This is one of the more facile things I've read on the internet. > Dear London, it's not you, it's me Er, except the next 1500 words are a very muddled and oc

This is one of the more facile things I've read on the internet. > Dear London, it's not you, it's me Er, except the next 1500 words are a very muddled and occasionally misspelt attack on London, and not you. > I left you for another women. Her first name is Silicon and her last name is Valley. I’m not sure why I believed you for so long, but you lied to me. You told me Tech City is the next Silicon Valley, and it isn’t. You told me you were going to lead the UK out of a slump and you didn’t. I wanted edgy. I wanted mobile. I wanted hip. I wanted cool. You were boring, conservative, and expensive. So what did I do? I left. I left you because my new girlfriend knows how to support me. Ignoring the painful rhetoric here, Tech City is not going to be the next Silicon Valley, and nobody said it would be. You thought the global economic recession's impact on London, the financial capital of the world, would be lessened by the government putting ten people in an office and asking them to talk about startups? I'm not sure what the output was which you were expecting from this input, but it's clear that you were misguided. Maybe you think SVASE is going to help the homeless in San Francisco? London is expensive. A bit cheaper than SF, though. Boring and conservative? Make grand plans and I think you'll find people willing to back you. We did. > When we launched our MVP in march my thoughts were “yes, let’s be part of this tech city revolution”. My thoughts now, “What revolution?” I've run a venture-backed startup in London for nearly 3 years. I also think "what tech city revolution?" because a common hallmark of the successful / venture-backed startups in the UK (you seem to conflate the two) is that they don't really go in for the bullshit: networking, accelerators where you get a communal office and access to a shitty lawyer, ec. The good startups in the UK don't obsess over Tech City News or go to networking events with cold pizza and warm white wine. They work out whether there's an opportunity in a market, raise capital, and build things. > Without sounding completely derogatory – London’s tech startup scene is very amateurish. I've read your article a couple of times and I'm still not clear on what facets strike you as amateurish. > the developer talent isn’t exactly amateur. For example, take a stroll into a TechHub campus or the Innovation Warehouse and it’s buzzing. I'm not sure that the "buzz" of an engineer is the best way to evaluate his or her amateur/pro status. If you want to assess software engineers, you need to meet them and work with them. Also, you're again talking about going into incubators and shared offices to assess the health of companies in a city. A bit weird. > I met a number of young and hungry developers, technical and online savvy who struggled to find good companies to work for. That's odd: I know at least one YC company in addition to us who find it very hard to find great software engineers. We're constantly advertising positions and recruiting through our networks. Whenever I speak to other venture-backed companies the biggest challenge is finding talent. Not all engineers are created equally. For established world class talent the attraction has traditionally been San Francisco, whether you're in Europe or America. But look at people like Nikolaj Nyholm: built a fantastic software company (which now powers facial recognition in most of Apple's products), sold it, and now back in Europe working with startups. > Here in SV, that match is almost nearly always met. I even met a women tech founder, yes one of this “pink” unicorns SV is biting it’s hands off to use as a poster child, who lacked a support network. Trying to decrypt this sentence. You met a female founder in SV, or in the UK? What "support network" was she lacking? > The bottom line is this – the right people aren’t leading the pack. I’m not suggesting a personal nomination, but it was still clear there aren’t enough of the right people in the system. Could have I waited it out and became one of those people? Sure, but one thing you learn in tech is that time is not on your side. This is so muddled. What are you saying, exactly? > One of the foundations of Silicon Valley is its strong angel investing community and large amounts of high net worths. At last, something we can all agree with! > As far as I am concerned this community doesn’t exist in London. Simply put this is wrong. London's major problem is that startups have become more popular and readily accessible due to a stronger proclivity to invest at the seed stage amongst people in the financial services. If you cannot raise £150k for your startup's seed round in London, you're doing something wrong. The big challenge has been at the seed through to Series A stage. Because of a lack of major institutions in the UK with large funds, the institutional backers tend towards later stage deals. A few are actively correcting that and one or two great funds have sprung up to specifically tackle this problem (Profounder, Hoxton Ventures, Passion), but the challenge is the same: because there isn't competition in the funds, only in the startups, there's less likely to be money trickling down to riskier ventures and those who are between seed and Series A. > Are there high net worth individuals in tech investing in companies in London? Yes, but as a whole, it is neither the correct group nor right number of people to become critical mass. There should be some kind of rule against asking yourself easy questions so you can look like a genius in a blog post. There are a great many HNWI and UHNWIs in London. The good point you veer towards making but manage to miss, is that there aren't the high number of $1bn exits in Europe which lead to HNWIs with tech backgrounds investing in companies. I agree with that. But I've also found that there are some, and they're interested in hearing from credible entrepreneurs. I got bored of the rest of this but here's my tl;dr: 1. Yes there are good reasons to found a startup in San Francisco and not in London. 2. There are also good reasons to found a startup in London and not San Francisco (another topic for a different time). 3. I believe that if you truly have a disruptive idea and the capacity to make it happen, you will not have a problem raising capital. But it tends to be at the higher end of the spectrum (£1bn+ idea) that you will have an easier time raising. I wish you well in San Francisco but I don't think London was the problem here. I think you had mismanaged expectations. Feel free to ping me if you want to meet for a coffee next time you're in London so we can compare notes on SF vs. London -- address is in profile.