drydenwilliams

I see this being questioned by UK and Europe investors quite a bit. Does Europe needs a YC?

Maybe, but first, a mentality shift might be needed...

Instead of my inbox blowing up talking to lots of VCs, I’d rather to a few. Ones who have real-world experience. Someone who can actually add value, drawing on a portfolio of companies that offer traction, feedback, and support early on. Someone willing to take real risks, who still remembers how thrilling it is to start something from nothing.

What I heard a lot was at pre-seed is: “Come back when you’ve got £1M ARR.”

In my (super limited) experience, many UK investors seem super cautious, sitting on large pools of money, moving far too slowly for startups in their most fragile pre-seed stage. Also there are LOADS of them, 1000s. Worse, they often want too much equity up front, which stifles creativity, momentum, and ambition.

Meanwhile, YC and San Francisco have gravity. The value is clear: if you’re in, you’re in, capital, connections, and momentum flow toward you. That pull accelerates founders, instead of slowing them down.

Too many VCs here only want to bet on the horses most likely to win. A dead cert. But, I’m not sure that mentality fuels real innovation, or builds the kind of ecosystem YC has managed to create.

For a time I thought this was Station F in Paris, but it's been quiet. So, would love to hear what you think below. Have I just been fooled by the bright lights and allure of YC?

Are they noticing this because 100% CPU usage? Or DNS queries from the instances?

This just happened to us and it would be super helpful to know how GCP can scan it before.

We’ve been experimenting with running CI/CD jobs multi-cloud, across AWS, Azure, and GCP — but with a twist: each job gets routed to the lowest-carbon region available at the time (among other weightings like latency, performance, and provider preferences).

There’s a surprising amount of variability between cloud regions. Some run on hydro, nuclear, or wind — others are still coal- or gas-heavy. By choosing where code runs based on carbon intensity, we’ve seen up to 90% reduction in emissions per job, without changing app logic or infrastructure. Also 25% cheaper too.

For example:

We’ve been tracking the average grid intensity of jobs run by GitHub Actions and Azure (when region is unspecified), and we’ve seen an average of ~285 gCO₂/kWh.By contrast, when we set a hard limit of 100 gCO₂/kWh max, our jobs averaged just 48 gCO₂/kWh — with some running as low as 24 gCO₂/kWh.

It’s been eye-opening to see how much of a difference regional scheduling can make — especially for something like CI/CD, where latency is often a lesser concern.

It’s made us wonder:

- Should developers be thinking about this, or should platforms abstract it away? - Where’s the right tradeoff between performance, carbon, and cost?

If anyone else here is exploring carbon-aware infra, cloud sustainability, or multi-cloud scheduling

We built this into tool called CarbonRunner that automates this process. It pulls live grid intensity data and applies weighted logic to select the best region for each job across providers — would love to hear what you're seeing or thinking about.