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

https://sifted.eu/articles/brexit-london-new-york-leaving/

by cesarosum • 5 years ago

143 245 5 years ago

DocTomoe• 5 years 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.

aigo5• 5 years ago

Almost my entire R&D team who received PhDs from British universities had them funded by the European Union

Well, there you go.

agent008t3• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

mvc• 5 years ago

And therefore, why cannot the UK fund PhDs more effectively than the EU?

I always assumed the whole raison d'etre of Brexit was that Conservatives wanted to avoid the obligation of paying into funds like this. Sounds lovely in theory but leaves less government money available to companies with social/professional connections to the cabinet.

Funny to see the red wallers finally realizing that too now.

maccard• 5 years ago

That was the suggestion that was made to many industries and regions, yes. In reality it seems that those funding sources are not being met, e.g. Cornwall [0] and the red wall [1]

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-55279468

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-levell...

kergonath6• 5 years ago

Short answer: the UK and the EU have different priorities and the Tories are not interested in giving money to get more fancy “intellectuals” (who tend to be foreign and liberal).

Also, for now Brexit is costing more than the money that was supposed to be saved.

SassyThrowaway2• 5 years ago

I did not understand that point at all. The author writes: "The loss of this funding and scientific exchange is a major loss for British and European academia — and innovative companies who need to hire the best scientific and technical talent." But what is it exactly that the UK lost [funding-wise, science-wise] due to Brexit?

aigo5• 5 years ago

The quote in my post about funding can no longer happen. The EU only funds research at EU universities, and UK universities aren't that any more.

jgrahamc5• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

KaiserPro4• 5 years 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. )

jgrahamc5• 5 years 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.

iso12102• 5 years ago

What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea.

That's what government's for

barry-cotter3• 5 years ago

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.

With supporters like this the UK is in no need of enemies. It would be difficult to more pithily explain why the US is a better place to build a startup as a founder, or to explain why US startups have more money and so can pay their staff more.

DeathArrow12• 5 years ago

What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea.

Different philosophies. In US you throw money at ten stupid ideas hoping that even nine will be dead, one will be successful and see extreme growth, making you very rich. It's more of a gambler's approach.

I don't know if studies were made but I suspect US based startups who survive to see a large growth while in EU even the growth is small more startups are surviving.

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.

With hyper growth at least you have the satisfaction of taking thousands of investors with you if you fall, while producing a big hole in the stock market and capture media attention. You will never be forgotten, you will have a several Wikipedia pages about you and also some legal investigations. Your name will be mentioned in bussines schools.

ed_balls2• 5 years ago

I used to work for a startup founded by a few Brits. We had engineers in London, but no sales people, because of the culture. I was much easier to sell to Walmart than Tesco.

busterarm7• 5 years ago

That's funny. I work at a public B2B tech company whose primary customers are in the retail space. Our main sales office for EMEA is in London and they're absolutely crushing it and always have been. They habitually convert more of their (albeit smaller) pipeline than North America does. Literally some of our best sales people are there in London.

Sure there's some satellites in France and Germany because locals prefer locals, but Brexit hasn't changed a damn thing for us.

Quarrelsome2• 5 years ago

like the author we're light on details beyond "the culture", "bad at sales". What does this _mean_ exactly?

eganist3• 5 years ago

In fairness, Cloudflare's public perception as a disruptor already did Cloudflare's marketing for it in 2017 onward when y'all opened your London office; Eigen doesn't seem to have that advantage.

I can imagine the sales landscape being a bit better with those tailwinds.

jgrahamc5• 5 years ago

The 2017 date you mention is not correct.

I was Cloudflare's first employee in London in 2011. Cloudflare went all in on London shortly thereafter and at one point 50% of Cloudflare engineering was in London and 50% in San Francisco. We had sales very early on in London covering EMEA. At the current time the London office is "full stack": engineering, operations, support, sales, legal, HR, finance, ...

secondcoming• 5 years ago

prioritised technological purity over commercial success; it was almost fatal for us.

A leadership failure, exactly. I thought I understood how business worked until I joined a startup. It was eye-opening hearing how Sales people did their jobs and the pressures they were under. Personally, I'd fail at being a Salesperson, it's a special talent. If a business allows its tech team to dictate a "better late than never" attitude then it's quite likely doomed.

Terry_Roll• 5 years ago

I was going to cite the same section, but what the author fails to notice or mention is a massive amount of inflation circles the planet right now that has not been seen since the 70's, which is perhaps before his time, but he may have noticed being based in London the BBC's Faisal Islam has already dropped it into a report that the Bank of England is seeing 5% interest rates in 2022 with inflation remaining on its current trajectory! When money becomes tight due to things like inflation, selling becomes harder because people want quality because it adds value and this "London-based employees who prioritised technological purity over commercial success" is to put it another way, quality, which will hurt the competition. When money is cheap due to low interest rates, people throw it around like confetti, when money becomes expensive, we will see who is not wearing a swimming costume when the tide goes out. Helicopter Ben is at it again. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-59358070

0x4d464d482• 5 years ago

"Helicopter Ben"

I think you mean Papa Jerome "Money Printer goes BRRRRR..." Powell.

At least Bernake had a cap on the balance sheet...

hogFeast8• 5 years ago

The commercial culture in the UK is, generally, nothing like the US. You have companies with great products that refuse on principle to hire lots of salespeople. I actually can't think of a SaaS company that is as aggressive in investing in sales and marketing as you see on average in the US. And this is rational because the return on investment is usually very poor (fintech in the UK is probably the best example, supposed to be the "best of the best"...pretty much unanimously weak results/growth from companies that are largely British). Autonomy/Darktrace is a possible exception (they have a lot of US people tbf) but given what happened to Autonomy...the jury is still out.

And CS courses in the UK have a very academic bent. This is a rather complex cultural point but, ultimately, it comes down to the teaching. What kind of things are prioritized, what kinds of things have value, and teachers in the UK value complexity for it's own sake (to give you an example, I studied somewhere that was doing AI research back in the 60s, was offered huge grants from military and corporates...all turned down, research stagnated, grad students all leave...the uni is feverishly trying to connect professors with funding now, all totally non-commercial nonsense...once this starts it is very hard to reverse).

Also, using the example of a US-based company opening an office in the UK isn't very helpful. The UK has lots of US investment banks doing very well in the UK but only one home-grown investment bank (and that one has been taken over by people from the US, and isn't doing very well). There is a reason why this is the case. Companies that are based overseas in the UK tend to be different in fundamental ways from ones that aren't. In tech, the big problem is that the UK is largely used as an outsourcing hub (particularly in development) because there is no real commercial expertise (this isn't obvious to people in the London tech bubble, most of the tech industry in the UK still exists that bubble).

The rest of the article is total nonsense but Britain has had these problems for decades. You see it in every industry, every part of the UK. Attitudes are slowly shifting but it is a very deeply embedded cultural thing (you actually see this in some British colonies, that is how deep it is).

selimthegrim• 5 years ago

I studied somewhere that was doing AI research back in the 60s

Edinburgh?

fnord123• 5 years ago

The UK has lots of US investment banks doing very well in the UK but only one home-grown investment bank (and that one has been taken over by people from the US, and isn't doing very well).

Barclays, Lloyds, Rothschild, NatWest Markets (+HSBC which maybe isn't "home grown").

seanbarry• 5 years ago

I recently had a massive American devops company's sales team on my case trying to sell me their product. It was obnoxious and put me off dealing with them entirely. When I insisted I was the wrong person they wanted me to hook them up with my CTO and tried to bribe me with Amazon vouchers.

I'll take the British way over that any day of the week.

vr46• 5 years ago

Yeah, the whole blog post came across as anecdata-driven decision-making and "I want to be in NYC because London has driven me away" rather than the "we have determined that this company's HQ requires things only available in X". That thing being money, apparently. The circumstances he outlines are too general to be reasonable, and it makes for a bullish article but not a robust argument. Good luck to him and the company, but this smacks of running away from a problem only to discover that your baggage came with you.

mg3• 5 years ago

Are there any European websites in the Alexa top 50?

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?

dgellow• 5 years ago

VK.com is European if you’re talking about the continent. Though not if you’re talking about the EU.

czzr• 5 years ago

The web was invented in Europe. Still, you’re right, few big internet successes in Europe. Problem is almost entirely addressable market size.

mg3• 5 years ago

What hinders Europeans to address big markets?

Ragnarokk• 5 years ago

It is kind of biased if you take global raw data as the US and China have a bigger share of global internet users. Baidu is 6th but I doubt that it is highly frequented by American or Europeans. However, the problem shows when you search by country. Top visited sites in Europe are still American.

DeathArrow12• 5 years ago

US is exporting it's recent culture trough Hollywood, music, news stories, Internet, while Europe does not.

I believe there are more Europeans who know how life in Pittsburgh is compared to Americans who know how life in Torino is.

Europeans are willing to try new tech originated in US while Americans would be more reticent to use new tech originated in Europe.

goldcd3• 5 years ago

I think there's a difference between where companies are listed/head-quartered and where the work is done (e.g. Google seems to have 4 separate offices, just in London).

Or consider India, where huge amounts of dev work is done - but nobody can name an "Indian web brand" (internationally).

Only actual European brand I can think of that's made global impact is Spotify.

Europe seems to do better on the less fancy consumer facing side of IT - reasearch and 'hard' companies like ARM.

bpye• 5 years ago

A couple more European examples:

- Wise (formally TransferWise)

- Skype

- Deliveroo

- JustEat

dzonga• 5 years ago

thing is most US startups are based on VC vaporware. lots of noise, but no end result in the long run when it counts. whereas, EU startups grow at a slower pace, but end up making more money in the long run i.e more sustainable. right now, you've a bunch of US VC funded companies with 200m revenues, yet valued 50x or even 100x revenue. and yet there's probably tons of EU funded companies that are around the same revenue numbers, but most people wouldn't know since they're likely to be private. another notable EU software company I can think of is Serif that makes affordable alternatives to Adobe products. they charge 50$ for a product and get out of the way.

DeathArrow12• 5 years 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.

jstx12• 5 years ago

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

soco2• 5 years ago

Especially when they prioritize technological purity over commercial success. Okay irony aside, you kick (most of) them out and hire new folks.

DeathArrow12• 5 years ago

Fire UK engineers, hire US sales people.

ageitgey3• 5 years 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.

Dracophoenix2• 5 years 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?

ageitgey3• 5 years 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

simonswords82• 5 years ago

But the truth remains - it's a whole lot easier to raise money in the US right now.

In the 20 or so years I've been involved in startups it's always been easier to raise money in the US.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

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.

I wonder how many US investors are actually (partially) Europeans.

It's really not that hard to meet many Europeans in the valley who decided to move there to innovate and build without the restrictive environment of their homelands. I wonder how many Europeans investors are diverting parts of their funds to more ambitious and risky investments here in the US.

aaa_aaa• 5 years ago

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

throwawaylinux• 5 years ago

And not to the EU, but the US.

jstx12• 5 years ago

This is misleading. Their staff having EU-funded PhDs is very different from receiving free money from the EU.

me_me_me• 5 years ago

Technically correct, though he is directly benefiting from EU funding. Or was.

simsla• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Literally each part of this sentence is false

callamdelaney• 5 years ago

He’s almost certainly just re-hashing open source AI anyways.

stillblue• 5 years 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.

soco2• 5 years ago

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

goldcd3• 5 years 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?

KaiserPro4• 5 years 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.

goldcd3• 5 years ago

Yes, there was a subtext of:

1) I'd like my company to be doing better ("what an innovative thought")

and

2) It isn't, because the engineers are trying to make the product better and sales can't shift it (but these two things definitely aren't connected and due to me not being in NYC which will magically solve these issues)

notahacker• 5 years ago

I don't know about his own mindset, but my first thought when he talked about attitudes towards sales is well of course you're hearing negative attitudes towards sales if you're in a company full of engineers with PhDs, nothing to do with Britishness

I mean, HN isn't British, and it's skewed towards people working for high growth companies in California, and yet because it's also skewed towards people whose mindset is engineering subthreads on sales are full of people with a negative view of salespeople, sales as a profession, sales as an organisational priority, products sold by enterprise salespeople etc.

fennecfoxen• 5 years ago

There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour.

Yeah, I moved from London back to NYC after Brexit and literally got a 100% raise. And London is well above the European average.

vidarh2• 5 years 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.

clement_b3• 5 years ago

Completely agree.

The grass is always greener, and moving to NYC will not come without challenges. However, post-Brexit UK is problematic on the skilled worker front for startups. Before, many European tech workers converged to London to work in startups (or ended up there). This seems to be happening much less now due to multiple reasons [0]. Overall, I think Brexit removed one of the main benefits of being based in the UK: being in that special EU English-speaking country that moves faster and better than the rest of the EU, yet, is part of it and greatly benefits from this setup. Now, you're left with Ireland, a beautiful country but probably hard to attract talents at scale in Dublin if you're not a big tech.

[0] purely subjective based on personal history. I'm currently working remote for a London-based startup and have the most challenging time hiring. It was easier pre-Brexit. I moved back to my home country in 2020, fearing the covid restriction x Brexit restrictions combo in the mid-term. The result of my (partly Brexit-induced) move is that my next gig will probably not be UK-based. I know I'm not alone in that situation, and I know we don't get CVs anymore from people ready to jump on the next plane to Gatwick to start a job in London. I wonder how many years we'll need to see this trend confirmed and who will be the real winners. Paris? Amsterdam? Berlin? Barcelona? All of them, hopefully!

disgruntledphd23• 5 years ago

Amsterdam will take the cream of the US based tech companies, Ireland will continue to be the ops centre for EMEA and Spain will continue to get most of the contractors.

biztos2• 5 years ago

Couldn't the UK just solve this problem by making it super easy for those people to get work visas?

Your best tech talent coming from Bucharest to London has always preferred to go to San Francisco if they could, but the EU made it so much easier to come to London. There's nothing about not being in the EU that prevents the UK from offering a similar deal.

What am I missing?

matthewmorgan• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

I also see a lot of brain drain in Brazil. Most are from public colleges, and they go mostly to Europe.

stayfrosty420• 5 years ago

I thought this was because lots of Brazilians are eligible for Portuguese passports

raverbashing• 5 years ago

It's not too trivial to go from an European country to the US. An H1-B is a hassle, as are the other types of visa available.

Can't imagine what is the process of "taking your startup" (with you) entails.

exdsq5• 5 years ago

Moving to the US from Europe isn't that easy. I only made the move because my wife is a postdoc over here, but with things like H1-B freezes and covid-19 it can be very difficult to do.

busterarm7• 5 years ago

I've worked with a lot of Europeans and overwhelmingly they are not on H-1B visas.

Green cards, L-1, O-1 and spouse visas are the way to go.

Getting an O-1 visa in the software space is a lot easier than you think, especially with the way the software industry works in Europe (it's a much smaller pool with a higher average level of education and way more public speaking & publishing opportunities) in general the requirements are easier than if I were to have to try for it.

setgree• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

hogFeast8• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

"cheap EU labour" tends to apply more to fruit pickers than AI PhDs I suspect

kranke1552• 5 years 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.

standardUser• 5 years ago

Tech salaries in continental Europe are significantly lower than in the US or UK. Even the most highly developed economies like Germany and Denmark often provide 50% of what you might make in CA or NY for a similar role.

aigo5• 5 years ago

Tech workers salaries are going up everywhere, though, and it's happening in other industries too. It can't be because of Brexit that a bartender in NYC is getting paid more, but they are.

exdsq5• 5 years ago

Found it amusing after moving to the bay area that a job ad on the side of a local Chinese restaurant was offering more for a "floor supervisor" than a professorship at Oxford Uni that I had just seen.

busterarm7• 5 years ago

The labor pool isn't any cheaper in NYC. Salaries are significantly higher than London.

He's in for a harsh reality.

evgen2• 5 years ago

Not 'significantly' higher, no. In the remote-first covid world you are going to be paying at least Austin/Seattle rates for talent in London and closer to NYC comp packages. It has been a very, very good 12-18 months for tech talent in London if you have the right CV.

varjag• 5 years ago

Likely a prequel to "leaving NYC for SF".

tonyedgecombe3• 5 years 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.

busterarm7• 5 years 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).

0x4d464d482• 5 years ago

"PhD's with sales skills..."

Sounds expensive.

xyzzy123• 5 years 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• 5 years 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-artificia...

an9n2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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-cri...

kingcharles2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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..."

DeathArrow12• 5 years 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!"

kingcharles2• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Best of luck.

Quarrelsome2• 5 years 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.

eggy3• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

since 2020

Isn’t that just because nobody was out on the streets in 2020?

eggy3• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

eggy3• 5 years ago

I still go to NYC to do inspections and other work-related tasks, and sure, if you're single and coming from the burbs or out of state, it's your adventure to the big city. I suspect those are the Google employees you are referring to, not native NY'ers. I don't think the 80% will be most of those who left, and I don't see the crowds you say you see compared to pre-COVID. MTA ridership is down 40% or more, and there are less cars, so I am not sure about your perception of more people. Although, I said bucolic, I don't mean a satellite dish on top of a cabin far from civilization, although, I did live in East Java, Indonesia for a year where 40% of the homes had dirt floors. I loved it much more than my apartments in NYC. I live in Nyack, NY now, and it has enough to do and see. I also prefer to do physical activities and see some trees, and be able to see starts in the sky than glaring LED screens full of adverts all around me. I had worked at the Brooklyn Museum in 80s and after living in Brooklyn/Manhattan apartments then, the best thing NYC offered me was the skate circle in Central Park during the Summer, but I also found that in my travels to Montreal, Spain, and all other parts of the world including SE China. All the other supposed benefits of museums, theaters, and film were mainly for tourists. Most of the people I grew up with became cops, garbage men, iron workers, criminals, or died. Times Square was not the Disneyland it is today. I actually preferred the more characterful Times Square of the 70s and 80s, and the NYC when crime dropped in the 80s. Me and my pals were hanging in the subway tunnels decades before the hipsters brought all their fluff down there to have impromptu raves in the 2000s, but I don't think that is still happening, although with law enforcement standing down a lot more, it has more potential again. NYC like most places in the world are becoming homogeneous centers of group think and like, mostly due to the pervasiveness of tech, big tech, and corp. cronyism. All my working-class friends are relatively fit, and aside from the crossfit acolytes, office workers and the population in general when you walk the streets of NYC look a lot less fit than I recall from the 1970s to the 1990s. Modern, urban, cube life is not for me.

jb1991• 5 years 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.

nnoitra3• 5 years ago

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

helsinkiandrew• 5 years 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.

DeathArrow12• 5 years 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.

biztos2• 5 years 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

Barrin92• 5 years 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?

easytiger• 5 years 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.

moab• 5 years 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

blackbear_• 5 years 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

ricardobayes2• 5 years 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?

nivenkos3• 5 years 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!

ricardobayes2• 5 years ago

Just bring them on as contractors, problem solved...

habosa2• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Higher education in England is definitely not free. I imagine most well-funded startup employees have good healthcare plans in the US too.

ddek2• 5 years 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.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

Meanwhile in London your workers will have free healthcare, their kids will have free higher education, etc.

Oh it's free for engineers? Who pays for it? The Queen pays for it?

habosa2• 5 years ago

Edit: it was early when I wrote this. I said free higher education, which is wrong. I meant cheap.

rmbyrro• 5 years ago

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

oxymoran• 5 years 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.

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

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