I cant speak to all this, but as an American doing a lot of work in London, wow transportation is incredibly great. Shockingly impressive. Traveling to London, and getting around London, and doing a lot of meetings in a small trip, is easier than anywhere in the US now because of how beautifully their transit system works (despite occasional delays which can be expected.)
The rollout of the Elizabeth Line from Heathrow airport is also eye-opening. In NYC we speak about new subways lines with hundred-year plans (recall the 2nd ave subway extension) but in London the smoothly operating Elizabeth Line seemed to be introduced out of thin air.
My dad was a tunnels engineer and worked on Crossrail feasibility studies at several points in his career across decades.
London is is many ways one of the less impressive subway systems simply because much of it is so old, with small trains running in Victorian era tunnels. Not as bad as the Glasgow one, which feels like travelling on a 2/3 scale model of a subway with alarmingly narrow platforms.
It is however a point of contention within the UK that London public transport is better than public transport in almost every other city, due to being properly nationalized.
It's a pretty extensive system and the pretty new Elizabeth Line is great. But if you take something like the Piccadilly Line in from the airport, you probably shouldn't have a lot of luggage because a lot of stations just have stairs and platforms are often at a significant offset from the underground cars. (The double decker busses also work pretty well although they're not generally my default.)
It isn’t universally awful in the US. Washington, DC’s system is great and should be the cornerstone of any revitalization that isn’t so reliant on the federal government.
Some bits about the service can be pretty astounding.
I used to live near the Central line. The station near home was open air and the exit was at the very end of the platform, so I always wanted to make sure I entered the train from the correct end. Service on the Central line is frequent enough (24 trains per hour off-peak), that, if I hopped off the train from the wrong end, the time it took me to walk the length of the platform was long enough for the next train to arrive.
Hah, the joys of optimising your morning commute on the Underground.
“If I stand here on the platform, then the door will open right in front of me, and I’ll be exactly at the exit of the next platform where I need to change…”
I've lived in London for a decade, and feel incredibly lucky to have access to the transit here - having lived in Aus, NZ and Canada previously.
It's not perfect. It's late sometimes, pollution sucks, and often crowded - but people here who like to criticise it really don't recognise how much better they have it than lots of other places.
Same with travel from here to Europe (by train), is just awesome.
Thin air? It was delivered 3 years late and cost £5bn more than it should have. While projects like HS2 to the North are scaled back. The UK uses other parts of the county as a piggy bank to fund London projects.
I have a dog in this fight as I'm quite close to the public transport industry in the North and it's pretty disheartening to see politicans use us as some sort of "policy win" and then never follow through with it. Manchester only recently got devolved powers meaning the region did not have to get approval from Westminster on how they use their money and the bus and tram system has completely improved in the sapce of a couple of years (unified tickets, tap and go) with the suburban rail to come into that this year.
What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better.
> What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better.
> Under the project name of Crossrail, the system was approved in 2007, and construction began in 2009. Originally planned to open in 2018, the project was repeatedly delayed [...] The service is named after Queen Elizabeth II, who officially opened the line on 17 May 2022[...].
Fair but have you seen how long things take in the US? The original proposal for the 2nd ave line was in 1920 and they have only managed to deploy four stops. I read about it in the news when I was in 5th grade and still read about it now, 40yrs later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
Similar for the Hudson tunnel which is supposed to allow commuter trains to function w/o the current madness...
>> The Elizabeth Line was unbelievably expensive to build; that's how the UK did it.
Fair. But what is also expensive is every single citizen taking $100 Uber rides to the airport, like in NYC. In NJ, the transit service has become so volatile and sporadic and opaque that people have reduced NJTransit use for Newark airport in favor of simply driving.
But it is also really good. I love the completely enclosed platforms, ie shielded from the track and train by a glass wall/doors, like the Jubilee line, but all the way to the ceiling. This makes it both safe and very quiet.
Though the platforms are huge, as the trains are long, you have to really make a conscious decision on which exit to use as they come up very far from each other. Unlike other tube stations, where if you don't pick the most optimal exit, you just have to cross the road.
Many European cities have this. London has the biggest, though. And Asian cities. Paris has a metro, Berlin has a metro, Tokyo has a metro, many cities in China but that information is a bit less accessible.
China built an entire national high speed rail network while America was waiting to see if the Hyperloop was anything.
I live in a big continental European city that also has a start-up hub. The companies here are also small, creative, solving problems, but don't necessarily aim for an exit and growth at all costs, many of them want to create a sustainable business solving a need that people have.
I think, to the economist, these are just SMEs and a start-up is about making money, an IPO, an exit, the unicorns. And of course London as one of the largest financial hubs will be a good place to start such a business.
But I've always thought of these "SME"-type start-ups as belonging to the start-up category too; after all they "start up" a company and often have ambitious goals and creative, tech driven approaches to solving problems. This is how I've thought it would work when I was younger, and it is how I still think it'd be good to do today, and how I'd try to build a company if I have a good idea to pursue.
Anyways, the point I want to make re the article is that I think the definition is narrow, leaves out a bunch of interesting companies, and thus skews the picture towards London. There are plenty of innovative places around Europe, it's just a different model of doing start-ups. IMO this overly financially motivated view onto the start-up world is quite a bit less interesting than a the broader (maybe harder to quantify) picture.
I think you're right that the ambitions in Europe are smaller and I'd say more likely healthier for those involved and maybe the world in general. I have spent some time working in a start up hub in Scandinavia and there was the usual talk of innovation, disruption, work hard, etc... but by 4:30 the offices were empty and people had gone home to their families. Work life balance still came first.
I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following:
A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business.
A friend of mine used:
A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.
From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.
A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.
A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?
I really hate the exponential growth every year, which is physically impossible, instead of a plain "sustainable business solving a need that people have." as you mention.
Naturally as soon as the need is covered, and there are no new people to sell the product to, the exponential growth every year mentality bursts into entshitification, or firing half of the company because the targets weren't reached, but no worries at least the shareholders are happy.
Maybe it is my European mindset that cannot grasp this MBA mindset into creating /destroying jobs as if people didn't matter.
Europe has plenty of cities that are great if your goal is "build something useful, make money, don't sell your soul," and those don’t show up in these charts
That probably applies to many cities of economically advanced (or even less advanced) countries. I think the (Anglo-Saxon) startup narrative for too long has been about growth at all cost, go big or die trying, sell out your company as early as possible to VCs and be essentially employed by them as a founder. Starting a normal innovative, profit-making company and growing it sustainably is just non-news, unfortunately.
I mean, I do slightly appreciate this (not all businesses need to grow 10X every year to succeed), but the other way of phrasing it is that London produces lots of business that generates lots of money.
Is this really surprising? London picks up all the advantages of the UK (legal system is sound, eg in contract law, native speakers of English, the lingua franca of business, strong university tradition) and adds in its special sauce: access to the City, global-tier culture, excellent public transport (I know we moan about it, but it really is excellent), and a timezone location that easily serves the US and Asia markets.
The awkwardness for founders in London is that when they want to IPO, London doesnt have nearly as deep a pool of capital as the US, so they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table.
US founders have essentially outsourced risk to London.
> What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
Maybe the UK has been run by blithering idiots but the business environment and regulations are still among the most attractive in Europe... not sure what that says about the other European countries.
Startups might thrive there, but business investment in England (particularly in mature businesses) has not exactly been lively ever since Brexit. I can't recall the last time I heard someone talking favorably about investing in England, or at all, really.
> Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people
Cultural diversity is not a draw. Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia are all culturally and ethnically diverse. No one moves to any of these places.
The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity, which is ironically usually only made possible by ethnic homogeneity. This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), China, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Target cities become “culturally diverse” due to the arrival of migrant labor. The migrant labor itself is not seeking this diversity out for its own sake. New migrants have their movements facilitated by networks of already-landed migrants, who provide knowledge of the immigration process, employment opportunities, and material assistance to their coethnics.
These people are not moving to London because they can find people like themselves there (there are already plenty in their country of origin), nor are they moving to London because they want to experience other cultures (this was a form of conspicuous consumption that went out of fashion years ago). At best you could say they hope that the relative ethnic heterogeneity will distract from their own foreignness, but that still doesn’t amount to being drawn to diversity.
Is it reasonable to say that in many (not all) parts of London, English no longer functions reliably as the default public language, even if most individuals technically "speak English"?
Across most of the world, people who do not share a common native language will speak English to each other. London is no different.
What this is, is a racist meme pretending that the significant fraction of immigrants to London who may occasionally speak their native language to each other in public is somehow a problem. Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish.
I don't think so. Like sure, if you're a Bangladeshi living in Tower Hamlets you could probably get away with a limited life speaking only Bengali, but you could say the same about Spanish in swathes of the US. Realistically, you need English.
I am completely biased but I think London is one of the best places to live in the world, everything considered.
There's a guy on Instagram who spins a wheel for a random country and goes to eat that cuisine somewhere in London. There are maybe 1 or 2 places in the world you can do that. It's an incredible feat of human diversity to pack hundreds of global cuisines into a 10 mile radius.
Food only takes you so far. The housing stock is simply terrible. Extremely small, damp, badly insulated ... I lived in four boroughs, from poor Southwark to rich Richmond. Had a couple of friends sharing a luxury flat by the Emirates stadium, you could hear the neighbours two doors down.
It was alright in my twenties. Built a career, made a ton of money before the IR35 reform, but you sort of felt like everyone had an expiration date, was there to build a career and then move away. It's not that interesting outside of zone 1, it's the same high street full of Prêts/Nerro/Itsu (If you're lucky) or Paddy Power/Chicken shop/charity shop, and rows of small, drafty and moldy terraced houses.
I wouldn't live there, but Paris is infinitely more charming, and keep getting more pleasant as they remove the cars from the city. It's a place that feels lived in, that encourages and rewards you for wandering.
Oh and it's also the least spontaneous place I've lived in. All the food in the world, but you can't really just decide to try something, because everyone knows about the place, and they don't do bookings anyway, and everything is packed all the time, so there's an hour and a half queue to get in, after which you'll be granted a generous 35 minutes to eat before being softly nudged out by the waiter.
This is probably good enough for the anglosaxons or the nordics, but food is just a small part of what makes a good dining experience.
I don't know London all that well, I've only spent about a month there. But in my limited experience the food scene didn't come close to LA, SF, NYC, Tokyo.
As an example, the LA metro Area (LA, OC, SB), 46% latino, 27% white, 15% asian 7% african, 3% mixed
There huge sections of those cities, several kilometers long where you drive for miles and see majority one culture. Several areas majority korean, chinese, japanese, vietnamese, middle eastern, african,
I have the opposite feeling. I would put London and NYC on roughly the same level, but London definitely beats SF and LA in terms of variety, quantity, and quality for a lot of cuisines. Tokyo is also not as good, but it’s different because you can find high quality (higher than basically anywhere in the world), but low variety.
I disagree, NYC was OK but LA and SF specifically, the average quality of food was pretty bad. There were absolutely good options, plenty of them, but on average, just walking around, seeing something that looks good and checking Google Maps reviews (including reading them), had 0 guarantee of the food being of any quality.
Compared to London and Paris where you're guaranteed a good meal in any random place as long as the google reviews are ~3.5+. And even for the lower, the complaints are usually that the service is slow or rude, not that the food is shit tier quality. I mean 4.9 noted places with ramen that tastes like margarine and uses canned vegetables, or where the meat tastes bad.
The great thing about London is that it has diversity without segregation. So no, you won’t find a huge area of town where almost everyone is of the same ethnicity, but the diversity is still there. Race isn’t the only index. A higher percentage of London’s population is foreign-born than LA’s.
Food depends a lot on what you go for. You won’t find much good Mexican food in London, but on the other hand, you can by a better croissant in a supermarket here than you can find in most of the US.
You can certainly do that in Houston. Food from anywhere is something we have more of than most American cities, and you don’t have to wonder if you’ll be able to get a table in the restaurant tonight. But if you like living in densely populated London, you might not prefer how spread out Houston is. I do love visiting London to experience a totally different world from my usual daily life.
True. Generally whatever niche interest people have, they usually can find it in London. As a fellow passenger old lady once put it on the tube: "London might not be the prettiest but certainly the most interesting city".
You could not possibly compare Sydney and London, they are very different. London is a bustling diverse city, Sydney is a nice (big) town. Sydney is a great place, and London is far from perfect but they are not in the same conversation. They are different.
The Global Liveability Index is, essentially, highlighting the most middle of the road cities. London (as with New York) has huge disparities and that guarantees it will never rank well on the Global Liveability Index. The people who choose to live in London and love London (as with the people who choose to live in New York and love New York) do not choose it because it is average.
I have lived in London and Sydney and many other cities. I have fallen out of love with London. I would rather live in Sydney than London. I still cannot imagine ever describing Sydney as a better city than London. Just as I can't imagine describing Copenhagen better than London.
Healthcare in London is world class. A city is crowded. The weather is very average for Europe.
People from Sydney who move to London come to hate it, once the novelty wears off, just as they would with New York, because the Australian way of life is very different. Sydney is closer to island life than city life.
Even with London's ongoing decline due to the U.K's inexplicable self sabotage, it still has something to offer.
Yes I really wish people saying "X is the best place to live in the world" would add where else they have lived, otherwise their opinion is not very useful to me.
I'm fairly well travelled. Lived in Tokyo for a bit. There's no perfect city. London has the best combination of all attributes, for me.
Have you lived in London and Sydney both, or are you just reading numbers off of Google and "best city" lists? Sydney is boring and in the middle of nowhere.
Back when I ran the Shenzhen Gastronomic Society I did most of the alphabet in Bangkok one trip, beginning with Afghan. I'd wager it's better food than London on average, purely based on freshness and tropical inputs. I think if you were to pick the best city on earth for food it would have to have resident international populations, a tropical climate, and at least enclaves of wealth with a relatively free visa policy. Bangkok fits the bill. For variety I much prefer it to Singapore, KL, HK, Jakarta, Taipei, etc. Best for drinks has to be HCMC. Paris and New York are up there too, but you have to be 0.1% to enjoy them exhaustively. I spent 10 years designing food robots mostly because so much damn awesome food is ~unavailable outside its origin. Now raising for GTM/growth: https://infinite-food.com
Bangkok has the best food of anywhere I’ve been. The country is obsessed with food in general, while not being snobby about it. It is an absolute highlight of expat life there. The bar/cocktail scene can also hold its own against literally anywhere.
It's okay not to be that into food, but a bit odd to expect everyone else to be the same. If I had to eat steak and potatoes every day I'd be miserable by day 2.
Yup, London has consistently showing up in geographic hotspots in my job postings data. I think it could be also be due to success of companies like DeepMind.
Yeah, lots of examples of that happening. Runna was the latest one I can remember. I won't be suprised at all if ElevenLabs is bought out by a big US player soon.
Surprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom?
>> Surprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom?
SF's challenge is that the business distract is split across 2 areas (SF, SV) 50mi apart, with extremely sparse public transit in SV. Everything is doable, just be prepared for $100 Uber bills as you go between meetings.
In NY the business district is thankfully mostly centralized. However, poor commuter train service outside of Manhattan makes everything more expensive as there is insatiable appetite in central areas to avoid the commuter trains.
Yeah, I've lived in London, New York and San Francisco for work and the first had the lowest cost of living in absolute terms. Local developer salaries are, however, shockingly low outside of finance and consulting to US eyes.
The public transportation point is definitely key: London is just so unspeakably large spatially and it's all more or less well-connected that there isn't the same scarcity of commutable apartments as in NYC/SF. It wasn't uncommon for older colleagues to even commute in from Kent or elsewhere in the English countryside -- and often their morning train wasn't much longer than my own.
The issue is that wages in London are much lower for tech than in SF or NY. If you want to make good money in London, you have to work in finance, and preferably in the investment business.
London is a very expensive city, and the median income is actually very low compared to it. There is a high concentration of people who are very well off, but everyone else is struggling.
Most live in flat-shares, which honestly I prefer to living alone anyway. You can easily find central London flat shares for £1000 a month which are walking distance to various central locations, and extremely quick by bus/bike/tube.
I've lived in London for 8 years now as a student (undergaduate masters then PhD) and have lived on around £20k a year (post tax) and it's completely fine tbh. I earn more through extra work but save pretty much all of it.
High rents encourages startups to be founded by those who haven't coupled up and who choose to live together.
A company of 3 single founders in their mid twenties that rent a two bed flat and then live and breath nothing but their startup collapsing on the couch each night can make two $50k angel cheques go a long way.
Edit: SEIS allows a friends and family seed round if up to £250k in London that the government will rebate 78% of in taxes (50% immediately and 28% if the company eventually goes bust).
Which makes me all the more disappointed that Birmingham (close to me) doesn't have a better startup ecosystem.
It is an ideal place to benefit from London (little over an hour away) without the crazy prices.
Anyone here based around the midlands, say hello / "alright bab"....
TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
"Freetrade built a profitable trading app, got acquired by IG Group for £160M after targeting a £700M valuation"
That is not an accurate recollection of history. Freetrade raised money at a £700 million valuation at the very top of the market when money was plentiful, then, when the money dried up, and they were forced to go from losing money to making money, and they cut all advertising, they were able to just about scrape profitability. At the point of the acquisition, Freetrade either needed more investment to fund more advertising, or get acquired. After 10 years, a dozen rounds of fundraising and capital drying up, £160M is a good exit. Freetrade was significantly overvalued at £700 million.
And also, IG Group is a British company, HQ'd in London, traded on the London Stock Exchange. "British stock trading company acquired by British stock trading company" is a pretty boring event.
London and UK for that matter is great and seeding Startups...high quality universities, entrepreneurialism and attractive tax benefits for angels but for real growth capital it lags massively behind US and has forever.
Also UK contract law is well established and it's easy to find experienced transatlantic lawyers and firms (there's a reason UK lawyers can practice in NY and why both Hong Kong and the Emirate of Dubai kept poaching British judges with contract dispute into their business judiciary).
In most cases when we'd invest in a startup abroad, the founder would often structure their startup as a subsidiary of a US, UK, Singapore (especially Indian/Chinese startups), or Cayman Islands (it's a BOT so you basically get it for free) corporation.
Ironically, this ease of financial access is what makes it difficult to seed a lasting DeepTech startup in the UK because capital would often be deployed to invest in other startup ecosystems. I wrote about this before on HN as well [0][1][2]
The majority of IPOs in 2025 were in 4 markets - US, China, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea [0]. It's really hard to exit in the LSE currently, and this article is self congratulatory while ignoring major recent (past 2-3 years) mistakes that negatively impacted the entrepreneurship scene in the UK (eg. the revocation of funding for Tech Nation [1] and the ongoing leadership crisis at Monzo [2] which makes no one look good).
I don't know Aakash Gupta so I can't say if he's lying or just didn't do his research, but I know the IPO figures he cited there are wrong, like very wrong, which puts everything else there in doubt.
Not to mention location of IPO not being all that important. But that's a whole separate thing.
As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?
There's a lot of problems with bureaucracy there (I've lived in London and Lisbon). It's a great city but the government is insanely inefficient (compared to the UK IME).
Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all.
In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues.
It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there.
The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.
I arrive in 2026. Decide to start a startup. By the year 2038, the state mandated reader of legal documents has finished reading out aloud to me and my co-founder. Now we find a VC. His documents need to be read to us both. But the Y2K38 problem strikes. He thinks we are in the year 1970. He needs to read us the "ancient company addendum". While he's reading he chokes and keels over, dead from the emissions from his Volkswagen. Our ARR may be zero, but what about our government grants? Also zero.
My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.
Reminds me of how often you hear Austrian Railways announcing that they apologize for the late running of a train "which was subject to delays in a neighbouring land". They never name which country but it's always Germany.
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?
The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.
I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.
Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.
best reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not.
I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:
> it's not ideal is it?
or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:
> as you say sir
> very good sir
with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]
Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.
Depends on the company, but typical junior salaries are £35-45k a year, mid level around £50-65k year and senior somewhere between £65-85k a year. Obviously you have FAANG who pay significantly more and finance firms, but they are not the majority, and I've hired or have friends being paid in these ranges who are extremely talented and from top unis.
Upper ranges for all levels accross the very highest paying employees are £100-400k when including bonuses usually. Usually these are quant/quant-dev jobs and FAANG.
It truly is. I've seen multiple pre-seed startups and founders burn significant amounts of personal capital in order to land an O-1A visa because of how much capital and mentorship is available here.
London is the money laundering capital of Europe [1]. The entire London property market has been propped up by Russian kleptocrats [2]. I'm not saying startup money is (necessarily) illegal or at least dubious in origin. I am saying that London's banking and legal system heavily favors companies and invetors. And that's the point. It's the same reason Delaware is the de facto standard for incorporation for American companies.
Granted, English is widely spoken in London and that's factor for cross-pollination of talent between the US and the UK. It also has an easier visa situation than the US.
On top of that, salaries in tech in London are much lower than the US [3]. The cost of living in London is actually pretty awful.
London's biggest problem is that the UK is no longer in the EU. Long term I see this as a strategic problem because (IMHO) the EU is going to be incentivized and ultimately forced to make their own versions of key US tech companies in much the same way as China has. And the EU won't want that outside of EU jurisdiction. It defeats the point.
The big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms.
For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc...
Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"?
On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified.
It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes.
Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts.
If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
Do you have an experience working in Europe or the UK?
> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree
Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.
My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.
Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
I've had a similar career, and the only time I've ever been asked about my education was towards the end of the hiring process with a major US-based tech company back in the early 2010s.
No UK employer has ever asked about it, to my knowledge.
I wonder who are these people willing to work in London and transfer 60% of their net income directly to landlord. Maybe money doesn't matter because most of the time they spend in work and commuting?
The math works out for almost every HCOL area. Your salary is higher. Rent is high too but people either choose to live further away or accept a smaller apartment/condo.
London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
There goes another 15% of your net income on train tickets. Eating out every time (because have no time for proper value shopping) and you are basically working in exchange of food, housing, and commute.
It should be based on the number of successes relative to the amount raised or ROI and that picture is quite different. In that sense London is way behind SV.
Having a London domicile often leads to an overstating in venture capital raised for the UK ecosystem.
For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications.
Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors.
That would be pretty funny to say. Where are America's startups founded? Principally the San Francisco Bay Area. What about the Rest of the World? Oh, principally the San Francisco Bay Area.
It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
Could you give only a few examples from those PLENTY of other places that are better? Like the first 10 that come to your mind, you made me very curious!
1. Startups
2. Scaling/Growth
3. Existing company expanding from USA->Europe or Europe->USA
It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA.
For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.
For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.
For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.
This is generally how it is. For the entry level market you have a realistic choice of 5 companies like Barclays, BT, Amazon, SKY for limited positions while competing against the world for them. A fresh linkedin job post for tech even for no-name companies gets a 100+ applicants in under an hour starting at 30k salaries. I'm not even sure which startups are hiring graduates except maybe from Oxbridge. It is obvious a lot of people commenting particularly in this thread are ultra-privileged expats where "London" is just zone 1 for them and are well connected in the industry. They probably don't even know what Morley's is. Living costs along with the high tax rates alone will eat up your income and I know British people who work in international bank's at senior positions complaining about these things and about mass immigration all the time.
This doesn't seem true, I work in a UK tech company and it's an incredibly international team. My team has three Brits (including me), a Norwegian, a Swede, a Pole, and an American. The CEO is Irish, the CTO is German/American.
Obviously that's just one data point, but every tech company is similar.
I cant speak to all this, but as an American doing a lot of work in London, wow transportation is incredibly great. Shockingly impressive. Traveling to London, and getting around London, and doing a lot of meetings in a small trip, is easier than anywhere in the US now because of how beautifully their transit system works (despite occasional delays which can be expected.)
The rollout of the Elizabeth Line from Heathrow airport is also eye-opening. In NYC we speak about new subways lines with hundred-year plans (recall the 2nd ave subway extension) but in London the smoothly operating Elizabeth Line seemed to be introduced out of thin air.
The Elizabeth Line, formerly known as Crossrail, is a lot more similar to the hundred year plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
My dad was a tunnels engineer and worked on Crossrail feasibility studies at several points in his career across decades.
London is is many ways one of the less impressive subway systems simply because much of it is so old, with small trains running in Victorian era tunnels. Not as bad as the Glasgow one, which feels like travelling on a 2/3 scale model of a subway with alarmingly narrow platforms.
It is however a point of contention within the UK that London public transport is better than public transport in almost every other city, due to being properly nationalized.
It's a pretty extensive system and the pretty new Elizabeth Line is great. But if you take something like the Piccadilly Line in from the airport, you probably shouldn't have a lot of luggage because a lot of stations just have stairs and platforms are often at a significant offset from the underground cars. (The double decker busses also work pretty well although they're not generally my default.)
Very true. If you really want to see rail lines materialise out of thin air, go to any major cities in China.
To americans, London public transport feels amazing. To rest of Europe, its lets say OKish
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I feel that's more "US public transport being bad"
Right as an American this reads like "American who's never been to large Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing etc..
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I've visited Paris and London a few months ago as a tourist.
I am really impressed by London public transport, both the classical red double deck buses and the subway.
I think it is widely known that public transport in the US is god awful. Public transportation is lovely in most European countries, IMO.
It isn’t universally awful in the US. Washington, DC’s system is great and should be the cornerstone of any revitalization that isn’t so reliant on the federal government.
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It's pretty good in NYC. I heard it's nice in Boston too.
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Some bits about the service can be pretty astounding.
I used to live near the Central line. The station near home was open air and the exit was at the very end of the platform, so I always wanted to make sure I entered the train from the correct end. Service on the Central line is frequent enough (24 trains per hour off-peak), that, if I hopped off the train from the wrong end, the time it took me to walk the length of the platform was long enough for the next train to arrive.
Hah, the joys of optimising your morning commute on the Underground.
“If I stand here on the platform, then the door will open right in front of me, and I’ll be exactly at the exit of the next platform where I need to change…”
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I've lived in London for a decade, and feel incredibly lucky to have access to the transit here - having lived in Aus, NZ and Canada previously.
It's not perfect. It's late sometimes, pollution sucks, and often crowded - but people here who like to criticise it really don't recognise how much better they have it than lots of other places.
Same with travel from here to Europe (by train), is just awesome.
Thin air? It was delivered 3 years late and cost £5bn more than it should have. While projects like HS2 to the North are scaled back. The UK uses other parts of the county as a piggy bank to fund London projects.
I have a dog in this fight as I'm quite close to the public transport industry in the North and it's pretty disheartening to see politicans use us as some sort of "policy win" and then never follow through with it. Manchester only recently got devolved powers meaning the region did not have to get approval from Westminster on how they use their money and the bus and tram system has completely improved in the sapce of a couple of years (unified tickets, tap and go) with the suburban rail to come into that this year.
What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better.
> The UK uses other parts of the county as a piggy bank to fund London projects.
it's the exact opposite
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> What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better.
What data is this based on?
> Under the project name of Crossrail, the system was approved in 2007, and construction began in 2009. Originally planned to open in 2018, the project was repeatedly delayed [...] The service is named after Queen Elizabeth II, who officially opened the line on 17 May 2022[...].
I wouldn't say thin air, exactly.
>> I wouldn't say thin air, exactly.
Fair but have you seen how long things take in the US? The original proposal for the 2nd ave line was in 1920 and they have only managed to deploy four stops. I read about it in the news when I was in 5th grade and still read about it now, 40yrs later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
Similar for the Hudson tunnel which is supposed to allow commuter trains to function w/o the current madness...
The Elizabeth Line was unbelievably expensive to build; that's how the UK did it.
>> The Elizabeth Line was unbelievably expensive to build; that's how the UK did it.
Fair. But what is also expensive is every single citizen taking $100 Uber rides to the airport, like in NYC. In NJ, the transit service has become so volatile and sporadic and opaque that people have reduced NJTransit use for Newark airport in favor of simply driving.
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But it is also really good. I love the completely enclosed platforms, ie shielded from the track and train by a glass wall/doors, like the Jubilee line, but all the way to the ceiling. This makes it both safe and very quiet.
Though the platforms are huge, as the trains are long, you have to really make a conscious decision on which exit to use as they come up very far from each other. Unlike other tube stations, where if you don't pick the most optimal exit, you just have to cross the road.
It's a massive investment in the areas near its stations.
Many European cities have this. London has the biggest, though. And Asian cities. Paris has a metro, Berlin has a metro, Tokyo has a metro, many cities in China but that information is a bit less accessible.
China built an entire national high speed rail network while America was waiting to see if the Hyperloop was anything.
having done a lot of work on it in a previous career, I can confirm that it was born out or no shortage of blood, sweat and signalling snafus.
And for a city that wants to be a global startup hub, that kind of frictionless mobility matters way more than people realize
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I live in a big continental European city that also has a start-up hub. The companies here are also small, creative, solving problems, but don't necessarily aim for an exit and growth at all costs, many of them want to create a sustainable business solving a need that people have.
I think, to the economist, these are just SMEs and a start-up is about making money, an IPO, an exit, the unicorns. And of course London as one of the largest financial hubs will be a good place to start such a business.
But I've always thought of these "SME"-type start-ups as belonging to the start-up category too; after all they "start up" a company and often have ambitious goals and creative, tech driven approaches to solving problems. This is how I've thought it would work when I was younger, and it is how I still think it'd be good to do today, and how I'd try to build a company if I have a good idea to pursue.
Anyways, the point I want to make re the article is that I think the definition is narrow, leaves out a bunch of interesting companies, and thus skews the picture towards London. There are plenty of innovative places around Europe, it's just a different model of doing start-ups. IMO this overly financially motivated view onto the start-up world is quite a bit less interesting than a the broader (maybe harder to quantify) picture.
I think you're right that the ambitions in Europe are smaller and I'd say more likely healthier for those involved and maybe the world in general. I have spent some time working in a start up hub in Scandinavia and there was the usual talk of innovation, disruption, work hard, etc... but by 4:30 the offices were empty and people had gone home to their families. Work life balance still came first.
It's not that the founders have smaller ambitions, it's that they can't find fundings to really grow the size of US tech companies.
And when they do find fundings, it's in US so they move their company there.
I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following:
A friend of mine used:
From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.
A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.
Why should it grow to 100M in 5 years?
A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?
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> A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.
How can you assign a name to something based on what might happen in < 5 years ?
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To me a startup is something that's not yet profitable
I really hate the exponential growth every year, which is physically impossible, instead of a plain "sustainable business solving a need that people have." as you mention.
Naturally as soon as the need is covered, and there are no new people to sell the product to, the exponential growth every year mentality bursts into entshitification, or firing half of the company because the targets weren't reached, but no worries at least the shareholders are happy.
Maybe it is my European mindset that cannot grasp this MBA mindset into creating /destroying jobs as if people didn't matter.
Europe has plenty of cities that are great if your goal is "build something useful, make money, don't sell your soul," and those don’t show up in these charts
That probably applies to many cities of economically advanced (or even less advanced) countries. I think the (Anglo-Saxon) startup narrative for too long has been about growth at all cost, go big or die trying, sell out your company as early as possible to VCs and be essentially employed by them as a founder. Starting a normal innovative, profit-making company and growing it sustainably is just non-news, unfortunately.
I mean, I do slightly appreciate this (not all businesses need to grow 10X every year to succeed), but the other way of phrasing it is that London produces lots of business that generates lots of money.
Is this really surprising? London picks up all the advantages of the UK (legal system is sound, eg in contract law, native speakers of English, the lingua franca of business, strong university tradition) and adds in its special sauce: access to the City, global-tier culture, excellent public transport (I know we moan about it, but it really is excellent), and a timezone location that easily serves the US and Asia markets.
The awkwardness for founders in London is that when they want to IPO, London doesnt have nearly as deep a pool of capital as the US, so they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table.
US founders have essentially outsourced risk to London.
> What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005
It's a classic example of how natural advantages and network effects can overcome mediocre to poor policymaking.
The UK has been run by blithering idiots for decades at this point, but London has survived so far
Maybe the UK has been run by blithering idiots but the business environment and regulations are still among the most attractive in Europe... not sure what that says about the other European countries.
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Startups might thrive there, but business investment in England (particularly in mature businesses) has not exactly been lively ever since Brexit. I can't recall the last time I heard someone talking favorably about investing in England, or at all, really.
Or since the anti-corruption reforms of 2015-2018.
Which frustratingly overlap with Brexit, making it hard to tell whether this is “good driving business away” or “bad driving business away.”
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right, people will just tell you the best places and things to invest in ...
during a game of chess: "hey why'd you make that move?"
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London ends up being this amazing on-ramp into global tech, but not quite the place where the biggest companies finish their journey
Plus SEIS is the most insanely generous investment tax relief
Is deep enough pool of capital for the vast majority of businesses.
Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people (other than people like DHH).
The big problem with London is that it is very, very expensive.
> Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people
Cultural diversity is not a draw. Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia are all culturally and ethnically diverse. No one moves to any of these places.
The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity, which is ironically usually only made possible by ethnic homogeneity. This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), China, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Target cities become “culturally diverse” due to the arrival of migrant labor. The migrant labor itself is not seeking this diversity out for its own sake. New migrants have their movements facilitated by networks of already-landed migrants, who provide knowledge of the immigration process, employment opportunities, and material assistance to their coethnics.
These people are not moving to London because they can find people like themselves there (there are already plenty in their country of origin), nor are they moving to London because they want to experience other cultures (this was a form of conspicuous consumption that went out of fashion years ago). At best you could say they hope that the relative ethnic heterogeneity will distract from their own foreignness, but that still doesn’t amount to being drawn to diversity.
Housing is super expensive, but even that is coming down. Transport is a bit expensive, bit it's fine. Everything else is pretty reasonable!
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Is it reasonable to say that in many (not all) parts of London, English no longer functions reliably as the default public language, even if most individuals technically "speak English"?
Across most of the world, people who do not share a common native language will speak English to each other. London is no different.
What this is, is a racist meme pretending that the significant fraction of immigrants to London who may occasionally speak their native language to each other in public is somehow a problem. Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish.
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Your comment reminded of the youtuber who changed the shop signs in his video into scary non-English script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPZxMVpnCBM
Edit: Changed to link I like a bit more
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I don't think so. Like sure, if you're a Bangladeshi living in Tower Hamlets you could probably get away with a limited life speaking only Bengali, but you could say the same about Spanish in swathes of the US. Realistically, you need English.
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Not sure what point you’re trying to make here in relation to startups.
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> English no longer functions reliably as the default public language
Absolutely false. My god! Have you even been to London? Stop consuming propaganda from Twitter/X and Facebook. It isn't good for your mental health.
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No
Nope
nope
I am completely biased but I think London is one of the best places to live in the world, everything considered.
There's a guy on Instagram who spins a wheel for a random country and goes to eat that cuisine somewhere in London. There are maybe 1 or 2 places in the world you can do that. It's an incredible feat of human diversity to pack hundreds of global cuisines into a 10 mile radius.
Food only takes you so far. The housing stock is simply terrible. Extremely small, damp, badly insulated ... I lived in four boroughs, from poor Southwark to rich Richmond. Had a couple of friends sharing a luxury flat by the Emirates stadium, you could hear the neighbours two doors down.
It was alright in my twenties. Built a career, made a ton of money before the IR35 reform, but you sort of felt like everyone had an expiration date, was there to build a career and then move away. It's not that interesting outside of zone 1, it's the same high street full of Prêts/Nerro/Itsu (If you're lucky) or Paddy Power/Chicken shop/charity shop, and rows of small, drafty and moldy terraced houses.
I wouldn't live there, but Paris is infinitely more charming, and keep getting more pleasant as they remove the cars from the city. It's a place that feels lived in, that encourages and rewards you for wandering.
Oh and it's also the least spontaneous place I've lived in. All the food in the world, but you can't really just decide to try something, because everyone knows about the place, and they don't do bookings anyway, and everything is packed all the time, so there's an hour and a half queue to get in, after which you'll be granted a generous 35 minutes to eat before being softly nudged out by the waiter.
This is probably good enough for the anglosaxons or the nordics, but food is just a small part of what makes a good dining experience.
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I don't know London all that well, I've only spent about a month there. But in my limited experience the food scene didn't come close to LA, SF, NYC, Tokyo.
As an example, the LA metro Area (LA, OC, SB), 46% latino, 27% white, 15% asian 7% african, 3% mixed
There huge sections of those cities, several kilometers long where you drive for miles and see majority one culture. Several areas majority korean, chinese, japanese, vietnamese, middle eastern, african,
I have the opposite feeling. I would put London and NYC on roughly the same level, but London definitely beats SF and LA in terms of variety, quantity, and quality for a lot of cuisines. Tokyo is also not as good, but it’s different because you can find high quality (higher than basically anywhere in the world), but low variety.
I would say [even] Berlin is better than London.
I disagree, NYC was OK but LA and SF specifically, the average quality of food was pretty bad. There were absolutely good options, plenty of them, but on average, just walking around, seeing something that looks good and checking Google Maps reviews (including reading them), had 0 guarantee of the food being of any quality.
Compared to London and Paris where you're guaranteed a good meal in any random place as long as the google reviews are ~3.5+. And even for the lower, the complaints are usually that the service is slow or rude, not that the food is shit tier quality. I mean 4.9 noted places with ramen that tastes like margarine and uses canned vegetables, or where the meat tastes bad.
The great thing about London is that it has diversity without segregation. So no, you won’t find a huge area of town where almost everyone is of the same ethnicity, but the diversity is still there. Race isn’t the only index. A higher percentage of London’s population is foreign-born than LA’s.
Food depends a lot on what you go for. You won’t find much good Mexican food in London, but on the other hand, you can by a better croissant in a supermarket here than you can find in most of the US.
Having spent some of my life on UK, I would rather live in Bristol or Cardiff, and travel to London on per need basis, than be located there.
You can do that in any big international city. NYC, LA, SF, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, and I'm probably missing a lot of them. Way more than "1 or 2".
You can certainly do that in Houston. Food from anywhere is something we have more of than most American cities, and you don’t have to wonder if you’ll be able to get a table in the restaurant tonight. But if you like living in densely populated London, you might not prefer how spread out Houston is. I do love visiting London to experience a totally different world from my usual daily life.
True. Generally whatever niche interest people have, they usually can find it in London. As a fellow passenger old lady once put it on the tube: "London might not be the prettiest but certainly the most interesting city".
Though personally I find it pretty enough.
Where else have you lived though? The cost of living is high, healthcare is problematic, crowded, bad weather, low economic growth prospects.
It's not even top 10 on most lists. Europe, Australia has way better cities.
Example Sydney, life expectancy is at least 5 years more.
The poverty rate in London, 26%, is double of Sydney at 13%.
E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2025/06/18/the...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Index
You could not possibly compare Sydney and London, they are very different. London is a bustling diverse city, Sydney is a nice (big) town. Sydney is a great place, and London is far from perfect but they are not in the same conversation. They are different.
The Global Liveability Index is, essentially, highlighting the most middle of the road cities. London (as with New York) has huge disparities and that guarantees it will never rank well on the Global Liveability Index. The people who choose to live in London and love London (as with the people who choose to live in New York and love New York) do not choose it because it is average.
I have lived in London and Sydney and many other cities. I have fallen out of love with London. I would rather live in Sydney than London. I still cannot imagine ever describing Sydney as a better city than London. Just as I can't imagine describing Copenhagen better than London.
Healthcare in London is world class. A city is crowded. The weather is very average for Europe.
People from Sydney who move to London come to hate it, once the novelty wears off, just as they would with New York, because the Australian way of life is very different. Sydney is closer to island life than city life.
Even with London's ongoing decline due to the U.K's inexplicable self sabotage, it still has something to offer.
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London has a special microclimate and pleasant weather all year around. No extremes and less rain than other parts of the country.
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Yes I really wish people saying "X is the best place to live in the world" would add where else they have lived, otherwise their opinion is not very useful to me.
I'm fairly well travelled. Lived in Tokyo for a bit. There's no perfect city. London has the best combination of all attributes, for me.
Have you lived in London and Sydney both, or are you just reading numbers off of Google and "best city" lists? Sydney is boring and in the middle of nowhere.
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It was one of the best places to live in up until about 10 years ago.
Places I have lived in: London, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, New York, San Francisco.
And there are a few places globally that have that vibe
Back when I ran the Shenzhen Gastronomic Society I did most of the alphabet in Bangkok one trip, beginning with Afghan. I'd wager it's better food than London on average, purely based on freshness and tropical inputs. I think if you were to pick the best city on earth for food it would have to have resident international populations, a tropical climate, and at least enclaves of wealth with a relatively free visa policy. Bangkok fits the bill. For variety I much prefer it to Singapore, KL, HK, Jakarta, Taipei, etc. Best for drinks has to be HCMC. Paris and New York are up there too, but you have to be 0.1% to enjoy them exhaustively. I spent 10 years designing food robots mostly because so much damn awesome food is ~unavailable outside its origin. Now raising for GTM/growth: https://infinite-food.com
Bangkok has the best food of anywhere I’ve been. The country is obsessed with food in general, while not being snobby about it. It is an absolute highlight of expat life there. The bar/cocktail scene can also hold its own against literally anywhere.
Where can I find a list of food unavailable outside of its origin?
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There is only so much of food one can eat and after all potatoes and steak do the job as well.
It's okay not to be that into food, but a bit odd to expect everyone else to be the same. If I had to eat steak and potatoes every day I'd be miserable by day 2.
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Hub / City Area,Total Tech Startups,Total Funding (2025 Est.),Total Residents (Metro),Startups per 1k Residents,Money per 1k Residents
San Francisco (Bay Area),"18,052",$122.0 Billion,7.7 Million,2.34,$15.84 Million
New York City,"15,000+",$45.0 Billion,19.5 Million,0.77,$2.31 Million
London,"8,900",$26.0 Billion,9.0 Million,0.99,$2.89 Million
Tel Aviv (Area),"2,996",$12.0 Billion,4.2 Million,0.71,$2.86 Million
Beijing,"2,350",$18.0 Billion,21.9 Million,0.11,$0.82 Million
Paris,"3,200",$10.0 Billion,13.1 Million,0.24,$0.76 Million
Bangalore,"3,500",$12.0 Billion,14.0 Million,0.25,$0.86 Million
Where is this CSV from?
My eyes..
Yup, London has consistently showing up in geographic hotspots in my job postings data. I think it could be also be due to success of companies like DeepMind.
https://jobswithgpt.com/blog/global_software-engineering_job...
Another British company swallowed by the US :(
Yeah, lots of examples of that happening. Runna was the latest one I can remember. I won't be suprised at all if ElevenLabs is bought out by a big US player soon.
At least Elon Musk didn’t end up getting it, which he tried before Google swooped in.
Surprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom?
>> Surprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom?
thinking about comparisons, in SF the average 1B is $3300 https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-fran...
In NYC it is similar.
SF's challenge is that the business distract is split across 2 areas (SF, SV) 50mi apart, with extremely sparse public transit in SV. Everything is doable, just be prepared for $100 Uber bills as you go between meetings.
In NY the business district is thankfully mostly centralized. However, poor commuter train service outside of Manhattan makes everything more expensive as there is insatiable appetite in central areas to avoid the commuter trains.
Yeah, I've lived in London, New York and San Francisco for work and the first had the lowest cost of living in absolute terms. Local developer salaries are, however, shockingly low outside of finance and consulting to US eyes.
The public transportation point is definitely key: London is just so unspeakably large spatially and it's all more or less well-connected that there isn't the same scarcity of commutable apartments as in NYC/SF. It wasn't uncommon for older colleagues to even commute in from Kent or elsewhere in the English countryside -- and often their morning train wasn't much longer than my own.
The issue is that wages in London are much lower for tech than in SF or NY. If you want to make good money in London, you have to work in finance, and preferably in the investment business.
London is a very expensive city, and the median income is actually very low compared to it. There is a high concentration of people who are very well off, but everyone else is struggling.
Most live in flat-shares, which honestly I prefer to living alone anyway. You can easily find central London flat shares for £1000 a month which are walking distance to various central locations, and extremely quick by bus/bike/tube.
I've lived in London for 8 years now as a student (undergaduate masters then PhD) and have lived on around £20k a year (post tax) and it's completely fine tbh. I earn more through extra work but save pretty much all of it.
Perhaps this is a feature not a bug.
High rents encourages startups to be founded by those who haven't coupled up and who choose to live together.
A company of 3 single founders in their mid twenties that rent a two bed flat and then live and breath nothing but their startup collapsing on the couch each night can make two $50k angel cheques go a long way.
Edit: SEIS allows a friends and family seed round if up to £250k in London that the government will rebate 78% of in taxes (50% immediately and 28% if the company eventually goes bust).
The short answer is that you have to be pretty well off to start with to be a founder.
Plenty of stuff much much cheaper than that outside of the center. Quick look in Deptford shows a bunch of 1 bedrooms for £850/m
I mean, by comparison to the booming US market, paying for London talent is becoming an absolute bargain...
Which makes me all the more disappointed that Birmingham (close to me) doesn't have a better startup ecosystem. It is an ideal place to benefit from London (little over an hour away) without the crazy prices. Anyone here based around the midlands, say hello / "alright bab"....
A different perspective: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005
TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
"Freetrade built a profitable trading app, got acquired by IG Group for £160M after targeting a £700M valuation"
That is not an accurate recollection of history. Freetrade raised money at a £700 million valuation at the very top of the market when money was plentiful, then, when the money dried up, and they were forced to go from losing money to making money, and they cut all advertising, they were able to just about scrape profitability. At the point of the acquisition, Freetrade either needed more investment to fund more advertising, or get acquired. After 10 years, a dozen rounds of fundraising and capital drying up, £160M is a good exit. Freetrade was significantly overvalued at £700 million.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/investing/article-142962...
And also, IG Group is a British company, HQ'd in London, traded on the London Stock Exchange. "British stock trading company acquired by British stock trading company" is a pretty boring event.
London and UK for that matter is great and seeding Startups...high quality universities, entrepreneurialism and attractive tax benefits for angels but for real growth capital it lags massively behind US and has forever.
The Kraken story is one to follow to see if this changes...https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/news...
This.
Also UK contract law is well established and it's easy to find experienced transatlantic lawyers and firms (there's a reason UK lawyers can practice in NY and why both Hong Kong and the Emirate of Dubai kept poaching British judges with contract dispute into their business judiciary).
In most cases when we'd invest in a startup abroad, the founder would often structure their startup as a subsidiary of a US, UK, Singapore (especially Indian/Chinese startups), or Cayman Islands (it's a BOT so you basically get it for free) corporation.
Ironically, this ease of financial access is what makes it difficult to seed a lasting DeepTech startup in the UK because capital would often be deployed to invest in other startup ecosystems. I wrote about this before on HN as well [0][1][2]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763734
There's an argument that some of these takeovers should have been blocked.
> enabled by London’s shrinking public markets
That doesn't seem to be true?
It is - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/london-dr...
Edit: can't reply
The majority of IPOs in 2025 were in 4 markets - US, China, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea [0]. It's really hard to exit in the LSE currently, and this article is self congratulatory while ignoring major recent (past 2-3 years) mistakes that negatively impacted the entrepreneurship scene in the UK (eg. the revocation of funding for Tech Nation [1] and the ongoing leadership crisis at Monzo [2] which makes no one look good).
[0] - https://www.ey.com/en_pt/insights/ipo/trends
[1] - https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/3405c6f3-931b-4fe3-a169-a9665a132...
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I don't know Aakash Gupta so I can't say if he's lying or just didn't do his research, but I know the IPO figures he cited there are wrong, like very wrong, which puts everything else there in doubt.
Not to mention location of IPO not being all that important. But that's a whole separate thing.
In football we’d call the US “tap-in merchants”.
As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?
There's a lot of problems with bureaucracy there (I've lived in London and Lisbon). It's a great city but the government is insanely inefficient (compared to the UK IME).
Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all.
In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues.
It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there.
The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.
Bruder, komm nach Berlin or frère, allez à Paris
Error 404, Berlin apartment not found, or current tenant wants 11k for "the furniture" if I want the honor to be allowed to rent the apartment
I arrive in 2026. Decide to start a startup. By the year 2038, the state mandated reader of legal documents has finished reading out aloud to me and my co-founder. Now we find a VC. His documents need to be read to us both. But the Y2K38 problem strikes. He thinks we are in the year 1970. He needs to read us the "ancient company addendum". While he's reading he chokes and keels over, dead from the emissions from his Volkswagen. Our ARR may be zero, but what about our government grants? Also zero.
My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.
Reminds me of how often you hear Austrian Railways announcing that they apologize for the late running of a train "which was subject to delays in a neighbouring land". They never name which country but it's always Germany.
This was crafted with a subtlety that captures the continental combination of infrastructural petrification and untethered pride perfectly. Wonderful
Come to Germany, the letters from Rundfunkbeitrag and Waldorf Frommer are already waiting for you!
You've not heard of the UK's TV license then.
This checks out. I live in Silicon Valley but now work for a startup in London. Same vibe, less attitude.
They are not the same. The energy/resources in SF/SV are 5x at a minimum - but London has it going on.
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?
The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.
I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.
Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.
best reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not.
I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:
> it's not ideal is it?
or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:
> as you say sir
> very good sir
with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]
Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s03Fq1nsbng
(The full scene is around 11:30 in the first episode and I think its captures a conversation of subtext and indirectness quite well).
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Yeah SF is 10x every other place in earth. People that think things are comparable have never lived here.
10x more insufferable tech bros too? I've never lived there true, but I've spent some time there to know this place isn't for me.
How's the comp? From HN I had gotten the feeling that the UK was worse than most of western europe in that regard.
Depends on the company, but typical junior salaries are £35-45k a year, mid level around £50-65k year and senior somewhere between £65-85k a year. Obviously you have FAANG who pay significantly more and finance firms, but they are not the majority, and I've hired or have friends being paid in these ranges who are extremely talented and from top unis.
Upper ranges for all levels accross the very highest paying employees are £100-400k when including bonuses usually. Usually these are quant/quant-dev jobs and FAANG.
According to levels.fyi London is basically the best paying non-US city, I think maybe beaten by some Swiss cities.
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Funny how San Francisco can't fit the chart they have. League of its own I guess.
It truly is. I've seen multiple pre-seed startups and founders burn significant amounts of personal capital in order to land an O-1A visa because of how much capital and mentorship is available here.
London is the money laundering capital of Europe [1]. The entire London property market has been propped up by Russian kleptocrats [2]. I'm not saying startup money is (necessarily) illegal or at least dubious in origin. I am saying that London's banking and legal system heavily favors companies and invetors. And that's the point. It's the same reason Delaware is the de facto standard for incorporation for American companies.
Granted, English is widely spoken in London and that's factor for cross-pollination of talent between the US and the UK. It also has an easier visa situation than the US.
On top of that, salaries in tech in London are much lower than the US [3]. The cost of living in London is actually pretty awful.
London's biggest problem is that the UK is no longer in the EU. Long term I see this as a strategic problem because (IMHO) the EU is going to be incentivized and ultimately forced to make their own versions of key US tech companies in much the same way as China has. And the EU won't want that outside of EU jurisdiction. It defeats the point.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17462135
I personally think Wyoming will be the capital of startups, especially 30 N Gould Str is going to be the street of world's startups.
No no you simple minded USAmerican. It's obviously going to be Uruguay, its on it's way to transform from MonteVideo to MonteLLM /s
The big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms.
For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc...
Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"?
On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified.
It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes.
Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts.
If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
Do you have an experience working in Europe or the UK?
> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree
Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.
My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.
Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
I've had a similar career, and the only time I've ever been asked about my education was towards the end of the hiring process with a major US-based tech company back in the early 2010s.
No UK employer has ever asked about it, to my knowledge.
Sounds more like a company problem than a London problem. Wages also - the distribution is very wide.
What about taxes ?
I wonder who are these people willing to work in London and transfer 60% of their net income directly to landlord. Maybe money doesn't matter because most of the time they spend in work and commuting?
Isn’t it the same deal in every major tech hub?
London is #1 at that. You earn a bit more than rest of europe but everything is way more expensive
In other European "tech hubs" you're not going to find a job or will not be able to rent anything.
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The math works out for almost every HCOL area. Your salary is higher. Rent is high too but people either choose to live further away or accept a smaller apartment/condo.
London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
> London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
yes, you can quite easily live 50 miles out and be at your desk in under an hour
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There goes another 15% of your net income on train tickets. Eating out every time (because have no time for proper value shopping) and you are basically working in exchange of food, housing, and commute.
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Smells like marketing stuff.. there are plenty of other places that i think are better.
It's not based on marketing, it appears to be based on metrics like amount of venture capital raised.
It should be based on the number of successes relative to the amount raised or ROI and that picture is quite different. In that sense London is way behind SV.
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Given that London has little else going for it other than a financial industry it's not surprising money is raised and companies are registered there.
That said I don't know anyone doing a startup in London. But I know dozens in Berlin without even thinking about it.
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Having a London domicile often leads to an overstating in venture capital raised for the UK ecosystem.
For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications.
Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/926f4969-fda7-4e78-b106-4888c8704...
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For you specifically that may be true, but the numbers say London dominates by far.
Sand Hill road
That would be pretty funny to say. Where are America's startups founded? Principally the San Francisco Bay Area. What about the Rest of the World? Oh, principally the San Francisco Bay Area.
It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
Could you give only a few examples from those PLENTY of other places that are better? Like the first 10 that come to your mind, you made me very curious!
Not the person you asked but I am thinking of France and Germany. France has Station F (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_F).
There are also Portugal, Spain and Romania that are rising contenders. I am also very dubious of UK being "world first"
I'm waiting for the yearly "Waterloo is the Silicon Valley of Canada" article that always fails to deliver its promise.
I grew up in Waterloo but it's just not it lol.
London seems equally incredible & terrible.
London is tax hell. When tou start to have a family it quickly escalates to the mosr expensive place on earth by far
That's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors.
> That's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors.
One after another? The only one that closed office was Andreessen Horowitz.
What's the "another"? I don't know why all the London threads attract this kind of dishonest comments!
So London feels less like a Silicon Valley replacement and more like the world's best startup nursery
London's basically great for:
It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA.
For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.
For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.
For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.
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While startup capital flows in, the growth story is very different, and for those living in the UK, it isn't what it seems.
There aren't any jobs in the UK and most are offshored to other low CoL countries.
Young people, founders are leaving for other places like Dubai, Singapore and even SF for higher paying jobs.
This is generally how it is. For the entry level market you have a realistic choice of 5 companies like Barclays, BT, Amazon, SKY for limited positions while competing against the world for them. A fresh linkedin job post for tech even for no-name companies gets a 100+ applicants in under an hour starting at 30k salaries. I'm not even sure which startups are hiring graduates except maybe from Oxbridge. It is obvious a lot of people commenting particularly in this thread are ultra-privileged expats where "London" is just zone 1 for them and are well connected in the industry. They probably don't even know what Morley's is. Living costs along with the high tax rates alone will eat up your income and I know British people who work in international bank's at senior positions complaining about these things and about mass immigration all the time.
This doesn't seem true, I work in a UK tech company and it's an incredibly international team. My team has three Brits (including me), a Norwegian, a Swede, a Pole, and an American. The CEO is Irish, the CTO is German/American.
Obviously that's just one data point, but every tech company is similar.