat 14y agoThey don't list merchant accounts as part of their account services, but I suspect that can't and won't be their main differentiator. After all, BrainTree has now expanded to the UK (and I believe they offer accounts-with-merchant-account-included), and surely a Stripe-in-the-UK clone (or even Stripe expanding to the UK) is not far away.