The point I wanted to make in the article is that most startups are a high-risk experiment. A side effect of that is that most of them will fail and you need a lot of liquidity to fund that failure-level.

I wish more developers would just create 1-5 man businesses that make $100k-$2M/year. It's exactly the right thing to do as an individual but it doesn't sustain a startup culture it just sustains a set of solid, long-term businesses.

Who is that a bad thing for? Small, solid businesses sounds like a better option for customers and the country as a whole than frenetically building new things knowing most of them will fold. It doesn't give the founders the same chance at celebrity, but they get to do something reliable and potentially fulfilling.

I guess I'm not convinced that the UK wants a 'startup culture' at all. I'd like to think people could focus on building stuff that's useful or entertaining, rather than what sounds like desperate attempts to become a millionaire.