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Comment by AshleysBrain | Hacker News Reader

I run a UK startup (www.scirra.com) and recently secured angel investment. I keep hearing about how much the UK government wants to encourage UK startups, but so far I've not read anything relevant to me, heard from anybody useful, or generally seen anything the UK government might be doing that interests me in any way. Are they just full of hot air or am I supposed to be doing something I'm not? Right now I feel very much like our business is fighting alone with no help from the government at all, despite all their talk...

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"no help from the government at all"

I'm not sure what kind of help a government can realistically offer a startup - other than tax breaks, we had angel investors who benifited from EIS and I saved a chunk of CGT because of the tapering relief rules that were in place at the time meaning I only paid 10%.

Based on my own experiences I'd be very wary of any other "help".

Make NCAs illegal. Make it so your employer doesn't own what you do in your spare time. A truly nuclear option is to bar discrimination based on previous employment history.

One major peril for erstwhile startup founders is that if you fail while bootstrapping, it can be hard to get a job because people, for some stupid reason or another, consider you to be unemployed. That problem is a non-issue in the valley but I do wonder if it will have to be solved by brute force elsewhere.

"Make it so your employer doesn't own what you do in your spare time"

The simple answer to that is to avoid employment contracts that claim that - the only time I've had a contract that claimed that was when I was CTO of a VC backed company and one of the investors insisted. My own lawyer suggested that it was unenforceable anyway - as many things are in employment contracts.

If you do a few (relatively simple) qualifying steps your investors can qualify for EIS tax relief which makes angel investment more attractive as it reduces the downside.

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