Why are there no googles,microsoft's,twitter,facebook etc from UK?

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Permalink Reply by Graham Joyce on July 15, 2009 at 6:55pm

While working in Silicon Valley for several years, it became very apparent there is a complete "ecosystem" driving the entrepreneurship. Great universities (Stanford, Berkeley, UCSF, etc.), a ton of money (VC) and a very interconnected workforce (it's not unusual to work with the same colleagues at multiple companies over the years). Thus, small companies become big companies, big companies spin off new small ones or employees leave to start another one. It's become a very self-sustaining engine.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Cohen - blog.asmartbear.com on July 17, 2009 at 4:18pm

It could be population, but even more extreme than you're giving it credit for.

Remember that a lot of the population is required just to sustain the rest of the population, whereas new tech startups are often in new territory that doesn't include food, shelter, water, health, or government.

So if you assume N people are required just for "sustenance activities" in a group of millions of people, the absolute number of people remaining who have the socio-economic ability to do a "tech startup" is many times higher in America than in the UK.

Also, although I don't live in the UK, having spend many months there on several occasions, I think it's fair to say that most people don't value "big risk for big reward" as much as "happy life with good corner pub and good friends," as compared with America.

Also more people report themselves "happy" in the UK than in America. Linked? I think so.

Steve Johnson said:

Could it be as simple as population? There are just more people in the U.S. UK = 60M; US=300M. Five times as people = five times as many ideas. The same is true for Canada. Canada = 30M; US=300M = ten times as many ideas.

But wait, that fails. Where are the successes in China and India?

Maybe what is different is the way we raise our children. In the 60s in the US, we raised our kids to GET jobs; in the 90s we encouraged our kids to CREATE jobs. U.S. does well in creative endeavors like movies and music. India and China are great at manufacturing. And I think that software is more like music than it is like manufacturing.

Another interesting question is how many of those companies are not from the U.S. but from California. 33M people in California is roughly the size of Canada. But I suspect that California has more ideas than the rest of the US and Canada and UK. There's something about the air out there.

We can reach for the stars in the US--if we're willing to take the fall. We don't have much in the way of protection from our failures. But as someone said earlier, failure doesn't hold much stigma for the U.S. as it might elsewhere.

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Petri I. Salonen on July 30, 2009 at 7:07pm

The same thing applies to other countries such as Finland where we have not seen another success coming since Nokia got its marketshare in the mobility space (with issues as of now). I think it is also about risk taking and culture in Western European countries... As a Finn and lived in the US for 11 years, I have experienced the "different attititude" towards entreprenourship. It is something that the school system in some countries just do not educate well enough.

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Permalink Reply by Nicholas Hebb on August 2, 2009 at 7:40am

The funny thing is, two of the four companies mentioned by the OP have no business model. So maybe folks in the UK are smarter than us. ;-)

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Permalink Reply by Liu Yen Liang on September 2, 2009 at 2:29pm

Don't forget ARM - the company which competes with Intel in mobile processor business.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Dalgarno on December 31, 2009 at 12:07pm

The US is also looking at changing its visa system to keep entrepreneurs in the country: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/8417510.stm

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Permalink Reply by Chad Crandall on January 19, 2010 at 3:48pm

Culture. I love learning about differences in our world's cultures, and from what I can tell, American culture has deep roots of innovation and a drive to "do better than the other guy" kind of mentality. In my opinion, the drive for Americans to innovate today is mostly from the desire to become famous and/or wealthy, but in the past was driven by the desire to improve life (work smarter not harder).

Not that the UK doesn't have the same qualities, but it seems to be much more pronounced in Americans.

Special note: A lot of the innovation that occurs in the US is from immigrants seeking a better life in the "land of promise", so I would bet these immigrants believe in the culture and gravitate to the US.

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Permalink Reply by Sam Howley on March 4, 2010 at 8:46pm

I can't speak about the UK, but I have often asked the same question about Australia.

Obviously the simple population size explanation would apply to Australia more than the UK since we have a third of the people.

Other possibilities :

- No inspiring examples. It might only take one massive success, a Google, to inspire many other startups to burst forth, and some might succeed. So a chicken and egg problem.

- Too many other comfortable options. Almost all Australian software companies provide bespoke development rather than products. There is a lot of easy money to be made working for the government and big companies.

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Permalink Reply by Aditya Tuli on March 15, 2010 at 3:54pm

Possibly a combination of a whole lot of things like above, size and even immigration come into play. I've been in the UK for only 5 years now so I may have got this wrong. But from what I've seen, there is a great regard for the book in the UK: rules, procedures and processes matter a lot. In contrast my friends in the States seem somewhat ignorant of the hows and whys and they prefer to learn as they go. They also know how to reward and celebrate uniqueness which I find often missing in UK culture.

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Permalink Reply by Girish Bellalcheru on April 20, 2010 at 11:28am

You could put any countrys name there and the question remains the same. In fact there have been many attempts by countries to create their own "Valleys" but none as successful as the original. It may seem like there is a simple answer, but it goes so deep into every aspect of life in the valley that I'm afraid there will be only one "valley" in history.

That said there have been many successful startups turning into large businesses in every country, Its just that they are not concentrated in one geographical area or particular niche like software and technology.

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