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.
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. )
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.
> 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.
That's what government's for
I'll take the British way over that any day of the week.
I think you mean Papa Jerome "Money Printer goes BRRRRR..." Powell.
At least Bernake had a cap on the balance sheet...
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).
Barclays, Lloyds, Rothschild, NatWest Markets (+HSBC which maybe isn't "home grown").
Edinburgh?
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.
Sure there's some satellites in France and Germany because locals prefer locals, but Brexit hasn't changed a damn thing for us.
I can imagine the sales landscape being a bit better with those tailwinds.
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, ...
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.
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.
In the 20 or so years I've been involved in startups it's always been easier to raise money in the US.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
Yeah, I moved from London back to NYC after Brexit and literally got a 100% raise. And London is well above the European average.
London has many great qualities, but tech hiring here is also really challenging.
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!
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?
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.
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.
Oh it's free for engineers? Who pays for it? The Queen pays for it?
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.
He's in for a harsh reality.
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.
Can't imagine what is the process of "taking your startup" (with you) entails.
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.
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.
Or is this all to do with the much higher ratings tech companies receive in the US?
Well, there you go.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-55279468
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-levell...
Also, for now Brexit is costing more than the money that was supposed to be saved.
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.
Trying to start a business in the USA: "Rock on, bro! You're going to be the next Zuckerberg/Gates/Bezos!"
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..."
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!"
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).
Sounds expensive.
But yeah, they could easily operate in both countries if they're willing to move everything like this!
[0] https://www.ey.com/en_ch/ai/eu-draft-regulation-on-artificia...
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.
Isn’t that just because nobody was out on the streets in 2020?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigendecomposition_of_a_matrix
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1006/nypd-citywide-cri...
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?
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.
- Wise (formally TransferWise)
- Skype
- Deliveroo
- JustEat
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.
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.
