London does sales well, if you want a sales office you open it in london.

What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea. Even less so to someone with a crap idea.

Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else.

They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised.

To back up the point that John is making, "Technical purity" above all else is a symptom of leadership not explaining the business needs well enough. (or not putting in place an engineering team with enough pragmatism to translate business to tech. )

I mean, good luck to him moving his HQ to NYC etc. but if I were an employee in London HM The Queen's tea cup in Windsor would be shaking from the sonic boom after I lit the reheats on my CV.

> I mean, good luck to him moving his HQ to NYC etc. but if I were an employee in London HM The Queen's tea cup in Windsor would be shaking from the sonic boom after I lit the reheats on my CV.

I wish I lived in London just to use this expressive nugget of gold.

Gold.

The Epstein Drive[1] method of finding a new job.

1. https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Epstein_Drive

>What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea.

Different philosophies. In US you throw money at ten stupid ideas hoping that even nine will be dead, one will be successful and see extreme growth, making you very rich. It's more of a gambler's approach.

I don't know if studies were made but I suspect US based startups who survive to see a large growth while in EU even the growth is small more startups are surviving.

> most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else.

With hyper growth at least you have the satisfaction of taking thousands of investors with you if you fall, while producing a big hole in the stock market and capture media attention. You will never be forgotten, you will have a several Wikipedia pages about you and also some legal investigations. Your name will be mentioned in bussines schools.

> It's more of a gambler's approach.

Wrong. The cultural difference comes from differing appetites for risk. VC's aren't gambling on their portfolio companies, they expect each and every one of them to turn into rocket ships. If there's no potential to become a rocketship, they don't invest, simple as that. Stupid ideas don't get investment.

That VCs understand that it is highly unlikely that each portfolio company will actually become a rocketship, just means that they appreciate that each investment in the portfolio carries high amounts of risk. Europe doesn't have the same appetite for risk.

Well, the line between a risky investment and a stupid investment isn't always obvious.

If my business plan is to make wifi-enabled juicing machines that cost $400 and only work on proprietary, DRMed packets I sell at a huge margin - great investment? Or stupid investment?

If my business plan is to make a $2,000 stationary bicycle, when most competing products cost <$400 - and it'll come with a subscription, but only people who've paid $$$$ upfront will be able to subscribe - great investment? Or stupid investment?

If I'm going to take out long cheap leases on office space, spruce them up a bit and sell short expensive leases? And some of the long leases will actually be from the CEO who personally owns some office buildings - great investment? Or stupid investment?

What if I run a website that lets strangers talk to each other, and I have a lot of users, barely any revenue, decades of losses, and I have no plan to make a profit. The users hate ads. Great investment? Or stupid investment?

It turns out some investments that seem dumb have worked out much better than I would have expected. Others not so much...

It seems to me like you're letting personal bias get in the way.

> Juicero

Huge margin, going for rich, health conscious consumers - great investment on paper. Shitty due diligence by investors who thought they could grade the investment by the numbers and not by the actual hardware, juice bags, etc.

> Peloton

Taking a commoditized product and differentiating with a premium offering offering high margins is literally a phenomenal investment, if you can find a market for the premium offering and can build a moat. Pharmaceutical companies do this all the time with drugs that are about to lose patent protection, put in a little tweak, get the patent moat back, market the hell out of it to get doctors to prescribe it instead of the suddenly cheap generic version.

> WeWork

You literally described a way to buy low and sell high, taking advantage of latent inefficiency in the market due to misaligned incentives on the part of real estate owners vs. short-term tenants. Basically run hotels but for entrepreneurs instead of tourists. Sounds like a pretty phenomenal investment to me! Too bad the CEO was unstable and let valuations run out of control.

> Social media

Facebook specifically actually was a pretty stupid investment. FB didn't just have a ton of users who hated ads, it had a CEO who foreswore ever deploying advertising, whose board structure kept him from ever getting fired. Pretty sure early FB investors are thankful that some business sense was knocked into Zuck before they went bankrupt.

Twitter, on the other hand, was a far better investment. If you can get strangers to talk to each other, you can get people to talk to brands. Of course that's valuable.

I can't say I agree with either of you 100%. For example, your statement that VCs expect each and every one of their investments to turn into rocket ships? Nah. If they don't know that a % of their portfolio will fail, then they're idiots. Also, FOMO. Any time there's a new hot technology, VCs soil themselves trying to get a piece of the action (AI, I'm looking at you). So they end up investing in start-ups that probably won't succeed (BUT IF THEY DO, RIGHT???)

I definitely agree that it's all about appetite for risk. I'm not sure you disagree with each other fundamentally, you're just watching from different sides and wording it accordingly. Some people buy stocks for long term investment, some people short sell, and some bet their house on a hand of poker. I'm sure they would have a bar fight if you got them talking about risk appetite.

> If they don't know that a % of their portfolio will fail, then they're idiots.

Yes, but they don't know which ones. What the commenter meant is that the VC believes each and every one of their investments has the potential to become a rocketship. So they spread the risk into several potential rocketships and hope for one of them to not crash.

> they expect each and every one of them to turn into rocket ships

> it is highly unlikely that each portfolio company will actually become a rocketship

You're just rebranding gambling as "taking risk". Every gambler expects his next hand to be a royal flush, while understanding that it's unlikely.

I'm not sure that's true.

Gamblers often have various reasons for continuing to gamble, but very few of them EXPECT their next hand to be a royal flush. For most of them it is exactly the case that 'if I keep going, eventually I will get a big win that offsets my losses'.

That I suppose is a type of taking risk, but I think OP was not being quite as blunt.

In a situation where you have 10 companies each with a 1/10 chance of 20x growth (and a possibility for better) or 1000 companies, each with 1/1000 chance of 5000x growth, which would you pick?

While theoretically, the two situations are similar, and given an infinite amount of money and investment opportunities, the second situation pays off better, the first is more likely to yield returns in the real world. Most people would probably call the first one 'taking risk' and the second 'gambling'.

Perhaps a bit weird to talk of Europe when speaking of London, because that's where you've got all the Russian and Arab money sloshing around. It's not exactly Barcelona or Berlin.

>Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else.

> They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised.

With supporters like this the UK is in no need of enemies. It would be difficult to more pithily explain why the US is a better place to build a startup as a founder, or to explain why US startups have more money and so can pay their staff more.

> It would be difficult to more pithily explain why the US is a better place to build a startup as a founder, or to explain why US startups have more money and so can pay their staff more.

But it is really simple. In US they have a higher appetite for gambling.

It's not gambling if you consistently make more money than the person who thinks they're being prudent. It's a better investent strategy.

This is devolving into a discussion about semantics, but in my vocabulary at least, just because you have an edge doesn't mean you're not gambling. It's about the level of risk, and investing huge amounts of capital in hopes of funding a unicorn tech startup fits the bill, to me.

There's a phrase in Europe. "Old money dies hard"

And money in Europe is old, and hard fought for. We still have rich people who's families made their fortune in the 11th Century.

Money in the US is new. And easily lost. The whole show is less than 250 years old. And that star is already on the wane.

US investors have a stronger focus on upside maximisation, Europe tends to focus on downside protection.

Having been on this merry-go-round in Europe, I can tell you that focusing on downside protection frequently results in poor decision making that activity prevents upside growth. In other words, worrying about the downside so much, makes it a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I’ve always thought it was stupid for VCs to worry about downside protection. Either you’re playing the VC game, and having companies go to zero is just part of the plan, or you’re not. Not being able to stomach the worst case scenario when you invest, just means you waste time that would be better spent trying to achieve the rocketship outcome everyone is looking for.

And far more money.

The US is just far wealthier than Europe.

I mean how stupid, trying to make some money. What kind of n00b tries to pay their own way?

How terribly blinkered we were to not waste runway on hyper growth knowing that there wasn't money to support it?

We are all so terribly stupid.

I wouldn't call it stupid unless you're participating in the VC ecosystem. If your aim is to build a sustainable business and get rich slowly by all means go for it. But if you want to get enormously rich the American way is clearly superior. Go big, fast, or go home. If the VC loses all their money who cares? Play at capitalism and lose, you lose your stakes. If you as a founder fail, well either try again or play a different game, one that doesn't involve questions like "Is the total addressable market here over a billion dollars a year?"

> What it doesn't do well is spaff money indiscriminately at any old idiot with an idea.

That's what government's for

No, the UK government requires you to have no clue (but be chums with a minister or Tory MP) before it spaffs torrents of money your way.

But once you have that, anything is possible e.g a lucrative ferry contract despite owning not a single boat.

Nah, the way they got that contract - along with a bunch of private sector funding - was by having previous experience running a ferry boat line to the UK until the Competition Commission forced it to shut down due to being owned by Eurostar, and (from what I can tell) by already having everything lined up to actually operate ferries by the time the opportunity came along. It turns out that you don't actually need to own a single boat to run a ferry and generally wouldn't want to. Instead, you need to be able to lease one of the handful of ferry boats of a suitable size to operate from their chosen port, and it just so happens that the company which owns the only suitable boats in the world ended the existing contracts right when the new ferry line would've needed them... if they hadn't imploded due to all the key players pulling out because the press coverage had lead them to believe the whole thing was fake, including the port at the other end and the funding (which earlier media coverage made it seem didn't exist, right up until the point it was pulled).

As far as I can tell, the British media destroyed a potentially viable new company by seeding the belief it was a scam just out of sheer anti-Brexit spite. That seems like a pretty good reason not to set up business in the UK actually.

It seems you are agreeing with the comment you replied to.

It isn't enough to be an idiot, you have to be an idiot with connections to get spaffed

>It isn't enough to be an idiot, you have to be an idiot with connections to get spaffed

The first part I can manage. But how do I get connections?

Whenever I hear advice about using connections and networking, I always interpret that to mean "be born with the right relatives".

It can be work connections too. My brother worked for a startup that got bought for a 150 million and he still connects with the old ceo whom I bet my brother could get funding from now if he had a good idea.

Go to eton is common

You are too late. They met at school!

Yes, I am in violent agreement. If anything the comment I replied to was understating the case, that was what I was pointing out.

Well that and all that boring but important infrastructure that means you have the pleasure of living in a viable society, rather than a hellscape.

Easy now, I think they'd rather be called Florida

I recently had a massive American devops company's sales team on my case trying to sell me their product. It was obnoxious and put me off dealing with them entirely. When I insisted I was the wrong person they wanted me to hook them up with my CTO and tried to bribe me with Amazon vouchers.

I'll take the British way over that any day of the week.

Yeah, the whole blog post came across as anecdata-driven decision-making and "I want to be in NYC because London has driven me away" rather than the "we have determined that this company's HQ requires things only available in X". That thing being money, apparently. The circumstances he outlines are too general to be reasonable, and it makes for a bullish article but not a robust argument. Good luck to him and the company, but this smacks of running away from a problem only to discover that your baggage came with you.

I was going to cite the same section, but what the author fails to notice or mention is a massive amount of inflation circles the planet right now that has not been seen since the 70's, which is perhaps before his time, but he may have noticed being based in London the BBC's Faisal Islam has already dropped it into a report that the Bank of England is seeing 5% interest rates in 2022 with inflation remaining on its current trajectory! When money becomes tight due to things like inflation, selling becomes harder because people want quality because it adds value and this "London-based employees who prioritised technological purity over commercial success" is to put it another way, quality, which will hurt the competition. When money is cheap due to low interest rates, people throw it around like confetti, when money becomes expensive, we will see who is not wearing a swimming costume when the tide goes out. Helicopter Ben is at it again. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-59358070

"Helicopter Ben"

I think you mean Papa Jerome "Money Printer goes BRRRRR..." Powell.

At least Bernake had a cap on the balance sheet...

The commercial culture in the UK is, generally, nothing like the US. You have companies with great products that refuse on principle to hire lots of salespeople. I actually can't think of a SaaS company that is as aggressive in investing in sales and marketing as you see on average in the US. And this is rational because the return on investment is usually very poor (fintech in the UK is probably the best example, supposed to be the "best of the best"...pretty much unanimously weak results/growth from companies that are largely British). Autonomy/Darktrace is a possible exception (they have a lot of US people tbf) but given what happened to Autonomy...the jury is still out.

And CS courses in the UK have a very academic bent. This is a rather complex cultural point but, ultimately, it comes down to the teaching. What kind of things are prioritized, what kinds of things have value, and teachers in the UK value complexity for it's own sake (to give you an example, I studied somewhere that was doing AI research back in the 60s, was offered huge grants from military and corporates...all turned down, research stagnated, grad students all leave...the uni is feverishly trying to connect professors with funding now, all totally non-commercial nonsense...once this starts it is very hard to reverse).

Also, using the example of a US-based company opening an office in the UK isn't very helpful. The UK has lots of US investment banks doing very well in the UK but only one home-grown investment bank (and that one has been taken over by people from the US, and isn't doing very well). There is a reason why this is the case. Companies that are based overseas in the UK tend to be different in fundamental ways from ones that aren't. In tech, the big problem is that the UK is largely used as an outsourcing hub (particularly in development) because there is no real commercial expertise (this isn't obvious to people in the London tech bubble, most of the tech industry in the UK still exists that bubble).

The rest of the article is total nonsense but Britain has had these problems for decades. You see it in every industry, every part of the UK. Attitudes are slowly shifting but it is a very deeply embedded cultural thing (you actually see this in some British colonies, that is how deep it is).

> The UK has lots of US investment banks doing very well in the UK but only one home-grown investment bank (and that one has been taken over by people from the US, and isn't doing very well).

Barclays, Lloyds, Rothschild, NatWest Markets (+HSBC which maybe isn't "home grown").

Barclays is largely US after the LEH acquisition, and is run terribly (and largely by Americans). Lloyds isn't an investment bank. Rothschild is a mid-market (and is actually a combination of British and French). Natwest Markets is part of RBS now, and RBS investment banking was shut down after the govt acquired most of the company in 2008.

>I studied somewhere that was doing AI research back in the 60s

Edinburgh?

Yes. Still a great uni but known more for the people who studied and went elsewhere than the people who stayed (in AI).

> prioritised technological purity over commercial success; it was almost fatal for us.

A leadership failure, exactly. I thought I understood how business worked until I joined a startup. It was eye-opening hearing how Sales people did their jobs and the pressures they were under. Personally, I'd fail at being a Salesperson, it's a special talent. If a business allows its tech team to dictate a "better late than never" attitude then it's quite likely doomed.

I used to work for a startup founded by a few Brits. We had engineers in London, but no sales people, because of the culture. I was much easier to sell to Walmart than Tesco.

That's funny. I work at a public B2B tech company whose primary customers are in the retail space. Our main sales office for EMEA is in London and they're absolutely crushing it and always have been. They habitually convert more of their (albeit smaller) pipeline than North America does. Literally some of our best sales people are there in London.

Sure there's some satellites in France and Germany because locals prefer locals, but Brexit hasn't changed a damn thing for us.

like the author we're light on details beyond "the culture", "bad at sales". What does this _mean_ exactly?

It is everything.

Customers too risk-averse, class boundaries still endemic (it is amazing the US tech companies went into this, Google/Facebook/etc. seem to have hired the Notting Hill set as soon as they came to London), companies too conservative about investing margin in sales, very relationship-driven sales culture (as opposed to product-driven) that is closed to "outsiders", reluctance to cold-call, etc.

It is cultural because it can be anything else, do people from the UK have a different biology? No. I think if you look at politics in the UK, it is self-evident that the culture of the UK is not exactly entrepreneurial...unless you believe that a group of probably 30-50 people who went to the same school, went to the same university and largely studied the same course should rule the country...it is very weird.

> class boundaries still endemic (it is amazing the US tech companies went into this, Google/Facebook/etc. seem to have hired the Notting Hill set as soon as they came to London)

In the UK, the working class used to be propelled upwards by grammar schools, [1] which selected children based on academic ability. Of course, there are problems around not wanting children who didn't get into grammar schools to be written-off, but I can't ignore their effectiveness in this regard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school

Yes, despite what I said, I don't think comps have been the answer. Bullying is rife, the stats on sexual abuse of girls in UK schools is unbelievable (one of the highest in the world, bullying is only as high in Europe in Finland another comp education system), it isn't possible to succeed in a comp because you are stuck with a load of people who don't want to be there.

The playing field can never be level. Where I am the grammar schools are as good as the private schools, but they are only in places where property prices are prohibitively high (ofc)...but they are the only effective way out (Sajid Javid went to a comp, it is possible but it is very rare and requires support from family that isn't available in most of the UK). The way to move forward is to aggressively stream students (not necessarily by ability, I went to a school with a guy who was thick as pig shit but went into St. Andrews because he worked hard, took his A-levels three times iirc), improve teaching, and offer more opportunities in poor areas (maybe even through positive discrimination, i.e. offer kids from poor areas a chance in a decent school...the UK used to have state-funded places in private schools).

You are right though, it isn't only cultural. Part of the reason why this group is so far ahead is their education system is far better.

'I think if you look at politics in the UK, it is self-evident that the culture of the UK is not exactly entrepreneurial...unless you believe that a group of probably 30-50 people who went to the same school, went to the same university and largely studied the same course should rule the country...it is very weird.'

My impression is that the UK and US are fairly similar in this respect. The leadership of the political and administrative class in both countries is dominated by graduates of a small number of institutions who took similar courses. In the UK it's primarily Oxford and Cambridge, and in the US it's Harvard, Yale and some other Ivy League colleges. There is a analogous pattern in many other countries.

Below is a list of all the national elections contested in the US and UK in the postwar period, noting the subject or subjects studied by the two leading candidates for head of government, along with the higher education institutions they attended:

USA

2020 Biden (Delaware/Syracuse, Law) v. Trump (Wharton, Economics)

2016 Trump (Wharton, Economics) v. H. Clinton (Wellesley/Yale, Politics/Law)

2012 Obama (Columbia/Harvard, Politics/Law) v. Romney (Brigham Young/Harvard, English/Law)

2008 Obama (Columbia/Harvard, Politics/Law) v. McCain (US Naval Academy)

2004 G. W. Bush (Yale/Harvard, History/Business) v. Kerry (Yale/Boston, Politics/Law)

2000 G. W. Bush (Yale/Harvard, History/Business) v. Gore (Harvard, Government)

1996 B. Clinton (Georgetown/Oxford/Yale, Foreign Service/PPE/Law) v. Dole (Washburn, Law)

1992 B. Clinton (Georgetown/Oxford/Yale, Foreign Service/PPE/Law) v. G. H. W. Bush (Yale, Economics)

1988 G. H. W. Bush (Yale, Economics) v. Dukakis (Swarthmore/Harvard, Politics/Law)

1984 Reagan (Eureka, Economics) v. Mondale (Minnesota, Politics)

1980 Reagan (Eureka, Economics) v. Carter (US Naval Academy)

1976 Carter (US Naval Academy) v. Ford (Michigan/Yale, Economics/Law)

1972 Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law) v. McGovern (Dakota Wesleyan/Northwestern, History)

1968 Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law) v. Humphrey (Minnesota/Louisiana State, Politics)

1964 Johnson (Texas State/Georgetown, Politics/Law) v. Goldwater (None)

1960 Kennedy (Harvard, Government) v. Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law)

1956 Eisenhower (West Point) v. Stevenson (Princeton/Harvard/Northwestern, History/Law)

1952 Eisenhower (West Point) v. Stevenson (Princeton/Harvard/Northwestern, History/Law)

1948 Truman (None) v. Dewey (Michigan/Columbia, Law)

UK

2019 Johnson (Oxford, Classics) v. Corbyn (None)

2017 May (Oxford, Geography) v. Corbyn (None)

2015 Cameron (Oxford, PPE) v. Miliband (Oxford/LSE, PPE/Economics)

2010 Cameron (Oxford, PPE) v. Brown (Edinburgh, History)

2005 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Howard (Cambridge, Law)

2001 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Hague (Oxford, PPE)

1997 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Major (None)

1992 Major (None) v. Kinnock (Cardiff, Industrial Relations)

1987 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Kinnock (Cardiff, Industrial Relations)

1983 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Foot (Oxford, PPE)

1979 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Callaghan (None)

1974 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Heath (Oxford, PPE)

1974 Heath (Oxford, PPE) v. Wilson (Oxford, PPE)

1970 Heath (Oxford, PPE) v. Wilson (Oxford, PPE)

1966 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Heath (Oxford, PPE)

1964 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Douglas Home (Oxford, History)

1959 Macmillan (Oxford, Classics) v. Gaitskell (Oxford, PPE)

1955 Eden (Oxford, Oriental Languages) v. Attlee (Oxford, History)

1951 Churchill (Sandhurst) v. Attlee (Oxford, History)

1950 Attlee (Oxford, History) v. Churchill (Sandhurst)

1945 Attlee (Oxford, History) v. Churchill (Sandhurst)

Sandhurst is essentially equivalent to West Point. What is particularly notable about the UK is the number of Prime Ministers who were educated at Oxford: in the postwar period, all but two graduated from one of Oxford's various colleges. This probably has more to do with Oxford than the UK as a whole: in terms of prestige, academic success and establishment influence, Oxford and Cambridge are more or less identical, yet Cambridge clearly has a problem with producing Prime Ministers.

The US has a little more diversity in the academic institutions that educate its presidents, but that perhaps isn't surprising given it has about five times the population and about forty times the geographic area. A small number of institutions still dominate.

There is a little less diversity in the US in terms of the courses taken: all but three postwar US presidents have been law, politics, economics or history graduates. Of those who weren't, two were graduates of national armed forces academies, and one (Truman) had no degree. On the UK side there are graduates in chemistry, geography and languages, but law, politics, economics and history still dominate just as they do in the US (classics — which Johnson and Macmillan studied — is a combination of ancient history, languages (Greek and Latin), literature and philosophy).

That is because no-one in the US could possibly conceive of a system in which college wasn't the thing that separates people. But if you are a Brit, you understand that almost all of the people you name went to the same high school and have the same background culturally...it is like all the Presidents you name not only going to the same colleges but also going to Philips-Exeter or Groton and having grown up in the North-East with parents who largely did the same jobs...that kind of thing is basically inconceivable to people from the US (the reason for this is a subtlety in how politicians are selected that, again, people unfamiliar with the detail of UK politics don't understand...to become an MP in some parts of the UK, particularly in the past, you only needed to win over at most 50 to 100 people...that is it, I am not talking about hundreds of years ago, I am talking about a decade ago...this changed slightly as both parties brought in changes to selection processes, but it is still hugely undemocratic in a way that would make no sense to anyone from the US).

Also, as I was careful to mention, the issue isn't necessarily that PMs went to the same university (although they did, your reasoning is backwards about Oxbridge...the UK has a large number of other very good universities that are better than Oxbridge in some subjects, the perception that it is a cut above is because all the PMs went there not because it actually is). It is cultural, and it is throughout govt...so in the US, you still see the same elite representation in the civil service...but it is nothing like the UK where there is close to 100% representation (the FCO is notorious for this, you need the right university, right high school, right primary education, and right parents...I know a guy who went to a £30k/year private school, parents went to Oxbridge, he got a first in IR from St. Andrew's a top university for IR, then got a distinction at KCL for IR again a top university globally for the subject, 4 high A grades at A-level...didn't even get an interview with the FCO). This is often very subtle because you have private schools teaching subjects like Classics...these subjects aren't really taught at all outside private schools, so if you go to a private school you can get into Oxbridge even if you are a relatively mediocre student if you apply to this subject (Theology is another, Land Economy is another...most students in the UK have no idea these routes into Oxbridge exist).

There is a semblance of truth to some of this, but I'm afraid anyone not especially familiar with the UK could come away from reading what you've written with a very distorted impression of reality.

I may be misreading some of your remarks — please forgive me if that's the case — but to respond to some of the points you make:

The list of UK Prime Ministers and opposition leaders, particularly in the earlier part of the twentieth century, does contain many wealthy 'establishment' figures, including some with aristocratic backgrounds, but the suggestion that almost all of them went to the same high school and have the same cultural background is a gross exaggeration.

Churchill was the son of a Lord and an American heiress, and was literally born in a palace. Thatcher was the daughter of a shopkeeper and a seamstress, and grew up in a home without a garden or a proper bathroom (the family's toilet was in a small outbuilding — not an uncommon situation for ordinary people at the time).

Attlee was the son of a wealthy lawyer, and he grew up in a house with a tennis court and several servants. Callaghan was the son of a coastguard sailor who died of a heart attack at a relatively young age, leaving his wife and children in poverty; as a teenager Callaghan was eligible to go to Oxford, but he couldn't afford to. He became Prime Minister regardless.

Cameron's father was a stockbroker and his mother was a magistrate. Major's father was a circus performer who made a living selling garden ornaments, and his mother was a dancer who worked in a local library; the family was nearly bankrupted in the 1950s and lived in a small flat in Brixton. Major never went to university, yet he still became Foreign Secretary (meaning he was in charge of the FCO — perhaps your friend's mistake was going to university at all, though I wouldn't worry about him; the future King and Queen are also both St. Andrew's graduates), and then Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister.

Eden's family were landed gentry. May's father was a village vicar; both of her parents died shortly after she graduated from university.

Wilson was the son of a chemist and a schoolteacher. Blair's father was given up for adoption as a baby and became part of the family of a shipyard worker and his wife; he grew up in a Glasgow tenement with an ambition to become a barrister, which he achieved. Blair's mother was the daughter of a butcher; she was born in the flat above the family shop.

One could go on; there is certainly privilege in the backgrounds of many British Prime Ministers, but there is also poverty and much else too.

There are popular private schools in the UK favoured by the wealthy, such as Eton, Harrow, Westminster etc., and many of the UK's political elites were educated at those schools, but it is not correct that almost all of them were. Many of the pupils at those schools do have wealthy parents, but not all of them are from the same background (I attended a British private school on a scholarship. Thatcher attended a local girls' grammar school on a scholarship). There are also expensive prep schools in the US favoured by the wealthy and privileged; the US and UK are not especially dissimilar in that regard. The main difference is that British schools tend to have longer histories, and admit a higher proportion of students on academic merit due to old bursaries and tax incentives.

I am struggling to understand your remarks about the number of people that must be won over to become an MP in parts of the UK, but what you are referring to sounds a lot like rotten boroughs, which were — contrary to what you state — abolished over a hundred years ago, by the 1832 Reform Act. If you are not referring to rotten boroughs, then what you are describing is just a marginal constituency where the vote is tightly contested between parties, and those exist in all democracies that use the first past the post system, including the US.

If anything, some would argue that the electoral situation is better in the UK because gerrymandering — which is acknowledged to be a widespread problem in the US — is for the most part impossible in Britain, since districting has largely been removed from political control and handed over to the independent Boundary Commissions. I take no stand on the wisdom or otherwise of the current approach to that issue in the UK, but similar solutions are widely advocated in the US in areas affected by gerrymandering. It is not uncommon for elections in the US to be decided on the basis of a small number of votes — the US and UK are, again, similar in that regard. So few people needed to be 'won over' to change the result of the 2000 presidential election in the US that the election was effectively decided by a court, and a closely divided court at that.

I agree with your observation that the electoral system in the UK can be 'hugely undemocratic', but that is a generic complaint about the first past the post system, which is also used to decide all major national elections in the US.

I can attest to the fact that Latin (if not full classics courses, which are typically the preserve of universities) is still commonly taught in British private schools, but I don't see much evidence that learning it will do a great deal for you career-wise anymore in the UK; Johnson is the first Prime Minister in sixty years to have a classics degree. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Johnson, Eton. Cameron, Eton. Douglas-Home, Eton. Macmillan, Eton. Eden, Eton. I am not sure what you are trying to prove to yourself. You are grasping as straws trying to prove that Blair, who went to fee-paying schools was actually a working-class man of the people...why? It is a very odd exercise (do you not understand that becoming a Minister is a different process to joining the FCO as a civil servant? If you just Google, 55% of diplomats went to a public school and 33% went to a public school and Oxbridge...the only job with a higher proportion in the UK are senior judges...btw, this is nearly double the rate for chief executives). Does Philips-Exeter and Groton have the same route into govt specifically (which is surprising given that money is more important in US politics, and the US has far wealthier people at the top end)? No. It is a very odd argument to take (and btw, not one made by anyone in these positions, the FCO has said publicly they need to change hiring and have been trying for years now, the Tory party came to this conclusion about two decades ago...you have picked the strangest hill to die on).

No, I am not referring to rotten boroughs. I am referring to how MPs are selected. That is why I said specifically that not many people understand this (because not many people actually know about their political parties work or know MPs). All you have to do is convince the local constituency party or some other small group of people in a safe seat (again, both Cameron and Blair have reformed this, although Labour's recent issues with selection should demonstrate that the system is still problematic). The US has primaries, it has caucuses...there are some safe Tory seats where the constituency party is literally 10-20 people, the selection process for Labour can be even more opaque (again, this is why the Tories decided to reform, they just kept selecting the clubbable old boys but they still have issues, particularly in Scotland, where the constituency party is very small/weak...one recent addition to the Scottish Parliament was the 21 year old son of a current MSP...meritocracy?).

Yes, the UK doesn't have gerrymandering...how did the Sixth Boundary Review work out? No controversy according to you? Ofc. It is nothing to do with a small number of votes deciding elections, that is just irrelevant, the outcome of an election is the outcome, it being close has nothing to do with anything.

FPTP isn't undemocratic. I would look at what the word democratic means. It is unrepresentative, it is most certainly not undemocratic. And there is nothing wrong with unrepresentative democracy (and that has nothing to do with the topic either).

It does your career good because you can get into Oxbridge with very little competition from students who go to schools that don't teach those subjects, and get a job in the Civil Service...or advertising, or banking, or PR, or any of the professional jobs that overindex towards people with a the right background. The point is that it has no value, and that things that have no value are rewarded. You can believe that there is no advantage (again, an odd take given the preponderance of evidence and the fact that most institutions have accepted this is happening)...all that would indicate to me is that you don't actually know anyone who works in any of the places I mention...that is it.

If you were a scholarship boy, don't try to waggishly quote Latin. People can see through you like a window, it impresses no-one.

> You are grasping as straws trying to prove that Blair, who went to fee-paying schools was actually a working-class man of the people...why?

I did not claim that Blair was a 'man of the people', though there are plenty of people who might credibly be described in those terms who have been involved in ruling the UK. You stated above that 'if you are a Brit, you understand that almost all of the people you name went to the same high school and have the same background'. I am British, and I know your statement is an exaggeration, which is why I noted examples of the backgrounds of some of the people referred to. I agree with you that it is relevant to a discussion of this topic that Tony Blair attended a fee-paying school, but I also think it is relevant — if background is important as you suggest — that the decision to send him to a fee-paying school was made by a mother who was the daughter of a butcher, and a father who was adopted into a working class family as a baby and grew up in a tenement in Glasgow. You can draw whatever conclusions you want from that, but to me, a reasonable consideration of that example, and others like the ones I noted, illustrate that it is not correct that 'almost all' of the British ruling class have the same cultural background.

> Does Philips-Exeter and Groton have the same route into govt specifically (which is surprising given that money is more important in US politics, and the US has far wealthier people at the top end)? No.

I'm no expert on American prep schools, but a quick look at the alumni of the ones you mention reveals two presidents, three secretaries of state, four treasury secretaries, dozens of governors, the founder of the Republican Party, the first Director of the CIA, the first Director of National Intelligence, the founder of Facebook, and too many senators, members of congress, federal judges and ambassadors etc. to list. It is curious to me that you don't believe this indicates that attending these schools provides a route into government, whereas a similar list of the alumni of a British school like Eton does. In looking up Groton alumni I found an observation about the school from one of them, who was a friend of Franklin Roosevelt's (another Groton alumnus). He wrote 'Ninety-five percent of the boys came from what they considered the aristocracy of America [...] Among them was a goodly slice of the wealth of the nation.' It seems to me that Eton and Groton are not dissimilar in that regard.

> All you have to do is convince the local constituency party or some other small group of people in a safe seat (again, both Cameron and Blair have reformed this, although Labour's recent issues with selection should demonstrate that the system is still problematic).

This is a description of the process required to be selected as a candidate for a particular party. In order to become an MP the candidate must then win an election that returns them as the most popular candidate. It may be disappointing that voters in safe seats reliably opt for the candidates of a particular party, but that does not necessarily make their election 'hugely undemocratic'. If the people in these constituencies objected to the candidate of the party that traditionally wins there, they could democratically elect someone else instead.

> It is nothing to do with a small number of votes deciding elections, that is just irrelevant, the outcome of an election is the outcome, it being close has nothing to do with anything.

It would be relevant if that is what you had meant when you wrote that becoming an MP in the UK only requires winning over a small number of people. You have clarified that what you actually meant is that being selected as a candidate for a particular party in parliamentary elections might only involve winning over a small number of people in a local constituency party. Those candidates must then secure the votes of a much larger number of people in an election if they are to become MPs. You neglected to mention that latter fact, presumably because you felt that elections in safe seats are somehow undemocratic because the local population reliably elects candidates from a particular party.

> FPTP isn't undemocratic. I would look at what the word democratic means. It is unrepresentative, it is most certainly not undemocratic.

In the UK, the first past the past system nearly always produces a result in which a substantial majority of voters are not represented by the MP they voted for. British governments are therefore typically controlled by a party that has been rejected by a majority of voters. The governing party in the UK hasn't won a majority of the votes in a general election since the 1930s. I would argue that the UK is a democracy in some sense of the word in spite of this, but the first past the post system is not guaranteed to produce democratic results, and in Britain it usually doesn't.

> If you were a scholarship boy, don't try to waggishly quote Latin. People can see through you like a window, it impresses no-one.

I think we're in agreement here. If quoting Latin impresses no-one, it's unclear to me why you think it is important that some old-fashioned schools briefly force their pupils to study it. It can be studied at Oxford and Cambridge and many other universities, but classics has been a niche subject for a long time, and it doesn't confer any particular career advantage over more popular subjects like economics and history that are taught at all schools. I doubt it is any easier to obtain a degree in classics from a prestigious university due to a lack of competition from applicants who were not educated at private schools than it is to obtain a degree in any other niche subject that is more widely taught. It is true that there is less competition for places to study classics than many subjects due to a lack of interest, but that is also true of courses in language and religion — subjects which are very widely taught outside private schools. [1]

Classics was already an outdated choice of university subject by the time Johnson was studying it in the eighties, which perhaps explains why prior to the 2019 election no Prime Minister or opposition leader with a classics degree had contested a general election for six decades.

[1] https://www.admissionreport.com/university-of-oxford

I would look at background more than university. For instance, Thatcher's background has nothing in common with Cameron's or Johnson's.

Oxford is top of the league and attracts brilliant, ambitious people so it's not surprising that it is over-represented at the top as well, though it's interesting that it dominates so absolutely. It may partly be self-reinforcing because I suspect that ambitious young people who want a career in politics think "right, first step is Oxford PPE".

>Customers too risk-averse

In EU gambling and casinos are legal almost everywhere. There's no need to go to Vegas or make high risk investments.

slower sales cycles, more risk-averse.

Personal anecdote - depends on where you are on the technology adoption bell curve. Innovative, a bit "out-there" things seem to be better received in the US.

In fairness, Cloudflare's public perception as a disruptor already did Cloudflare's marketing for it in 2017 onward when y'all opened your London office; Eigen doesn't seem to have that advantage.

I can imagine the sales landscape being a bit better with those tailwinds.

The 2017 date you mention is not correct.

I was Cloudflare's first employee in London in 2011. Cloudflare went all in on London shortly thereafter and at one point 50% of Cloudflare engineering was in London and 50% in San Francisco. We had sales very early on in London covering EMEA. At the current time the London office is "full stack": engineering, operations, support, sales, legal, HR, finance, ...

Thanks; I googled it and the press was heaviest in April 2017 for a new London office, so this is a helpful correction for me. Though deeper inspection found 2013 (https://www.facebook.com/Cloudflare/posts/10151742549255432), so I probably should've just googled harder.

It also changes the equation substantially since the rest of my assumptions were based on 2017, though I wonder how much the environment also changed between 2011 and 2021, brexit aside?

Cloudflare's London office remains large and important. We've built up Lisbon as an alternative location in part to give folks a choice between London and a continental European city and in part because we are hiring so fast it's good to hire in multiple places.

Why not just open to remote hiring across Europe then, rather than be location-dependent?

Just opening for “work from anywhere” has right to work, legal and tax implications for the employee and company. So we’ve taken an approach where people can work where we have a legal entity.

We also do believe that time in the office is valuable and prefer employees be “near” the office so they can work together with other in the office as needed.

But this isn’t set in stone. Maybe totally remote would be great for us, we’ll experiment and see.

They're doing that as well https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/