Hiring: * Engineers in the UK are amazing, and you can hire from mainland Europe, which is also very good. * Retention rates are higher. * Salaries are lower. * Most decent start-up-orientated talent is at the under-25 level. Finding good PMs with big vision is harder, and if you do, encouraging them to leave for a start-up is less heard of. In a sense, you have to 'grow your own'. * Engineers traditionally have come from more corporate / tech-consulting backgrounds than start-up ones; this has both its pluses and its minuses. * Engineers in mainland Europe, and to a lesser extent London, will have more experience with older technology (C++, java) than newer technologies. That said, there are great developers for clojure/scala/python/ruby, but -- again -- they tend to be at a more junior level.
Fundraising: * The good people in London are really good, but there are a lot less of them. * Seed rounds are not significantly harder (due to SEIS and lots of hnws.) Crunch, I believe, comes at A, B, where there are only a handful of options (Index, Accel, Balderton, Wellington). This is when people look across the pond. Ironically, London is full of PE and massive funds (property, hedge funds, etc.) I assume some of this money will divert to tech in the future. * For seed rounds, you may have some discount price-wise, but, then again, it is a lot cheaper to run a company in the UK. I don't believe this discount is that high or particularly relevant. * Investors are more inclined to want revenue, and focus on minimizing downside instead of maximizing upside; IMO it is harder to fund very big, disruptive ideas vs. smaller, cash-generative ones. There are outliers who are exceptions to this. * Things seem to be changing. Lots of 'US-style' firms are springing up, but mostly at the seed level. * There is a tradition of doing seed as equity rounds instead of convertible debt. This is a massive headache, but people aren't used to debt like in SV. * Most VCs have been bankers / consultants instead of entrepreneurs.