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Jimmy Wales: London Is Better For Tech Than "Dreadful" Silicon Valley
Mickeycaskill writes: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has praised London as a tech hub, saying its cultural assets make it an ideal place to do business and superior to Silicon Valley as a place to live. “I meet people around London and they ask ‘when do you go back to San Francisco?’ assuming I’m here for a few days, but I live in London,” he said at the launch of Tech.London. “There’s always this bit of British self-deprecation about ‘oh well, things are so great in Silicon Valley’. But I can tell you, things aren’t that great in Silicon Valley. London has all these incredible advantages of a tech scene, but it’s also a place people want to live. Nobody wants to live in Silicon Valley – it’s dreadful out there. London is this incredible cultural city, it’s at the crossroads of the world. In the US you have San Francisco for tech, Los Angeles for movies and Washington for politics. In London you have all these things. It’s a great place to do business.”
If you like "high culture", have money, and don't mind crowds then London is great. If you prefer other things not so much.
As everyone starts to insult where everybody else lives.
The silicon roundabout is mostly wishful thinking by artsy fartsy posers and politicos. The real tech innovation that does happen in the UK, happens despite all the good intentions, not because of it.
Indians... I kid i kid. And investors from 'the city'. But if it's truly so great then where are all these new booming tech startups.
London's fantastic if you're rich, or at least well-off. If you're poor, or simply young, it's awful. Housing is totally unaffordable.
Silicon Valley is about the only place you can have your startup fail, walk down the street a few blocks, and have a nice safe job to tide you over until you decide you need to do another startup (if you do). In other words, there's a job safety net that is not there elsewhere (the article as much as admits this, for London).
The other issue with any place other than Silicon Valley: Silicon Valley is where most of the VC's are located, and it's where most of the VC's prefer their companies be located, so that they have the option of an acquisition as an exit strategy for the companies they fund. Other locations, not so much.
Jimmy Wales has a pretty safe gig, which allows him to live anywhere he wants, without having to get more funding, and without having to worry about money too much at all, or about having to get another gig. So he can live anywhere he wants to live, and it's kinda OK.
I'm personally OK with London as a very nice place to live, if you've got a steady income, and so on. It's an amazing place. But I think you would have a difficult time getting Series A funding there, compared to a 15 minute drive to Sand Hill Road. To get some sense of the absolute importance of this:
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ar...
If you're rich and famous, London is a great place, with per square foot prices about four times what they are in SF. You get to hobnob with all the wealthy and influential people, and get really close to people with tons of money to throw around. Of course, you have to like the lousy weather in London. And you have to not give a shit that your wonderful, privileged London lifestyle is subsidized by hardworking Brits who will never get to enjoy it. I'm sure Jimmy Wales meets all those criteria.
Ignoring climate... The difference is community focus. Do what you do best, rather than attempt to be best at everything.
Area51 - We are watching...
IMHO Berlin is much better place then London:
- it's way cheaper (both in terms of living expenses and salaries)
- it has amazing startup atmosphere
- it's the political capital of EU
- it's located almost in the center of EU, where London is on the outskirts
- Berlin is a city designed to scale, the transportation infrastructure is 100x better then in London
- VCs are keeping an eye on this city, as it may soon become the silicon valley of Europe
- it's the true startup capital of Europe, where London is something between corporate finance and cool stuff
Of course, but if you're from the U.S., anywhere in western Europe is an improvement, including London.
Sorry Jimmy, I just got back from London a few days ago, back to Sili Valley where I have lived for almost 30 years. Living in London would make me hate life after about 6 months. Heck, after 3 days I was more convinced than ever that the American war for independence was a very smart move. I'll take Sili Valley over London any day.
In my experience, when somebody asks when you are leaving, it is a polite way of saying, "I am sick of you, when are you going away?"
You can't not have culture, and honestly I would much rather live in Silicon Valley than in London. London is just as expensive as SV, and I guess if you're easily impressed by stuff just because it's man made and old, then that counts as 'culture'? London has two symphonies, which I guess is pretty nice, but also SF has one too and one is plenty.
What I really think is that Jimmy is just talking shit and probably couldn't really explain what he means when he says 'culture', beyond the usual american garbage about 'oh, Europe has so much culture'. This is just an American Abroad's incredibly insightful (and not at all obsequious) little musings about how *amazing* European 'Culture' (old property) is. I hope he gets licked by a Chav.
Good question.
The EU is very jealous with respect to non-EEA workers and a work visa can be very hard to get. There is a similar exception to America's H1B visa for specialised skills, but my perception is that the US is a lot less rigid about enforcement.
that Times has a news saying juuust the opposite. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06... I'd rather live in SV just to avoid extreme crowds and sky high prices in London.
Relatively difficult to get a work visa for the UK:
http://www.visabureau.com/uk/i...
You aren't going to get a Tier 1 unless you are an Olympic athlete, Linus Torvalds, or Craig Venter, etc.. Cap is 1,000/year.
You could *possibly* get a Tier 2, if you already had a job offer from a UK company. Cap is 20,700/year.
Intra-company transfers for an existing employer (e.g. IBM), limited to a year if you are making £40,000/year; call it $63,500 at todays exchange rate; this is generally not hard for someone employed by IBM, actually; I have a friend who went to the UK for IBM on one of those, and got her MBA at Oxford (IBM also paid for that, since it was business related).
If you have money (£200,000 for the business, plus your own living expenses), and can start a viable business, a Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) Visa is an option. It has to employ 2 EEA people, or you get kicked out after 2 years.
If you have *lots* of money (£1million), you can get an investment visa; you are not permitted to work any other job, other than managing your investments. I believe this means you can not do international consultancy or remote management of other assets. This is basically similar to the U.S. EB-5 "millionaires visa", by which you are able to (effectively) buy a U.S. green card if you are rich enough, and willing to pump a $750K or $800K house price up to $1M in the outer Sunset in SF (it's basically the reason real estate prices are so high in SF: 5,100 home sales in the Bay area this way each year, 1/3 go to 1,700 EB-5 visa winners, with the remaining 8,300 EB-5's going to other areas of the U.S. and inflating housing prices there, instead. Hint: it's not gentrification that's doing it.
Tier-3 you can't get (program is suspended); it's for things like swinging a hammer and other labor which is considered unskilled.
Tier-4 is a student visa; you aren't allowed to work more than 10 hours a week in most cases, generally granted for only one year, requires 15 hours/week study, you must agree to go home after, as a condition of the visa. This is probably not what you want.
Tier-5 is a temporary work visa with a sponsor; mostly, this is the artist/entertainer visa, but can also be for charity workers and things like Mormon missionaries. If you want one of these, your best bet is to run away and join the circus. :)
So basically: a heck of a lot less opportunity to go to the U.K. from the U.S. than the other way around.
My view on this, not being involved in the VC/startup/look_at_me_I'm_an_entrepreneur scene, is that there is a lot of political will to turn some of London into a technological hub, hoping that the money and innovation from Silicon Valley can be reproduced here. The trouble is... London is not cheap as SV used to be when it turned itself into an attractive place for techy companies to set up shop.
A garage in London is not a place to build the new consumer electronics giant, it is a place that is rented for hundreds or even thousands of pounds per month.
I think it's all great that people want more development and growth from high tech, but the "Silicon Roundabout" is not a place where universities, ambitious people with ideas and office space are all in an ideal state suited for new industry to bloom. The Silicon Roundabout is just north of the City of London, the place where there's only mature, cash rich companies and the Bank of England. It's more of a brand that costs a lot of money to join rather than being an organic growth phenomenon.
I'd much rather see the new tech hubs turning up away from London, so that all the techy smart people are not wasting their initial funding on paying extortionate rents and are actually doing what current day teach allows you to do: work from wherever suits you. As a nice side effect, new train routes could get more passengers and overcrowded London routes could get some relief.
If you want to turn your back on a wortd of culture and social interaction, sure. I'm sure Skye is beautiful, but how easy is it to : see world class theatre eat in a great restaurant from any conceivable culture meet new people Solitude is not to everyone's taste
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
London is a great place to visit.... but I would never want to live there again.
You arrive and you do all the tourist stuff in the first few weeks (musicals, theatre, dining out).... but after that it just is not worth it.... prices are high, living standards low (small cramped expensive apartments, going out expensive, etc.). I lived there for 1 year and 1 day. I harped that it was not a place that I wanted to live forever... and my PM a proud brit took exception to it to a certain extent. Only when he visited his counterpart in Texas did he actually get what we were talking about (his place was 20% the size and no cool cars in the driveway etc.)... and he was completely thrown.... I hear that he finally made the move to Australia.... something he originally thought he would never do.
I would never return to live... only to visit.
I have investments in various countries from India to Kenya to Colombia, amongst other countries
I am not saying that the West is not doing anything breathtaking - what I am saying is, if you guys are looking for fresh perspective on the tech scene, it's the places outside of the traditional Western sphere which is filled with real excitement
But of course, what I am saying is based on what I am experiencing --- YMMV
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
With the kind of Affirmative action and manginas going around, and not being able to open a fucking technical site without being accosted by articles spewing out misandry as a common place, I would say that London is the last places where you should do well with "aryan" looks, and not for long. If you are dark, feminist, lesbian and to top it off slightly retarded you will always find a job nowadays.
Very insightful, and the comment about tier 5 was particularly delightful.
Shameless plug for Germany.
Though I do not have personal experience working/living in UK, over the years met lots of people who were simply orgasmic after the move from UK to Germany. Especially the London with its outrageous rent prices.
Munich is good place too. And if you are in the financial software, Frankfurt am Main is the place to go.
Much better living standards than the UK in general and London in particular.
The language in large cities in general is not a problem too. Some companies (esp international) require the fluent English, and often offer help to those who just move from abroad.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
You can always get a flight to London in a weekend in any city in europe, see a word class theather, meet new people and not live in a very crowded and expensive city. About the eating, I can't even figure out why I would go to England to eat.
Note to Americans:
The "City of London" is about a square mile. It's the most downtowney square mile anywhere, and is home to London's finance industry. What you think about when you think about London is called the "Greater London Authority." So this guy is talking about a British government initiative to create a Silicon Valley type space near the most expensive Real Estate on the continent.
There're actually places in the Greater London Area where rent is reasonable. They're not near the Square Mile.
Your PM?
Which of Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, and John Major has moved to Australia?
As you say, not everyone is the same. I have zero interest in theatre or great restaurants. Skye sounds way more appealing to me. Having to work in London in bad enough, living there would be my worst nightmare,
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I was born and bred in London before living in Stockholm for a few years, Dusseldorf for 2 etc. I've worked and stayed for extended periods in Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Valencia, Rome, Florence, New York, Istanbul...(the list goes on)....
Every international city has it's own characteristics but ultimately they all share 2 common things, a unique cultural 'vibe' / identity (the style of the buildings, the food you can eat there etc) and 1 other thing: tourism.
London is unique in the fact that it has everything from every place you could ever imagine. London evolved as a series of smaller villages ("hamlets") that all had their own unique characteristics that slowly grew to merge together. Combine that with the British empire and the way the country was in essence founded over many centuries of immigration and pooling of resources from every corner of the world and you have one big melting pot of culture where you can pretty much see, do, buy, eat anything you want to.
They say if you're bored of London you're bored of life, in 30 years I haven't seen everything and I was born here, so how anyone could ever see everything in a week, 2 weeks, month, year I have no idea, you can't call it shit, you're just in the wrong part of London.
I've lived North, South, East and West and I live in Chiswick as of the past 2 years, down the road from where I was born, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else now. There are parts of London I hated living in (especially East London), but each area is so drastically different from another there's always somewhere that will suit someones personality.
The same applies to every other city I've visited, Amsterdam for example is an awesome city in the centre, go to west Amsterdam though and it's a completely different place, it's a fucking shit hole. Does that make Amsterdam shit? No, it doesn't.
Contrary to what people think we're a very chatty city and we do talk to people (it's true everyone's always in a hurry though), all too often people rely on tour guides and manufactured tourism maps to direct them to the usual crap instead of telling you to go off the beaten track, the best way to see a city this size is by asking someone who's from here.
- Dan
I know it's fun to bash English cooking, but there are some seriously awesome things to eat down there.
London also has a better selection of Indian food.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Having been to 48 states, living in several of them, and spending six years of my life in Europe, I'll call bullshit. YMMV
Just another day in Paradise
.... Dublin?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Both are playgrounds for very rich people. Everyone else suffers.
The spouse of a full-time student can work full time. I did just that for several years to support my wife's graduate school work.
And if you have to do that and don't already have a spouse studying there, I'd bet you could find a nice mail order bride who needs her tuition paid for. Just be careful what you get. there are reasons that ReiserFS, the much vaunted high performance freeware file system, is no longer supportd. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser )
London is Berlin plus extra dirt, pricepoint and noise, minus the vibe. At least in Berlin you get the all-out hippster flair, although gentrification has pushed that out of the door quite a bit already. However, Berlin is spread out so far and has so many green areas it's hard for it to gain the solid all-through gentrification and establishment in top-tier living costs that London or Paris have. Which is a very good thing IMHO.
Bottom line:
I'd probably choose Berlin over London. But then again, it also depends largely on the people you're with and the job you have. With the right people around you and the right things to do, such a drab town as Düsseldorf can be fun aswell.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm getting sick and tired of explaining to people that San Francisco and Silicon Valley are not the same place. Every time the news media does a story on Silicon Valley, they show a tech company campus (typically Google) and the Golden Gate Bridge. The two places are 50 miles apart.That's like claiming Florida as a New York City suburb.
No, not really. You either like a city like New York or you don't. Most people don't. That why they avoid such megacities.
The whole lot of them are like that (SFO,LA,London,NYC,DC). They are nice to visit but you probably wouldn't want to actually live there.
Glamour cities just get a lot of attention because of media concentration.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Define reasonable? Even cheap bedsits are over £500 a month. If you want a flat you need to be earning well over £30K if you're single just to keep up with the rent and the bills
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
majority of Tech is build on the back of startups, which often run on shoe string budget. Bay area and silicon valley is not cheap, but it is much cheaper than london! So cost of living alone makes silicon valley as a much better option.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's cheaper than the City, but still not the place to build machines or to have a growing team. I'd say companies need to go to the outside of Cambridge, Oxford, Northampton, Milton Keynes, any place more than 100Km from London to get a warehouse + office space that can be considered affordable. The talent pool will be different but you might get enough people who already moved away from the big city.
My sister and her boyfriend live in London and they love the city, but don't really like living there. Both make reasonable money, but a massive chunk of it goes to pay for their housing which is not great. They are hoping to be able to move farther away which will be a pain commute wise, but allow them to live some place nicer that doesn't eat up most of their cash.
Wont have to worry about tthat in London.
Well, quite a few of people are at least somewhat positive about living in a mega-city, by definition.
On the plus side it does look like you internet prices have drop substantially since I lived there last. Nice!
If you are a tech company, a nice city to do business in is one near an airport with good telecom infrastructure, good schools, and housing is inexpensive enough that your employees don't have to spend their entire paycheck to live in a cardboard box. Locating where rent is skyhigh just so it shortens your commute to 10 Downing St has nothing to do with business: its all about you.
The thing about 'megacities', based on my own admittedly limited experience, but also on what other people have said about places like New York City, is that they are composed of neighborhoods, and each neighborhood has its own flavor, its locals who are comfortable there and so on. (Of course, that may not be true of every megacity.)
I read a book called "Londoners" (don't remember the author), in which the author had people from various walks of life talk about their experience and take on London. It started with an airline pilot talking about flying in, and ended with him talking about flying out, but there were illegal immigrants, city planners, wiccans, American tourists (the most inane of the lot), old timers, people who hated it, those who loved it, etc. A very interesting read, and yeah, it seems like London would fit in with the neighborhoods description pretty well. The big problem with London and most megacities is their high cost of living. In that Londoners book someone commented on how it might become difficult for the needed working class people to live close enough to work there.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Intra-company transfers for an existing employer (e.g. IBM), limited to a year if you are making £40,000/year; call it $63,500 at todays exchange rate; this is generally not hard for someone employed by IBM, actually
Did I misinterpret that, or did you really mean to say that £40,000/year is a plausible amount for an IBMer to make while living in London? What would you say is a nice salary for a senior engineer?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm paying $575 in suburban Cleveland, which is £362; so £500 (roughly $795) isn't that unreasonable for a place where a) salaries are much higher, b) there are many more types of job available, and c) public transit is much better. Moreover, I'm American. You Brits would freak out at having to drive 10 miles before you get to the train station and then take half-hour on the train to get to work; but that's only a 40 minute commute. State-side that's average.
And you're exaggerating. There are quit e a few £400 spots available.
New York City is nothing like Los Angeles. NYC is indeed a city, whereas LA is an enormous suburb.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If you say so. Living in a European capital with stellar food choices, excellent seafood, very high quality cheap wines, and comparatively much lower prices, and to top if off where people actually know what is good food, I beg to disagree.
(Should perfectly - it's only TRUTH about online weasels that hide behind bs names & are EASILY tracked sheep online here @ /., that's certain - you did THAT to yourselves!)
So what exactly is your point here? That's what I'm trying to delve down into. As far as I know you always post AC, so you're not against people posting anonymously. Is the argument that the "pseudononymous" nickname is not anonymous? Sure, I could agree with that, you responded to one of my posts where I said as much. I login to Slashdot for the convenience of easily tracking my posts, and I'm fine with other people doing so, as you have. You can call me an easily-tracked sheep if you want, that's certainly your prerogative, but maybe I'm fine with people tracking my posting history. I'm not ashamed of my posting history on Slashdot, whether I log in as "Rakarra Williams" or decide to just post as AC. Going through the history seems to me like it would be a waste of time, but I recognize that it's there if you want it.