
London’s startup scene is getting more sophisticated - jimsojim
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21694594-gone-are-days-when-barely-qualified-hopefuls-could-pitch-away-londons-startup-scene?force=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/londonsstartupsceneisgettingmore
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vidarh
This article is a fluff piece on EF. EF is not a very large part of London's
startup scene. In a couple of years of various startup heavy tech meetups in
London, I've yet to meet anyone who's gone through EF. Which is not to dismiss
them, I'm sure they're good, but with a title like that you'd expect them to
have actually explored what's going on in London rather than just marketing an
individual incubator.

~~~
kami8845
Why any serious founder would show their face at a tech meetup is beyond me.
What an utter waste of time for early-stage startups.

~~~
funkaster
Why would anyone go outside and meet people, have a drink or two and talk
about common interests? That's also beyond me.

~~~
stormbuilder
As always, there's a happy balance. It is probably bad to be a social recluse,
unless you are in crunch mode and not looking for hiring anytime soon, but at
the same time it's probably bad to be out for events every night and spending
too much time socializing.

------
RyanHamilton
Definite PR article for EF. I live in Shoreditch, have my own startup, go to a
lot of events and have barely heard of them. The events I've got more out of
include:

[http://3-beards.com/dontpitchmebro](http://3-beards.com/dontpitchmebro) \-
Interesting pitches, usually very high quality. The group that run it do a lot
of cool startup events.

[http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/](http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/) \- Geeky
fun, though has been getting increasingly commercial

Lately the best meetup has been "lean coffee"
([http://leancoffee.org/](http://leancoffee.org/)) , the quality of people and
feedback I have got from that meeting has been superb. I suggest starting one
in your area.

Overall I am negative on accelerators. Perhaps I am bias as I have enough
savings/income from an existing small business that I don't need my living
expenses paid for what I think may be giving away too much of your business.
Though I look forward to reading other peoples experiences.

~~~
s_dev
>Overall I am negative on accelerators. Perhaps I am bias as I have enough
savings/income from an existing small business that I don't need my living
expenses paid for what I think may be giving away too much of your business.
Though I look forward to reading other peoples experiences.

If having cash lying around from a previous business/startup attempt was a pre
requisite to starting a startup are you not creating a sort of catch 22
scenario for the whole ecosystem? The current accelerator model seems very
completely sensible given the level uncertainty involved in startups and has
plenty of successful examples including YCombinator.

Have you specific reason to not like accelerators?

~~~
ommunist
I personally agree with Ryan. The whole accelerator ecosystem is designed for
the final benefit of VCs. It is like some clever fox built a pen, where the
hen are competing to get more fat for the feast of the fox. If you managed to
get enough for your own good, why the heck you need to work harder and trouble
people just to enrich one more VC?

~~~
gtf21
I don't agree with this (EF#3 Cohort Member). I was pretty sceptical of
accelerators before joining EF, and remain sceptical of VCs, but I found EF
really useful for things that I just would not have seen coming (someone else
has mentioned "unknown unknowns" which sums it up fairly well).

------
jamesmcaulay
EF turned me - a Computer Science graduate with a vague interest in startups -
into the founder of an angel-backed startup.

The pace of learning during the six pace programme is rapid, but that's not
what I see as most important. I'm most grateful for them giving me the
opportunity to start my own thing straight out of university.

Without EF, I would have been forced to get a graduate job at a tech company
in order to pay the bills. Building a startup in London would have been orders
of magnitude harder. I know people who are trying to build products in their
spare time, and it's tough.

Thanks to EF, I'm now running a five-person company with nearly 10,000 users.

Oh, and I met my co-founder on the programme. Not bad.

~~~
billmalarky
Come on man, you can't just drop that and then not share what you're building.

~~~
JazzMachine
[https://joinencore.com/jamesmcaulay](https://joinencore.com/jamesmcaulay)

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joshvm
> for women are generally outnumbered on Britain’s science-degree courses,
> especially among PhD

That's really not true. Physics undergraduate in most universities is perhaps
1:10 male:female. Postgraduate (PhD) is pretty much half/half in my
experience. My department is physics/space/climate and we have more girls than
boys now I think.

Perhaps the scene is worse in computer science, but I've been to a few machine
vision conferences and women are pretty well represented.

EDIT: That said, engineering undergraduate was atrocious at my university. I
had some friends doing civil/mechanical and it was maybe 1:20. Comp sci was
pretty good though, as was maths. Biology and chemistry (and biochemistry)
always seem to attract girls too.

~~~
Scirra_Tom
> That's really not true. Physics undergraduate in most universities is
> perhaps 1:10 male:female.

It was talking about science-degree courses, not Physics specifically. You
seem quite sure it's not true, do you have any sources?

~~~
joshvm
I interpreted the statement as as slightly more hyperbolic than it actually
is. What they say is true, across the board, but it's not as bad as it sounds.
The problem is that 'especially' implies that the ratio gets worse as you get
higher in academia and I think that's nonsense.

My undergraduate degree was physics, but we spent time in other classes run by
the maths and engineering departments.

The stats for UCL are here:
[https://www.ucl.ac.uk/srs/statistics/tables/g/1415](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/srs/statistics/tables/g/1415)

It's difficult to get more granular data. The graduate figures there are for
masters and PhD combined. My department is space and climate and we certainly
don't have 99 PhD students!

I can't find stats for my undergraduate intake (Warwick '08), so you'll have
to take my word for it. Things may have improved a lot since then. My
girlfriend says that her physics course (St Andrews) was fairly even.

Oxford is an interesting edge case because they seem to control for gender
quite well. They accepted more girls than boys for undergrad in 2013 (over all
sciences) at least.

[https://www.ox.ac.uk/gazette/statisticalinformation/#d.en.62...](https://www.ox.ac.uk/gazette/statisticalinformation/#d.en.6207)

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photonicist
I just went through EF - while the cost of living in London is awful, the EF
stipend more than covers it. I wouldn't have even considered moving back to
the UK (much less to London) had EF not been able to assure me that they could
deliver on the mentoring, connections, and financial support that they
advertise.

In 3 months I learnt a lot about a variety of industries as we very rapidly
iterated through teams and ideas, and I'm now developing instrumentation and
software that will be launched into space later this year.

It certainly beats the opportunities I've had in finance and academia over the
past few years!

------
jasonrez
Any independent opinions of EF? They are great things about them in most
media, though most articles have a PR flavor to them.

~~~
JazzMachine
As someone who went through the process, I'm glad I did. They do a great job
of building up a good atmosphere among the group, and just working with such a
high concentration of smart, engaged and interesting people is a great
experience.

That said, as a model for building startups, I remain skeptical. Given such a
short time period, there's a lot of pressure to grab quick wins and sell an
idea before writing any code. That takes a certain kind of customer, and a
certain kind of idea. Nothing wrong with it as such, but it's pretty narrow
and it's easy to reel off interesting companies which wouldn't fit well in
that model. Stripe probably would, but less so Google, Uber, EF itself etc,
especially not anything with an unclear trajectory or that will grow its own
market. There's a strong feeling among my group that the most successful
members have been the ones who most wanted to start a company for its own
sake, without particularly caring how, and there's plenty of people who
started out wanting to solve some problem in biotech or education only to end
up data mining online shoppers. There are exceptions to this, like OpenCosmos,
but they usually started EF pre-formed.

(As an aside, they haven't quite resolved the tension between making EF seem
valuable and the fact that people who see EF as a gatekeeper have the wrong
mindset. Those who think about it too hard might also realise that they are
disincentivised from taking EF's funding at the end of the program.)

Speaking of PR flavour, I think improving communication about what the process
is actually like (perhaps as opposed to what they would like it to be like)
would be a key improvement. Their marketing about being obsessed with problems
and deeply technical doesn't tell the above story. Their definition of "deep
tech", which basically means "not a CRUD app", probably seems sane to your
average web designer or VC, but if you spend your days in the guts of an OS or
compiler you might be disappointed. Ok, so if your programming itch is
scratched by chucking data into scikit-learn and selling it as an API, you're
going to have a great time – and you can slap the "AI" label on your company
as a bonus.

Lest that sound too negative, again, I did enjoy the process and they seem to
be doing well so far. My impression is that all the cohorts have had a
different feel, and they're still iterating on the process. Right now they
have something pretty good, and they might just be able to make it great.

~~~
photonicist
Largely agree there - given that EF itself is iterating and changing quite
rapidly, it should be interesting to see how it evolves now that it seems to
be entering hockey-stick stage. The deep tech didn't really materialise too
much IMO, but as a former physicist I guess I have fairly extreme expectations
regarding what constitutes "depth" in technology.

I'm quite impressed with Accelerated Dynamics and ThirdEye, I'll be following
them closely.

------
nakedrobot2
My lawyer lives in London. He's from silicon valley and has helped hundreds of
startups, including some of the biggest.

His observation about London is that the cost of living is simply so high,
that it is impossible to have a real startup culture here.

~~~
kami8845
You can live on £1000 per month. Of course it's not as much fun as spending
more money (especially since the people you see on the street seem lavish in
their spending). It's very easy to get accustomed to an expensive lifestyle.

In SF, is it possible to rent a single room 15 minutes walk from where all the
tech companies are located for $800 / month? Because in London you can.

~~~
Scirra_Tom
Pretty hard to live off £1k a month in London. Rent is going to be ~50% of
that minimum, then you have council tax + bills. Doesn't leave much at all for
transport/food and whatever else might come up.

~~~
Symbiote
£1k is a bit less than the recommended monthly cost for students in London of
around £1.1-1.2k, depending who you ask. That presumably assumes sharing a
flat/house with others, but also probably assumes living relatively close to
the university.

The "London Living Wage" works out to about £1200 per month, after tax. There
are people earning less than this in London.

If the startup doesn't _need_ to be in London they could cut costs
significantly by being further out of London in the suburbs, or in a satellite
town, and taking the train in when necessary. But this can put off potential
employees. Maybe it could work at the beginning.

------
bArray
There's equal opportunity and equal outcome, they propose to tackle the
problem with equal outcome. With more women taking degrees in the UK one must
ask why they are less seen in STEM based subjects and not try to artificially
level the playing field.

My personal opinion is that the issue is a social one, where we are still
awaking from a period where women must do certain jobs and men must do others.
You don't see many women as bin collectors although they are more than
qualified for the job. I think the best place to tackle this stigma is in
Primary and Secondary Schools. The results will take a few years to filter up
all the way from Primary to University.

Meanwhile, start-ups should be judged equally based on their quality and not
discriminated by who is attempting it. There is a ridiculous notion that we
can artificially change the end result and somehow that won't lead to issues.

------
andrewdon
Why sophisticated? It simply says bar is higher and woman participants are as
few as in the past.

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steliosp
EF is a relatively new Accelerator (< 4 years I think) which essentially means
that their early incubated startups will only now be showing their real
potential. IMO their future seems both solid and exciting : 3 out of top 5 up-
and-coming AI startups in London have been created through EF cohorts - #1
being Google's DeepMind.

via [http://uk.businessinsider.com/10-british-ai-companies-to-
loo...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/10-british-ai-companies-to-look-out-for-
in-2016-2015-12)

------
ommunist
I wonder whether The Economist knows about the MiniBar meetup in London.

------
zump
I don't see an electric vehicle manufacturer in London.

~~~
jdietrich
It would be _insane_ to start an EV company in London. Rent and rates are
cripplingly high and you could get considerable tax incentives for setting up
elsewhere in the UK.

Nissan have recently opened a massive battery factory in Sunderland to
complement their existing car factory. Jaguar Land Rover have announced
electric models for 2017 which would be manufactured in their Birmingham,
Halewood or Solihull factories. Magtec in Sheffield and Zytek in Staffordshire
design and manufacture electric drivetrain systems for a number of companies.

London =/= Britain.

~~~
ommunist
Right you are! When Britain produced strategic Handley Page bombers, they made
it at Bricket Wood.

------
adotjdotr
The guys

