Comment by throwaway132448
15 hours ago
Ah, another fantastic British innovator (YASA) having to realize its potential (and ultimately the downstream economic benefits of commercialisation) abroad.
Brought to you by the only country to have a space programme and abandon it.
Britain didn't abandon it's space programme. It abandoned a launch rocket programme though. That was over 50 years ago and the rocket was less capable and more expensive than alternatives at the time.
What alternatives? By your logic only one country should have a launch rocket. Thankfully that’s not a world we live in because that makes no sense. But I’m happy for you if you can be content with a space programme without a rocket, that’s a nice low bar to live with, you can basically never miss.
> Brought to you by the only country to have a space programme and abandon it.
I mean, so did France; they both essentially folded theirs into ESA.
Did they have to? My impression is British companies sell out as soon as they can these days. Is this something that could be changed with policy? Does Germany incentivise running companies more? Or is this cultural, e.g. British people are more risk averse?
I suspect it has more to do with Germany’s industrial scale in the automotive space (as opposed to incentives or culture).
Yeah. Traditional car makers have enormous demand for EV innovations. Germany has more and bigger traditional car makers.
It's very difficult to raise late stage capital in the UK, especially for deep tech. We invent so much but our capital ecosystem is all tied up in land and our pensions providers don't want to know.
The UK is by far the best country to raise venture capital in Europe, and is the third largest market in the world after the US and China...
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I think Germany has tax rules that make exits harder, whereas it's very easy in the UK to sell. If you have a more free market next to protective ones it makes sense that your IP is going to flow in that direction.
It’s cultural. It is not difficult to raise a lot of money in the UK. The problem is that the UK (government, investors, employees and employers) got so high on the margins of services and finance in the 90s, that it has never recovered from this all-consuming addiction. Everything else simply attracts no interest comparatively, economic diversification be damned.