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

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-28/arm-founder-sees-no-chance-in-hell-uk-getting-tech-sovereignty

by xqcgrek2 • 4 years ago

128 122 4 years ago

Doches• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I'm afraid "it won't work" is not something British politicians care about very much, as we can see today.

formerkrogemp• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

pasabagi3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

f1shy3• 4 years ago

People want to live (and buy housing) where there are good jobs.

That sentence is fundamental.

jsty• 4 years 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_path4• 4 years ago

This is the same Treasury that just had its top civil servant and minister replaced, specifically in order to allow a massive splurge of borrowing and money printing on an ahistoric scale? That Treasury?

The UK's problem is not government unwillingness to spend money. The US tech sector was primed and bootstrapped almost entirely without government money after the wall fell, and even before that it was largely independent of government funding. And there just isn't the same culture there of people expecting grants or handouts from the government - even in the cases where the US tech industry was helped by USG spending it was all via military/intelligence research projects.

ClumsyPilot6• 4 years ago

The US tech sector was primed and bootstrapped almost entirely without government money

This is mostly wrong, if you read the enterpreneurial state.

robocat2• 4 years ago

the treasury feels that spending money [] is always wrong

Governments virtually always make poor tech investment decisions. It is depressing watching my New Zealand government throw away serious coin on poor technology investment decisions.

Business friendly infrastructure is fertiliser which would cause businesses to grow like weeds. Simplify government mandated interactions, and lower risks caused by unnecessary government regulations. Create simple rules for businesses to be founded. Reduce red tape in areas like payroll, insurance, tax, employment law, etcetera.

In New Zealand, government red tape is not too bad, as compared to many other countries. But it is still a heavy burden for a founder, with a lot of unnecessary requirements. The barriers need to be lowered because creating a business is hard enough without the extra burden of a bunch of government regulated crap.

I’m not saying delete all rules, I am saying prioritise rules and provide default systems that make it easy to follow necessary rules correctly. Remove needless rules and make it easy to conform to the rules; by providing good resources, providing good default software, and by having some rules staggered so that they are only applied after relevant targets are exceeded (a few years, number of employees, total revenue, whatever).

Keep the important rules, provide necessary protections for employees, provide social fallback for failure (ACC, welfare, health systems). The limited liability company was an amazing innovation a long time ago, because it removed a bunch of risks.

SilverBirch• 4 years 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?

Zigurd3• 4 years 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.

fooker2• 4 years 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.

alephnerd• 4 years ago

Pakistan's airforce works closely with Chengdu Aerospace Corporation - the JF-17 Thunder [0] being their flagship product. That said, even Chinese flagship aerospace manufacturers also depend on IP transfers from Russian firms like Klimov and UEC Saturn. Also, most companies require some amount of IP transfer and collaboration because of how complex Engine design, Body design, etc are, as well as the fact that collaboration incentivizes collaborating countries to purchase these weapon systems. Aerospace, cybersecurity, enterprise partnerships, weapons systems - it's all the same business model.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAC/PAC_JF-17_Thunder

uup2• 4 years ago

China also has a security agreement with the Solomon Islands. While a tiny nation in and of itself, the use of the islands by the Chinese navy allow for quite a bit of force projection into the pacific. It would be very hard, for instance, for the U.S. to use their navy to defend Australia or Taiwan.

dirtyid• 4 years ago

US was near tier1 technologic autarky post war until 90s, it had unrivalled STEM talent pool (by virtue of others having relatively very little) as well as FP tools to constrain foreign high tech competition while feeling her own via favourable immigration / brain drain policies. US crushed JP semi in 80s, but chose not to continue crushing other east asian tech ambitions / indy policy in 90s-10s because it was deemed acceptable cost of feeding alliances in era of US primacy. Now US is desperately trying to reshore semi and other strategic supply chains now that she realized sensibly that interconnected world is increasingly not secure, especially in potential future frontlines of allied soil. Ultimately what likely will prevent US from recreating tech soveriengty according to analysis is lack of talent - domestic doesn't produce enough, nor can current immigration policy close gap.

especially important in evaluating China

Not particularly. PRC doesn't need alliances to leech off, because she has the demographics headroom to generate massive talent and governance power to systematically build academic / R&D / S&T institutions to harness said talent to be directly competitive with US + co. Mostly indigenously with big bux programs to recruit critical foreign talent and espionage to fill gaps. There's a reason PRC is rapidly catching up to tier1 tech levels on almost every sector within the last 10 years now that it's producing comparable STEM talent than ALL OECD countries combined, with lagging indicator of # of PhDs undergoing similar explosion that will ultimately drive PRC to tier1 levels. PRC has the most prospects and extremely strong advantages going forward simply because it will have the most skilled workers working off a relatively comprehensive industrial/tech chain and can souly focus on achieveing technologic sovereingy without stepping on toes. Unlike US whose has to balance providing advanced allies both security and prosperity. It's increasingly unable to do the former in PRC's back yard and now the latter is being harvested/reshored to US soil

As for PRC's neighbourhood... was US at height of primacy threatened by Cuba / South America? There was some fucking around and finding out. Folks in the neighbour hood can see which way the winds are shifting. PRC's growing power has already pushed most of region into neutrality and hedging, while actual US alliances are giving nothing but platitudes - very little concrete actions that actually boostered US defense position within 1st island chain. Also PRC has massive blue water navy with expanding replenishment fleet, it just doesn't choose to project outside of 1st island chain much, but it does regularly. Aleutian Islands this week.

scythe• 4 years ago

Lithium, ironically, is one of the few resources that the UK has plenty of.

https://inis.iaea.org/search/searchsinglerecord.aspx?records... (1987)

https://cornishstuff.com/2021/02/02/high-grade-of-lithium-fo... (2021)

Other things, like nickel, would be more problematic.

elil17• 4 years ago

"Technologically sovereign" means that a country is able to get the technologies it needs to achieve it's goals either internally or through alliances that don't create a "one-sided structural dependency." [1]

Saying that the UK isn't technologically sovereign is essentially saying that the UK has an undersized technology sector and doesn't have enough power to import effectively. On the flip side, you could view it as meaning that the UK has outsized geopolitical and economic ambitions given its size and technological capabilities.

[1] https://olc.worldbank.org/system/files/Webinar%201-4_Present...

eternalban• 4 years ago

Flip side is more compelling.

I don't think loss of empire is an easy pill and takes generations to process. Different cultures cope differently. Would be interesting to hear from Turks (Ottoman) on this. Russians clearly are still not over their loss of standing. I remember scenes from BBC's spy shows (Smiley stuff) where old IC hands (recruited from elite colleges) lament and make ironic comments. British Empire was a big deal. Can you imagine the shock of dropping from that height? And you know, the brits have one quality that has always impressed me: they are irrepressible. They just don't give up. Really admire that.

p.s.

this is the moment of realization. You can see it on his face, sitting on his '[shorter] chair'. location is Tehran, Iran, 1943: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Tehran_C...

Etheryte2• 4 years ago

This is not how the article approached technologically sovereign at all, as is this is just a strawman argument. No one proposed that sovereignty is about producing everything from scratch yourself. Here's the actual excerpt:

One question countries have to ask themselves if whether they have all the critical technologies needed to run a country and its economy.
“The answer for Britain” is “absolutely no, there is no chance in hell that Britain could ever become technologically sovereign,” he said.

shubb• 4 years ago

Do you mind explaining more clearly the difference between your understanding of what the article means, and what the GP wrote? They seem pretty similar?

radicalbyte• 4 years ago

Why would anyone expect that from a small country? If it was part of the EU - yeah you should expect the EU to be technically sovereign. But not a small island who decided to leave (so they could make bankers richer and the poor poorer).

denton-scratch• 4 years ago

I hit a paywall. http://archive.today/U6BUV

[...] whether they have all the critical technologies needed to run a country and its economy.

That's what he seems to mean by "technologically sovereign": apparently, it comes down to being able to build computers from sand and copper ore. Well, if you define "sovereign" that way, then of course the UK can never be sovereign. Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers; we've been dependent on trade for 400 years.

Maybe he's just having a go at the new Tory leadership, which has some odd notions about being completely independent of any one else on principle. But if that's it, it doesn't come across in the article.

darkteflon• 4 years ago

I get your point, but the word “sovereign” carries very particular implications that make it a poor choice by the interviewee in this context. I think it’s uncharitable to characterise GP’s argument as a strawman.

giobox• 4 years ago

I think it's a huge stretch to say the two concepts aren't related.

To take the example of the military; we have the "military industrial complex" which is the collection of private companies that form the vital part of the state's war functions.

To become technologically sovereign will require a similar basket of private companies based in your own State, unless you expect the government to be capable of all of these tasks effectively itself. Think universities, chip designers, fabs, factories. This is also not an all or nothing choice - the absence of Lithium in the UK is not a good argument against considering strategically what aspects of the tech industry should be sovereign.

f1shy3• 4 years ago

Exactly. And I would add, it is not about producing everything, but being able, if need be, to produce it. To have enough know how inland.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

Also, it may be soon economically viable to harvest lithium from the ocean :)

tablespoon• 4 years ago

To be honest I'm not sure any country apart from China stands any chance of becoming technologically sovereign.

IMHO, the US probably could manage it too: it has a big population and lots of natural resources. The reason it isn't is more of issue of ideology and will: it was far more technologically sovereign in the past than it is now, but chose to give that up so some investors could get more profits in the short-term. It's unlikely to change, since the ideologies that drove those choices are still strong.

lazyeye• 4 years ago

I wonder what percentage of the population it was that made the decision to "choose to give it up".

azinman2• 4 years ago

I don’t know what you call short term, because this has been decades in the making. I’d at least call it medium term.

The flip side is now the US is more competitive globally as the products can be priced as such, in addition to consumer price decreases. You also have the issue that most Americans don’t want the ultra low paying jobs necessary to build all this stuff, nor want the environmental damage from the mining.

So it’s not so simple as just some greedy evil villains we can point to.

bobthepanda3• 4 years ago

I would say even China isn’t technologically sovereign, depending on how broad the definition of technology is.

As a general example, even the Chinese attempt at building a commercial airliner still uses Western engines and other avionics.

ETH_start• 4 years ago

It's easy to be technologically sovereign: just give up any technologies you can't produce domestically. Isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea manage to be completely self-sufficient, to give an example.

What's impossible is staying at the technological forefront while being technologically sovereign.

Kalanos• 4 years ago

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

pelagicAustral• 4 years ago

Don't hold back.

AtomicOrbital• 4 years 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• 4 years 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_path4• 4 years 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.

Cederfjard• 4 years ago

”Charles Baggage” made me giggle a bit.

m_mueller• 4 years ago

Nitpick: Charles Babbage was the first to conceive digital computing in hardware - just mechanical instead of electrical.

donmcronald• 4 years 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.

f1shy3• 4 years ago

but is the IP ownership a big deal compared to the manufacturing?

Yes, it is.

ClumsyPilot6• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

rvz• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Don’t forget Autonomy for $11B which turned out to be a fraud. Herman Houser and Mike Lynch are still good friends.

lotsofpulp• 4 years 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)

ClumsyPilot6• 4 years 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• 4 years 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?

Etheryte2• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/U6BUV

throwayyy479087• 4 years 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.

t435624• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

jimnotgym• 4 years ago

All true. VC's in the UK only share the name of their US cousins. They invest in established business. They are full of the orthodoxy expected of a bunch of ex-big 4 accountants that went to expensive schools.

A startup in the UK is a son of a rich man who wants to set up doing whatever, and leverages their Old Boys network to get customers.

Banks are so risk averse that it is laughable.

ClumsyPilot6• 4 years ago

The idea that you could raise money based on a powerpoint presentation, like Dropbox did, is laughable in UK.

The investment culture is hard to describe with a word other than cowardly.

kypro2• 4 years ago

Yes, you're completely right. Not that I'm in favour of the wealth inequality in the US, but in some ways it's one of the US's biggest assets. There are a lot of people in the US who are so excessively wealthy they're willing to throw money at moon-shot companies (and sometimes simply ideas) that will almost certainly never yield them a return.

You don't get companies like Space X and Blue Origin without extremely ambitious and extremely wealthy individuals and the US has a large amount of both. In the UK people are generally far more conservative both with their ambitions and with their investments. We do have innovative tech companies here, but they're far less ambitions than those you'd typically find in the US. Things like food delivery, customisable greeting cards, accounting services, etc.

I think to a lesser extent there are geographical, demographical and regulatory advantages to starting tech companies in the the US too. In the UK employers have provide paid holiday, maternity leave, and pay national insurance contributions for everyone they employee. This isn't a huge issue if your a profitable company, but things like this add up if you're trying to bootstrap a company with a limited amount of VC money. Similarly, we can't scale as easily because of our geographical and demographical limitations. Europe isn't as easy to scale into for various geographic and cultural reasons and the UK as a domestic market is far smaller than the US.

While nothing I've said makes it impossible for the UK to create a tech giant, it does stack the odds against us. And just based on relative population size we're already 5 times less likely to create a tech giant when compared to the US.

prottog2• 4 years ago

I'm in favor of a system of free(ish) markets operating well, with big fortunes made from value creation and not rent-seeking behavior. If that results in wealth inequality, so be it; the old idea that a rising tide lifts all boats has not been invalidated yet.

nine_zeros• 4 years ago

This has parellels in the music industry. A British band has "made it" only if they have made it in America.

scyzoryk_xyz2• 4 years ago

I just interviewed at Ocado and I agree that it looks like they have it together. But then they’re outsourcing a chunk of the software to my country so not sure if that reflects well on the UK.

Another one worth mentioning a bit closer to my field is CMR - a surgical robotics company. They’re blowing enormous capital trying to conquer Europe and it might be working. Their tech is convincing and they have good showmanship. If it works out that’s an enormous market.

But it’s not visionary - just building on many incremental improvements and respectful of the thorough research and validation required. My external (optimistic) view is that this is something that is given a bit more respect in UK culture. Something about strong educational institutions and empirical reasoned thinking. But then maybe it’s just my POV?

robocat2• 4 years ago

But it’s not visionary - just building on many incremental improvements and respectful of the thorough research and validation required

That is the core idea of most successful businesses. The same thing done very quickly is called a startup. “Visionary” is for government pork barrels, or wealthy investors that want to gamble or gain status, with the most likely outcome of becoming less wealthy.

I think building a successful business is best achieved by a series of smaller steps, with each step up-and-to-the-right. Visionary businesses that have a single wallface/cliff to climb have a horrific level of failure.

sgt1013• 4 years 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.

oblio2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

sgt1013• 4 years ago

The market that they access is essentially the USA. They got allowed in for political reasons and the USA can tolerate that.

TMWNN3• 4 years ago

I asked well, what about French and German Tech companies?
Hauser looked at me and said : yes.

What does "Yes" mean?

sgt1013• 4 years ago

Well, there's one large German Tech company - SAP.

But no French or British ones.

jschveibinz• 4 years 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-plan...

US federal annual budget for R&D for 2022 is $180 billion:

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22322

melagonster• 4 years ago

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

marc_rich• 4 years ago

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

AnonymousPlanet• 4 years 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

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

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