I live in a big continental European city that also has a start-up hub. The companies here are also small, creative, solving problems, but don't necessarily aim for an exit and growth at all costs, many of them want to create a sustainable business solving a need that people have.
I think, to the economist, these are just SMEs and a start-up is about making money, an IPO, an exit, the unicorns. And of course London as one of the largest financial hubs will be a good place to start such a business.
But I've always thought of these "SME"-type start-ups as belonging to the start-up category too; after all they "start up" a company and often have ambitious goals and creative, tech driven approaches to solving problems. This is how I've thought it would work when I was younger, and it is how I still think it'd be good to do today, and how I'd try to build a company if I have a good idea to pursue.
Anyways, the point I want to make re the article is that I think the definition is narrow, leaves out a bunch of interesting companies, and thus skews the picture towards London. There are plenty of innovative places around Europe, it's just a different model of doing start-ups. IMO this overly financially motivated view onto the start-up world is quite a bit less interesting than a the broader (maybe harder to quantify) picture.
I am completely biased but I think London is one of the best places to live in the world, everything considered.
There's a guy on Instagram who spins a wheel for a random country and goes to eat that cuisine somewhere in London. There are maybe 1 or 2 places in the world you can do that. It's an incredible feat of human diversity to pack hundreds of global cuisines into a 10 mile radius.
Food only takes you so far. The housing stock is simply terrible. Extremely small, damp, badly insulated ... I lived in four boroughs, from poor Southwark to rich Richmond. Had a couple of friends sharing a luxury flat by the Emirates stadium, you could hear the neighbours two doors down.
It was alright in my twenties. Built a career, made a ton of money before the IR35 reform, but you sort of felt like everyone had an expiration date, was there to build a career and then move away. It's not that interesting outside of zone 1, it's the same high street full of Prêts/Nerro/Itsu (If you're lucky) or Paddy Power/Chicken shop/charity shop, and rows of small, drafty and moldy terraced houses.
I wouldn't live there, but Paris is infinitely more charming, and keep getting more pleasant as they remove the cars from the city. It's a place that feels lived in, that encourages and rewards you for wandering.
Where else have you lived though? The cost of living is high, healthcare is problematic, crowded, bad weather, low economic growth prospects.
It's not even top 10 on most lists. Europe, Australia has way better cities.
Example Sydney, life expectancy is at least 5 years more.
The poverty rate in London, 26%, is double of Sydney at 13%.
E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2025/06/18/the...
London has a special microclimate and pleasant weather all year around. No extremes and less rain than other parts of the country.
Yes I really wish people saying "X is the best place to live in the world" would add where else they have lived, otherwise their opinion is not very useful to me.
It was one of the best places to live in up until about 10 years ago.
Places I have lived in: London, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, New York, San Francisco.
I'm fairly well travelled. Lived in Tokyo for a bit. There's no perfect city. London has the best combination of all attributes, for me.
Have you lived in London and Sydney both, or are you just reading numbers off of Google and "best city" lists? Sydney is boring and in the middle of nowhere.
I'm from Sydney and yes lived in London, Melb, Auckland and Hong Kong. My main recollection of London was narrow streets. I think we like being in the middle of nowhere (geography, nuke missile target, conflict), surrounded by ocean. It is true, it's the one downside, it takes a long time to fly anywhere else.
True. Generally whatever niche interest people have, they usually can find it in London. As a fellow passenger old lady once put it on the tube: "London might not be the prettiest but certainly the most interesting city".
Though personally I find it pretty enough.
Back when I ran the Shenzhen Gastronomic Society I did most of the alphabet in Bangkok one trip, beginning with Afghan. I'd wager it's better food than London on average, purely based on freshness and tropical inputs. I think if you were to pick the best city on earth for food it would have to have resident international populations, a tropical climate, and at least enclaves of wealth with a relatively free visa policy. Bangkok fits the bill. For variety I much prefer it to Singapore, KL, HK, Jakarta, Taipei, etc. Best for drinks has to be HCMC. Paris and New York are up there too, but you have to be 0.1% to enjoy them exhaustively. I spent 10 years designing food robots mostly because so much damn awesome food is ~unavailable outside its origin. Now raising for GTM/growth: https://infinite-food.com
Where can I find a list of food unavailable outside of its origin?
While you can often get bad versions of things if you go out of your way, many foods are hamstrung by supply chain, which is to say without a critical mass the labor intensive elements do not make sense or the specific crops are unavailable. Ask any migrant (eg. your next Uber driver) which foods they miss from their hometown or childhood and whether locally available versions are up to par. You'd be surprised at the details that emerge.
There is only so much of food one can eat and after all potatoes and steak do the job as well.
Is this really surprising? London picks up all the advantages of the UK (legal system is sound, eg in contract law, native speakers of English, the lingua franca of business, strong university tradition) and adds in its special sauce: access to the City, global-tier culture, excellent public transport (I know we moan about it, but it really is excellent), and a timezone location that easily serves the US and Asia markets.
The awkwardness for founders in London is that when they want to IPO, London doesnt have nearly as deep a pool of capital as the US, so they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table.
Startups might thrive there, but business investment in England (particularly in mature businesses) has not exactly been lively ever since Brexit. I can't recall the last time I heard someone talking favorably about investing in England, or at all, really.
right, people will just tell you the best places and things to invest in ...
during a game of chess: "hey why'd you make that move?"
Is deep enough pool of capital for the vast majority of businesses.
Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people (other than people like DHH).
The big problem with London is that it is very, very expensive.
Housing is super expensive, but even that is coming down. Transport is a bit expensive, bit it's fine. Everything else is pretty reasonable!
Smells like marketing stuff.. there are plenty of other places that i think are better.
It's not based on marketing, it appears to be based on metrics like amount of venture capital raised.
It should be based on the number of successes relative to the amount raised or ROI and that picture is quite different. In that sense London is way behind SV.
The article doesn't dispute that London is way behind SV. What it's saying is that for non-US funding, London dominates.
But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another. The difference is just too big. What you could say is that London is the place to try to raise money if you can't raise in SV. But you'll have to realize that your chances of success are dramatically lower that way to the point that you're going to end up a with a small fraction of the stock yourself after the inevitable dilution through follow up rounds because you couldn't raise a large enough round to begin.
VC in London is harsh, both for the start-ups and for the VCs. What does happen is that a company manages to stay alive long enough to raise a secondary round in the USA, but then you can't really make the original claim in the TFA.
> But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another.
We are using different meanings for the same phrase. SV is the best place to raise, IF YOU CAN AND ARE WILLING TO RAISE THERE. But not everyone can, nor does everyone want to. And of the locations that are not in the US, London dominates.
And hell, Americans raise in Boston, Seattle, NYC, and so on. Not even all Americans move to SV, let alone people who may not even get a visa to enter the US.
Given that London has little else going for it other than a financial industry it's not surprising money is raised and companies are registered there.
That said I don't know anyone doing a startup in London. But I know dozens in Berlin without even thinking about it.
Eh, I know quite a few. LegalTech, hardware, obviously fintech, quite a bit of AI. But I work at a London startup so my social circle might be different to yours.
Having a London domicile often leads to an overstating in venture capital raised for the UK ecosystem.
For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications.
Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/926f4969-fda7-4e78-b106-4888c8704...
Does this also impact US metrics for capital raised? My understanding is that the Delaware C-Corp is still the startup standard for founders from anywhere in the world to raise global capital, which I imagine skews where the capital actually ends up flowing if they are actually building a company in a foreign location and just using the Delaware entity as a holding co.
Startups like Builder AI use London because a.) they want to raise money from filthy rich Arab investors and b.) those guys are not known for doing much due diligence. They go more by vibes and hype and who's on the existing cap table. Also c.) they are very comfortable with London because it was so much easier back in the day to launder or siphon away funds from their home countries. London is an extremely popular destination for Gulf Arabs.
You'll get a lot of shady startups of that kind in London for this reason.
For you specifically that may be true, but the numbers say London dominates by far.
Could you give only a few examples from those PLENTY of other places that are better? Like the first 10 that come to your mind, you made me very curious!
Not the person you asked but I am thinking of France and Germany. France has Station F (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_F).
There are also Portugal, Spain and Romania that are rising contenders. I am also very dubious of UK being "world first"
Sand Hill road
That would be pretty funny to say. Where are America's startups founded? Principally the San Francisco Bay Area. What about the Rest of the World? Oh, principally the San Francisco Bay Area.
It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
I'm waiting for the yearly "Waterloo is the Silicon Valley of Canada" article that always fails to deliver its promise.
I grew up in Waterloo but it's just not it lol.
Yup, London has consistently showing up in geographic hotspots in my job postings data. I think it could be also be due to success of companies like DeepMind.
https://jobswithgpt.com/blog/global_software-engineering_job...
Another British company swallowed by the US :(
At least Elon Musk didn’t end up getting it, which he tried before Google swooped in.
As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?
Bruder, komm nach Berlin or frère, allez à Paris
I arrive in 2026. Decide to start a startup. By the year 2038, the state mandated reader of legal documents has finished reading out aloud to me and my co-founder. Now we find a VC. His documents need to be read to us both. But the Y2K38 problem strikes. He thinks we are in the year 1970. He needs to read us the "ancient company addendum". While he's reading he chokes and keels over, dead from the emissions from his Volkswagen. Our ARR may be zero, but what about our government grants? Also zero.
My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.
This was crafted with a subtlety that captures the continental combination of infrastructural petrification and untethered pride perfectly. Wonderful
Come to Germany, the letters from Rundfunkbeitrag and Waldorf Frommer are already waiting for you!
A different perspective: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005
TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
London and UK for that matter is great and seeding Startups...high quality universities, entrepreneurialism and attractive tax benefits for angels but for real growth capital it lags massively behind US and has forever.
The Kraken story is one to follow to see if this changes...https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/news...
There's an argument that some of these takeovers should have been blocked.
> enabled by London’s shrinking public markets
That doesn't seem to be true?
It is - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/london-dr...
Edit: can't reply
The majority of IPOs in 2025 were in 4 markets - US, China, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea [0]. It's really hard to exit in the LSE currently, and this article is self congratulatory while ignoring major recent (past 2-3 years) mistakes that negatively impacted the entrepreneurship scene in the UK (eg. the revocation of funding for Tech Nation [1] and the ongoing leadership crisis at Monzo [2] which makes no one look good).
[0] - https://www.ey.com/en_pt/insights/ipo/trends
[1] - https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/3405c6f3-931b-4fe3-a169-a9665a132...
No it isn't, London's IPOs in 2025 were mostly towards the end of the year, after that article was written. London ended up about 8th worldwide for issuances in 2025 - https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/research-com...
Plus, the FTSE 100 returned 25.8% last year. That is not a shrinking market!
EDIT: I'd prefer you not change the subject away from your capital markets claim, but to address the other links:
1. I didn't say London was a top 4 IPO location, just that it's market aren't shrinking.
2. Tech Nation still exists, and still administers that visa. I don't know why you posted a very out of date article about it.
3. It's not ideal that such a high profile company is having issues like that, but hey, stuff happens. OpenAI had a whole goddamn coup and counter-coup happen!
In football we’d call the US “tap-in merchants”.
I don't know Aakash Gupta so I can't say if he's lying or just didn't do his research, but I know the IPO figures he cited there are wrong, like very wrong, which puts everything else there in doubt.
Not to mention location of IPO not being all that important. But that's a whole separate thing.
This.
Also UK contract law is well established and it's easy to find experienced transatlantic lawyers and firms (there's a reason UK lawyers can practice in NY and why both Hong Kong and the Emirate of Dubai kept poaching judges with contract dispute into their business judiciary).
In most cases when we'd invest in a startup abroad, the founder would often structure their startup as a subsidiary of a US, UK, Singapore (especially Indian/Chinese startups), or Cayman Islands (it's a BOT so you basically get it for free) corporation.
Ironically, this ease of financial access is what makes it difficult to seed a lasting DeepTech startup in the UK because capital would often be deployed to invest in other startup ecosystems. I wrote about this before on HN as well [0][1][2]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42768018
The big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms.
For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc...
Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"?
On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified.
It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes.
Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts.
If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
Funny how San Francisco can't fit the chart they have. League of its own I guess.
It truly is. I've seen multiple pre-seed startups and founders burn significant amounts of personal capital in order to land an O-1A visa because of how much capital and mentorship is available here.
This checks out. I live in Silicon Valley but now work for a startup in London. Same vibe, less attitude.
They are not the same. The energy/resources in SF/SV are 5x at a minimum - but London has it going on.
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
best reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not.
I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:
> it's not ideal is it?
or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:
> as you say sir
> very good sir
with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]
Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s03Fq1nsbng
(The full scene is around 11:30 in the first episode and I think its captures a conversation of subtext and indirectness quite well).
> yeah that's complete bollocks
We say "interesting" for that
Yeah SF is 10x every other place in earth. People that think things are comparable have never lived here.
How's the comp? From HN I had gotten the feeling that the UK was worse than most of western europe in that regard.
According to levels.fyi London is basically the best paying non-US city, I think maybe beaten by some Swiss cities.
London is tax hell. When tou start to have a family it quickly escalates to the mosr expensive place on earth by far
I wonder who are these people willing to work in London and transfer 60% of their net income directly to landlord. Maybe money doesn't matter because most of the time they spend in work and commuting?
Isn’t it the same deal in every major tech hub?
London is #1 at that. You earn a bit more than rest of europe but everything is way more expensive
In other European "tech hubs" you're not going to find a job or will not be able to rent anything.
Or you can come to SF and live in your car or at the gym.
The math works out for almost every HCOL area. Your salary is higher. Rent is high too but people either choose to live further away or accept a smaller apartment/condo.
London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
> London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
yes, you can quite easily live 50 miles out and be at your desk in under an hour
There goes another 15% of your net income on train tickets. Eating out every time (because have no time for proper value shopping) and you are basically working in exchange of food, housing, and commute.
As long as you live within Greater London and can use TFL, it's more like 5%
it wasn't even close to 15% of my net income when I was 25
and it certainly isn't now that I'm quite a bit older, and I earn a multiple of what I did then
Using hyperbolic percentages harms your point, it doesn’t help it.
But yeah you’re right dude, we live in a society. We work to support ourselves. What a shocking surprise.
That's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors.
London seems equally incredible & terrible.
While startup capital flows in, the growth story is very different, and for those living in the UK, it isn't what it seems.
There aren't any jobs in the UK and most are offshored to other low CoL countries.
Young people, founders are leaving for other places like Dubai, Singapore and even SF for higher paying jobs.
This doesn't seem true, I work in a UK tech company and it's an incredibly international team. My team has three Brits (including me), a Norwegian, a Swede, a Pole, and an American. The CEO is Irish, the CTO is German/American.
Obviously that's just one data point, but every tech company is similar.