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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.
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.
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.
I've spent a good deal of time in London and live right down the road from San Francisco. Don't get me wrong, San Francisco is a great city and I love spending time in it but you clearly don't know what you're talking about. London is a major economic and cultural hub, the capitol of what was a globe spanning empire dwarfing anything that has followed it in influence and significance, a current major fincial hub, the current capital of one of the most influencal and wealthy countries in Europe, home to immigrants from throughtout the commonwealth and beyond, has been the center of major artistic and musical movements and etc, etc.
San Francisco is a very dirty little city by the bay whose culture high point was hippies (note: I still love the city).
The big American comparison to London would be New York which i'd take over London any day (Of course i'm a pretty patriotic American so....). In terms of cultural significance San Francisco doesn't stand a chance versus London.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
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.
In IT you don't need German. English is more then enough. Even though the average salaries are a bit lower then in London you still get much better overall life quality. A pizza during lunch break costs 4 EUR here, a monthly public transport ticket around 80EUR, a decent flat outside of mitte (60m2) goes for 600-700 EUR.
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
They're not talking about a "fresh perspective", but working in a city with amazing infrastructure, which is the financial capital of the world, in the EU (for now :)), and in a great timezone whose business day overlaps with that of the US east coast and many Asian markets. All those things are simply not available in Africa, Latin America, or Asia. What you are saying, regardless of how accurate it is, has very little to do with this discussion :)
Berlin is a highly cosmopolitan city, and many Germans are absolutely thrilled to be able to practice their English with a native speaker. Most people aren't as concerned with language as you seem to think they are - a conversation is a conversation regardless of the language and the country in which it is held.
"I have investments in various countries from India to Kenya to Colombia, amongst other countries"
Well good luck with that, most people don't do that because of the massively high risk of losing it due to corruption. In Western markets you have a relatively high assurance that you can invest based on your understanding of the market and have your return fit your talent on predicting that.
You don't have that in the countries you list, in Kenya and India your investment is one corrupt government official away from being wiped out.
This is why dealing with corruption is such a big focus by politicians, and India is a prime example of this. 15 years ago we were told India would be a top 3 world economy alongside China and the USA. Instead it's still stuck at 10 despite having over 21x the population and drastically higher land mass and natural resources than the half way further up the ladder France. India is 142nd out of 189 in the ease of doing business index for this reason, and Kenya is 136.
Colombia does much better for sure at 34 however so is indeed a sensible investment - and probably will continue to grow as such now that things finally seem to be calming down in a possible more permanent way with FARC.
So whilst it looks good whilst things are going fine, like DRM corruption in countries like India and Kenya is one of those things that looks harmless until it fucks you, and then that's the end of your investment. They may pay off, but they're incredibly high risk.
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.
london is the criminal financial capital of the world.
london is the criminal financial capital of the world.
Kind of redundant, don't you think? ;-)
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
Not really. Some criminals are actually nice people sometimes.
New York City is nothing like Los Angeles. NYC is indeed a city, whereas LA is an enormous suburb.
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