The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.
There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
I do not know the truth of it, but clearly its not obvious.
> Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
I commented on this earlier. The UK's economic outcomes have been similar to comparable European economies (like Germany) and better than some (like France). Whatever the problem is, its not unique to the UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766107
I do not think the UK is well run, but I think the west in general is badly run. Poorly thought out regulation, short termism in both politics and business, a focus on metrics subject to Goodhart's and Campbell's laws, and a poor understanding of the rest of the work (leading to bad foreign policy).
HN has a very wide range of economic opinions, and some people are extremely uninformed about what it takes to do hard things that can't be grown organically, and what it takes to maintain a business running when it's done the hard thing in the face of competition.
Most of those are people complaining about a business having to make changes because it took $50+m in funding and now needs to justify it. The business was only "good" because it got $50m and didn't need to do things like charge enough money. If it hadn't gotten that $50m then those people wouldn't consider it such a good business or even know about it.
It is fairly clear what was the best option.
But that can only work for so long and is beneficial in the medium to long-term for a very limited number of people (basically the owners of said financial capital), at some point you have to produce some real wealth, wealth produced from real stuff via resources of the Earth + human ingenuity and, yes, + human work.
Who says those countries were well governed though? IMO they are all run by idealogical morons
My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse because all they care is preserving their wealth and the working class don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it. Instead, we focus our energy on other pursuits, such as family, sports, or friendships.
This shift in focus isn’t inherently bad—a life balanced between family, friends, work, and leisure is often a recipe for happiness. However, societal progress relies heavily on the efforts of a small minority of individuals who are bold (or perhaps crazy) enough to pursue their ideas. When 90% of those individuals are discouraged from taking entrepreneurial risks, society’s capacity for innovation is severely stifled.
In short, it’s clear that excessive regulations and high taxes are holding Europe back from achieving its full potential for growth and innovation.
Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest? Up until 1960's rich Americans payed %91 tax, and yet they kept their entrepreneurial spirit - why you can't do the same at the stated %50?
When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.
Nobody is talking about the difference between 1 and 2 billion, they are talking about the difference between 50 and 100 thousand, while competing.
No one's making that choice. Most businesses fail, even in somewhere entrepreneur-friendly like America. Why not just work for someone else, given the rewards are capped even at relatively low level of success? Why take the risk, when taxation has failed to price risk into reward?
BTW, rich don't actually pay much taxes. The luxury life they live is usually not taxed, most of the things they do is considered business expense.
When a worker flies to Ibiza they first pay social security and income taxes, then they pay consumption taxes like VAT.
When a businessman flies to Ibiza they deduct whatever they can as an expense so they don't pay income tax and VAT. For whatever they can't claim that it is a business expense they will pay with a cheap loan against their assets and avoid paying income taxes. Since they still have those assents, they pay just the interest later when the assents increase in value. If their business fails those assets fail, the bank takes the assets and no taxation happens.
Once you're at more than 1 million per year there are other challenges and you can probably afford to hire someone to take part of that burden off your shoulders, but until you get to that point you're on your own and it's very damn stressful (and by stressful I mean that that includes the possible inflated but all to real fear of getting to prison because of that tax-thingie that you didn't fill the 100% correct way or because some work your company did broke some municipal regulations or whatever and now you're on the hook for damages and, yes, personal liability).
Actually your VAT-skimming thing at the end is a very good example of that mentality, i.e. the innovators here having to have the Tax man front and center in their minds, before innovation and trying to build something useful off the ground, because if you don't know how to play the Tax man (at the limit of legality, as your example is) then you're toast. That "playing the Tax-man" thing consumes a lot of people's energy in the early stages, energy that would have been way better spent trying to actually make something new and innovative.
[the 50k and 1 million figures are just used as examples, maybe it's not 50k but 70k or 80k and maybe it's not 1 million but 5 to 10 million, but the idea stays the same]
My take would be that once people have 100k€ in net annual income per person, they just do other things and work less because it brings them more happiness than the additional money would.
It's not so much any single regulation, as it is there's so many little ones that seem reasonable on the face of it. But it's also that what makes the ruling Canadian class so is the authority to bypass those regulations.
I can give one personal example; I was able to secure some public funding application for a non profit I'm affiliated with. But the only reason I was able to do that was because my parents were university classmates of the elected official that was able to pressure the staff that was handling the paperwork to prioritize and approve our application ahead of probably the hundreds in front of us. The official's going to get a nice thank you dinner out of it, but I also had to offer some information that the official could financially benefit from for him to even consider it, and a promise of some future favors.
For better or worst that's how a lot of Canadian system works. Grant applications, personal tax work, personal and business banking, etc. Anyone can get through it eventually for anything. But if you want it done quickly and in a way probably won't get tied up in the system itself, you better know someone that owes you a favor.
As it turns out, he also complained about excessive documentation he needs to get public funds for his project.
So both of you are actually complaining about accessing public funds and not actually doing private investment or starting a private company with private funds.
this is not what most of the Americans do and this is not what they mean by startups or business. Mostly.
You can't rely on such paper figures to determine real tax burden in the past.
Life changing money is going from $50k/year to $1m/year. Not from $1b to $2b.
The vast majority of tax burden and complexity hits the middle class.
> When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.
It was 35% on capital gains.
And no, millionaire or billionaire doesn't matter much. Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires. Europe is full of small businesses and by small I mean millions in profits and revenues.
In Europe %99 of the companies are small or medium sized enterprises, which is not different than the USA. In USA however, large companies have slightly higher number of employees which is an indicative of concentration of power and that's how you get your "USA has 5 unicorns in top 10 but EU has only 1" lists.
Contrary to the narrative, Europe has much more small and medium sized enterprises per capita: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micr...
I find it ironic you mention "classes" (regarding "as a member of the working class"). There are problems everywhere (either as an employee or as an entrepreneur). Feeling overwhelmed is just a feeling, does not say anything about how much you can do or if you get a reasonable workload.
I think what is holding Europe back is the people not trying and understanding various things without having lots of fears (of being overwhelmed, of large tax, of what people will say, etc.).
A balance must be stricken also between what you can do (leisure, family) and how many resource you produce/consume. The purpose should be for more of leisure/family but that is ONLY IF we (I am also European) produce/consume enough. Too many smart and capable people want to "just be an employee", which results in gaps in other places (entrepreneurs, politicians, etc.).
Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of the latest YC 24 Winter batch at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST if they lived in Germany.
So, 30k EUR (gross) with a maximum funding period of one year? Laughable. Also probably a little bit tragicomic.
Early seed rounds are usually measured in couple of USD millions. I wonder how these brilliant minds in the EU think they will attract the industry talent to leave their ~5x salary (outside FAANG) for such a pocket money.
And/or don't think that more is better/desirable. I wouldn't consider myself working class, but I was definitely raised with the idea that making obscene amounts of money is actually pretty selfish/immoral and not something one ought to strive for. That doesn't preclude going into business. But it is pretty antithetical to the VC funding model and the creation of billion dollar businesses.
In general, it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful (consider that variants on socialism are still mainstream political ideologies in Europe).
I don't think I've ever seen this claimed anywhere except as a criticism.
Isn't this due to different types of Christian traditions? AFAIK In some, it is considered that the wealth is given by the God to the virtuous ones and they are merely guardians of it and responsible to use use the wealth in a virtuous ways and therefore getting rich is encouraged and the rich are treated with respect?
There's something similar among some Muslim sects too, in Muslim majority countries it is not uncommon to believe that the God chose someone to be rich and there's more to that person that the eye can see therefore must be respected. Some religious communities even get so obscenely rich and you can see poor servants having a religious experience when their leader arrives with an a luxury car.
Americans feel more pain but are also rewarded, Europe has no option but to become progressive - otherwise tere will be no more Europe and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
Oh, BTW, America is also struggling. The latest political developments are an attempt to change course - they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and class based politics holding roots. They say they are anti-regulation anti-discrimination(of whites specifically) but the core MAGA movement is all about putting barriers and preserving old ways for the benefit of a subset of people. Americans are too in soul searching. Their MAGA literally means fixing what is no longer great but their demands are actually quite conservative and they already begin falling off with their accelerations partners.
A notion of "bare progress" is the elephant in the room. Progress is a vector. It has magnitude and direction. People talk of moving "forward or back", but science also has a steering wheel.
> and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
This very notion of "progress" as a totalitarian force is also dangerous. The boot is on the other foot from 80 years ago. When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire. I see many similarities today - people seeing "progress" simply as dominance.
I liked the brain-dump in TFA, but I think it's over-complex and too tied to a contemporary interpretation of capital investment.
We've been spooging away our talent for generations here. Look at how we treated Turing. We mismanage or sell-off everything cool we invent.
What Britain still suffers from is class disloyalty. We still have a strong but invisible class system which is now international financiers. Those sorts "float above" the ordinary economy, they are disconnected from UK interests and don't give a toss about engineering, science, knowledge, education...
A lot of the measured minds were saying eugenics was a good idea. It took the horror of seeing experiments and concentration camps to make it so deeply unfashionable the idea couldn't even survive in academia.
Current EU is definitely not a stable and well functioning system. Look at economic conditions, political outcomes, illegal immigration, wealth inequality, societal and political trust, homelessness rates, birth rates, free speech suppression, welfare austerity, etc Everything has been going downhill since the 2008 crash. It's a powder keg.
>they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and class based politics holding roots.
What are you on about? Europe doesn't have much race based politics, that's a thing America keeps pushing.
Illegal immigration is a metric of the EUs economic success and social stability compared with North Africa, Eastern European Accession States, and the war-torn middle east. If America shared land borders and direct migration routes with Islamic caliphates and the like, they'd know all about it.
Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty sane and tolerable for all but a select group of (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher on the US side.
Societal and Political trust is still quite high - despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining the political capital necessary to instigate significant change outside of Hungary.
Homelessness rates are a factor of illegal migration - and are laughably low compared to the US on a per capita basis; ditto whatever warped contention you have regarding 'welfare austerity'. We just call it social security. During Covid and in the period afterwards it was hugely ramped up across Europe - and not in a giveaway budget with a check personally signed by an Oligarch.
Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what you're aiming at. The current cultural friction regarding things like gender-identification and pronoun usage are uniquely american exports. On basically all other counts other than venue-shopping defamation cases, it's a moot point for any normal person.
Finally re birth rates - they tend to go down in wealthy and advanced societies outside of select religious groupings (looking at you Salt Lake City) so I'm not sure what your point is there.
> Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty sane and tolerable for all but a select group of (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher on the US side.
This isn't true. I know many people that have moved from Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where politically fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right or centre-left. I speak to people from all over Europe regularly and many of them do not feel the way that you are describing.
> Societal and Political trust is still quite high - despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining the political capital necessary to instigate significant change outside of Hungary.
That isn't true. I know many areas of Europe where the electorate keep on voting for further right parties. The same is happening in the UK. Labour only won because the Conservatives lost and the Reform party did extremely well for what is a relatively new party. I know the same is happening in Belgium (I speak regularly with Belgian nationals). Areas of Spain that are most affected by immigration have voted for further right parties. So I know this isn't true.
> Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what you're aiming at.
Just look up the hate speech laws enacted throughout Europe and in the UK and some of the cases that have been prosecuted. We do not have a right to the free speech in the UK and the majority of Europe doesn't either.
Everyone knows that Europeans are much more racist than Americans, it's just that we are much less explicit about it and its issues are different than the issues in the USA.
> There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work - the characteristic vice of the New World - already begins to infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading over it a strange loss of spirit (Geistlosigkeit). One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually "afraid of letting opportunities slip." "Better do anything whatever, than nothing" - this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. And just as all form obviously disappears in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself, the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also disappear.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §329
We don't worry whether my insurance will cover the next health issue that will happen to me, be it broken leg or lifelong costly treatment. I don't have to desperately try to save maybe 1.5 million $ to put my kids through decent university, if they desire to do so. I am not brutally tossed on the sidewalk when I am fired, both employer and state gives a LOT of support to not fall off the societal cliff and end up as typical US homeless person. We have way more resting time to recharge via holidays (this fellow from 1.1. is running on 90% corporate work contract and thus sporting 50 vacations days per year - now thats QOL improvement, I've already planned 6 week+ vacations for this year). We have on average simply healthier lifestyles and it shows literally massively.
I could go on for a long time. But you can ignore that - compare usage of mental health medication, from what I've seen its much more massive in US, manifesting the additional stress that US population is cca exposed to.
Its a balance - you add more money, you remove more 'humanity', and the additional stress is there and very real. Everybody has different ideal spot, and this also changes a lot during life. Isn't it better to have 2 systems next to each other, and everybody can pick how they want to live your life? Focus purely on money is stupid, their added value in life quickly diminishes once a person is not poor, then other aspects of life become much more important. The complete opposite is same, 0 progress. Something in between, as always, is the best road for most.
By taking big risks, one might ascend to this capitalist class if they succeed.
You can change mindsets with regulations that reward taking risks in new businesses/innovations, and punish rent seeking and sitting on inherited real estate for example.
But as long as EUrope is focused on maintaining the status quo of boomers and gentrified dynasties of billionaires that you probably played against in Assassins' Creed, nothing will change.
They were exterminated and replaced by a very small European population. Like sterilising a Petri dish and letting bacteria grow, the opportunities that population experienced were the biggest any population in the world ever had. Just look at a graph of the population growth of US OR California in the last century and compare it to others.
Now there is in California a population of near 40 million people.
That is not a "mindset", this is real growth that they could experience and the rest of the world could not.
I'm from EU and would be totally open to move to UK if there was an opportunity to make more there while working on something cool. But there simply isn't?
Then there are US startups where I could likely make 2 or 3x what I make in EU or UK.
So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to build a startup in 2025 anyway?
A lot of people choose to start businesses near their friends or families.
Doing soldering of prototypes? Good luck finding a landlord that would let you do it. The moment they hear "fumes" is a nope, fire hazard, safety risk and won't let you...
If UK startups paid equity to their devs, I would work a lot harder when I've worked at them, but startups require working hard and long hours and if I've got no skin in the game, what incetive do I have to make sure the company is successful.
In basically every UK startup I've worked at they've done 1 or all of the below:
1. Offered options in numbers with no valuation/percentage of ownership. "We offer you 40000 stock options!". When asked to clarify numbers, they delay and never tell you. Inevitably they have a value of a few pence each
2. Withdraw options unilaterally when you leave the company with no option to exercise
3. Never get round to filling in the paperwork so you never actually receive them
I was _shocked_ when i worked for my first US startup and they just...gave me the options. And I could exercise them whenever I wanted. And they expired 10 years after I left the company
For example, right now there is not a single VC in Canada who does large pre seed / seed investments based on an idea and the founding team.
In the US you can get a 1 million cheque within a week.
That is the real reason Canada is failing on a macro scale.
@dang hopefully I have kept this well balanced.
This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.
It's anti success. And there is garbage everywhere, people keep voting for antisocial housing and bad cultures. It's a failing state.
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.
There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so be careful what you wish for.
Not only is the bureaucracy difficult, the labor laws make it very difficult to hire and compensate talent.
Germany wants innovation to be done by large corporations, not by start ups.
Deepmind is still in the UK. And more, including foreign, bidders driving up prices for acquisitions and investments, will lead to more people making the jump.
they dont mean location, they mean ownership of the equity.
Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" and should be sneered at.
Edit: To compare -
Me: "I want to build a house"
Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."
California/Oregon friends: "Fuck yeah I'll bring a nailgun"
And the problem runs in families. This is not therapy but every time I talked to my parents about an idea it would be dammed with faint praise or I'd be told I'm wasting my time. It's taken 20 years to work out that the more they dissed an idea is the better it actually was.
Insurance: “Okay sir, who did the electrical wiring? you: “Me”. Insurance: “Are you a professional? you: “No" Insurance: “Have you had your work certified by a third party?" you: “Do my buddies count?” insurance: "Have a good day sir"
There may never be a problem and you may have figured out everything that's required to get your butt covered (good for you in this case), but the fact is that a lot of people don't know about these things, do their own thing and get royally screwed if there's a problem and, God forbid, someone gets hurt.
There is an element of truth to that, self build projects seem to go about was well as the typical software project.
I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a great scheme, but the SEIS limit of £250k feels almost too small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally later stage or re-investment from SEIS.
US vs UK investors are night and day. UK investors only want to see profitability to protect their cautious capital
It can be argued that a responsibility falls on EU equity companies, pension funds, and so on, but they do not make seed investments.
20 years, or 112 years?
Consider just how far the UK's place in the world fell between 1911 (George V ascended to the throne of the global superpower; his Royal Navy was launching 2 to 4 new capital ships per year) and 1948 (3 years after "winning" WWII - and basics such as food, clothing, and gasoline were still strictly rationed).
By comparison, the performance of the UK in the last 20 years vs the US or the Nordics is a singular tragedy.
USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either; I'd say both parameters were much worse than UK's. But it managed to remain a large empire with a high economic potential, and UK could not.
Is number of war ships, or billionaires, a good measure for a country?
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/food-thought-rationing-...
Without sovereign protection you just can not compete with that, ever. It's really that simple.
Simply look at China they may export loads of goods but it's predominantly priced in USD, and what do they do with all that excise USD, the only thing they can do, buy US debt. It's truly perverse.
Or look at every UK company that was bought up with those very same magic dollars.
Europe wasn’t like this for centuries. What is the cause of this mindset?
Similarly, why work yourself to the bone for a miniscule chance of success, if you can... just chill instead? I used to be a highly-motivated go-getter, but then I realized, this shit ain't bringing happiness, and I turned into a work-avoider who spends time in the office mostly talking to coworkers and playing games in the toilet. My overall life satisfaction skyrocketed.
Yes, the society at large does need people to do the needful, but this ain't gonna be me.
There are definitely political - and ultimately, military-industrial - reasons for this. The UK is deeply, deeply embedded in the Anglo-centric 5-eyes criminal superstructure, and plays a huge part in the subversion of human rights at immense scale around the world, that this criminal entity commits every second of the day.
The spook factor bleeds into every technological advancement which occurs in the UK, from GCHQ outwards, like a kraken with deep, deep tentacles.
I've worked with multiple UK-based startups which, as soon as they start to gain traction in international waters/markets, immediately becomes the target for GCHQ embedding/plants. This kills the startup.
Until the British people start prosecuting their war criminals and seeks justice for the immense human rights abuses that occur, every millisecond of every day, as a result of their out of control military-industrial oppression apparatus, there is simply no hope for UK technological industry.
The world sees this, even if the people of the UK do not - and routes around it, accordingly.
Nobody really wants to work with UK-based technology groups, knowing that they are liable for immediate corruption the moment their technology becomes relevant to, say, the people of Brazil, or Africa, or China.
I'd be interested to hear more about this.
0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who gives you £250k can get £125k relief on their income tax (not what they'd have paid on £125k, literally the whole £125k), and then claim a further 50% back of the remainder from the government if you go bust.
You're focusing on one success story out of thousands.
90%, or more, of US startups only exist to be sold to the highest bidder or to coast indefinitely long in infinite investor money, and never turn a profit.
There's still expectation in Europe at large that your company should have an actual business plan and a path to profitability.
And yet, the UK hires were often better off after all expenses than the US hires.
Largely due to housing being slightly cheaper (other posters have pointed out, London is on par with SF / NY - the big difference being London expands, NYC and SF are both "islands" - yes SF is a peninsula, but commuting up 280 or 101 is not a pleasant experienced).
Also, even offering private healthcare (BUPA) - the UK hires were cheaper. I'm in my late 30s and reasonably healthy - my all-in, gold-plated UK policy was GBP 2k / year - I was at $2,000 / month in the US.
*However* - salaries in the UK are unsustainably low.
Three reasons: [1] BOMAD - The Bank of Mom and Dad (parents paying / lending the deposit for a house so the mortgage is at a low rate) is effectively exhausted. This means that current entrants into the housing market are either renting (which is nearly as expensive as NYC, especially after the inflationary / interest rate jump), or saving to "buy" a house (I enclose in quotes because at a 95% mortgage you don't own much of your house). [2] Professional salaries outside of finance are way too low. My fiancee works in a highly skilled, professional field and her salary in 2024 was, in nominal terms the same as my starting salary in NYC 17 years ago working for a large investment bank IN THE BACK OFFICE - where salaries were decidedly blue-collar. My unproven hypothesis is that the UK professional world is still largely geared towards those with alternative assets, private incomes (especially high-prestige non-professional jobs, especially around politics). This makes it impossible to compete with US venture backed startups, even post-ZIRP, because the offer is always going to be better. And yet that private-income driven base has largely been eroded through capital gains, inheritance tax and general downward social mobility (or, perhaps, less doom-and-gloom - averaging towards the center. The difference in wealth and income between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class has narrowed significantly). [3] There has been over the last 5-7 years significant negative messaging and tax policy against economic success. A confiscatory top-tax band, an erosion of a "job perks" friendly tax regime and a political climate that is very anti-success, even prior to the labour govt (largely started at the same time, though perhaps not by, Theresa May's 2015 speech and focus on "Just about managing").
VC in the UK is hard, largely because the majority (though by no means all) VCs are focused on aping mid-market pension managers. Their ambition is limited to businesses that already work (and yet anything transformative by definition does not work yet) - and are interested mostly in post-revenue companies with linear or lightly superlinear growth.
This, IMNSHO, is largely caused by the fact that, given state expenditure and the corp and personal tax burden, there simply isn't enough capital for US style VC - the portfolio approach requires capital to absorb failures. Most VCs here cannot afford failure.
The closest we get is the EIS / SEIS tax policy, which allows the offsetting of losses in failed businesses (by the equivalent of Accredited Investors) - as well as a friendly Cap Gains treatment of successes. But these are largely made as common stock investments by individuals - and limited to a very small scale.
Which brings me to my final point - the SAFE note is not only not ubiquitous here, it's rare. Even pre-seed investments are either common stock or (more rarely) convertible notes. This requires a level of diligence (even on small tickets) that make capital formation incredibly burdensome.
There's absolutely a path to resolving this - but the UK first has to make a political and cultural decision to embrace startup-led GDP growth, which is has not yet made.
I could quite happily get on fine at one of those big American style startups but I don't get excited about hype, I don't have the work culture it demands and I don't have a price on my soul. I'd rather earn a lot less, have extreme stability, have better family time and balance. On top of that there's something tasteless and unethical about a lot of the big startups. Do they really bring good things to society? Do I really want to be part of that?
If I can walk away with half the money, live a modest life and stand with my principles intact, I will take that over twice the money.
I don't think this is political at all. It's not a race either and we have no innate responsibility to build things like this.
Anyone young should go make as much money as possible, as early as possible, so they can have the same outlook you do in later life.