The answers to why the UK hasn't grown (many) huge tech companies is something I spent 10+ years trying to solve. It was ultimately quite depressing...
Many won't believe it but there is plenty of money and support for new ideas and companies in the UK. There is *far* more targeted and decent public support than I've ever found in the USA (especially compared to the Bay Area / Silicon Valley). For example, here in Northern Ireland there are TV adverts encourage people to get public funding to start their ideas.
Private inventors / venture capital support is admittedly patchy - the further you get from London / Oxford / Cambridge the harder it is.
Private US early stage investment is often far more onerous than the equivalent UK terms for individuals.
A significant part of the problem is few people want to try.
For a while I ran a small fund to develop research and at times I couldn't give the money away as there was no interest.
It's worst in the computing / tech sector. Here there are plenty of well paid jobs, at all levels, and getting a stable job is more attractive than working really hard to grow your own company.
Then there's the fear of failure. This is a big cultural difference between the US and the UK. In the UK if you get it wrong and your idea fails causing everyone to loose their money your reputation is trashed. There's an utterly unrealistic expectation that no UK start ups will fail and it's the boss' fault if they do. In the US, failure isn't so much tolerated as expected and celebrated as a learning experience.
This puts people off from even trying.
If you can get the something going there's a huge lack of vision for UK tech startups compared to US ones. A UK company will often look to grow to turnover of £1million in a few years. In the US, the business plans are often far more aggressive and would be targeting turnover of $50million+ in the same timescale. Of course the US is a much larger marketplace but there's the mindset issue that's holding people back.
And of course, the funding for scale up is far, far harder in the UK than the US...
Fundamentally a big part of the problem is us. We don't get the big tech results as so few of us actually try.
It's not all doom and gloom for those who try. The UK medical startup sector is doing really well and there's a lot of good stuff happening. However they virtually never make a big deal out of it so hardly anyone knows what it's done.
Yes, that's a bit of a depressing assessment.
Mr Toad
This is, from my experience, an accurate description of the reason why the US tech industry - specifically computers and IT infrastructure - has been more successful than the European equivalents. Specifically the key sentence is the one about failure - the Americans accept it as a learning process whereas here it's seen as incompetence and in Germany its seen as practically a criminal matter as you have wasted other people's money.
The other side of the coin is that, if successful, in the US the entrepreneur is lauded on becoming rich and congratulated in generating so much wealth and jobs. Here there is an atmosphere of envy of the person's new riches and the feeling that there must be some underhand activity going on in order to be able to make so much money.
If creating the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Cisco and the like is desired to happen here, then these attitudes to wealth will have to change.
We have the City of London, which should provide a rich source of capital for new business/industry. Unfortunately it seems better at denuding the country of industry for its own gain.
I feel like it's more difficult to get funding / business loans here. Imagine a teenager went to a UK bank for a business loan for their 'facebook' idea in 2004? Do you think the bank would lend to them
To both of these quotes - banks are not in the venture capital business and neither in the US nor here would they put money into a start-up.
This thread essentially has the sub-title 'Why don't we have a Silicon Valley/technology hub here which produces large companies?' I'll try to answer this question and the main answer is that only two kinds of people are needed to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They're the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they're the only ones present when startups get started.
This is one of the things that fascinated me about working for Apple - the company car parks were full of expensive cars - Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguars and top end US pick-up trucks and SUVs. How did that happen? So I looked into it so I'm sorry if the next bit may be TLDR as it's one of my interests...
The defining quality of Silicon Valley is not that Intel or Apple or Google have offices there, but that they were
started there.
So if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you need to reproduce is those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a company. And to reproduce that you need those people. All the other people needed to run a company will move to where the start-ups are located.
The most important thing to note is,
all you need are the people. If you could attract a critical mass of nerds and investors to live somewhere, you could reproduce Silicon Valley. And both groups are highly mobile. They'll go where life is good. So what makes a place good to them?
What nerds like are other nerds. Smart people will go wherever other smart people are. And in particular, to great universities but, in addition, in order to spawn startups, your university has to be in a town that has attractions other than the university - it has to be a place where investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate. This is why Oxford and Cambridge have been so successful in the UK context - the towns and the surroundings are nice places to live. Silicon Valley has San Francisco, Monterey, the Pacific coast and the northern Californian climate.
Are the rich people really needed? Wouldn't it work to have the banks or government invest in the nerds? No, it would not. Startup investors are a distinct type of rich people - they tend to have a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. This (a) helps them pick the right startups, and (b) means they can supply advice as well as money. And the fact that they have a personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention.
Bureaucrats in both banks and government are, by their nature, the exact opposite sort of people from startup investors. The idea of them making startup investments is comic. It would be like mathematicians running
Vogue.
I could go on, but you get the drift.
