I have had the pleasure of being an immigrant visiting a startup event in England. To give you an idea of what this looks like: Five minutes in, an organizer comes up to me and informes me that the she was sorry but this event was invite only (I was invited).

At a tech meetup, most were happy to chat over beer, but every single one flat out refused to agree to a one-on-one, unofficial demo of my MVP.

I helped a startup debug and fix an urgent infrastructure issue on a critical customer-deployment, gratis. Their in-house guy had given up on it. Few months later I asked to sign up for a referral for my co, they stopped replying.

Doing a startup there is hard mode squared.