Comment by globular-toast
14 hours ago
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...
> UK is by far the best country to raise venture capital in Europe
For late stage? Continental Europe has its banks and industrial policy. America and China have their deep pockets. Scaling out of the UK is incredibly hard, doubly so post Brexit, that’s why they sell early.
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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.