

Ask HN: How does the London startup scene compare to NYC? - untog

I'm British, and currently living and working for a startup in NYC. I love the city and my job is great, but I'm starting to get to the point where I want to start doing my own thing sometime soon. I've got ideas and the ability to execute on them (I'm a developer) but it's extremely difficult for me to set up a company and work for it- and as far as I know it's impossible for me to do it on the side of my existing job.<p>So, I'm starting to wonder if I should move back to the UK. Is there anyone out there that's spent a decent amount of time in both, and could give an account of how they compare?<p>It feels like NYC has a hackathon event every weekend and an active social scene to back up the industry- not to mention a ton of investors on hand to pitch to. Can the same be said about London?
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ig1
The positive about London:

This weekend london has two hack weekends, CharityHack and Seedhack, a couple
of weeks ago Startup Weekend was in London, next month Launch48 has a London
event and there's a StartupWeekend Education event. There's also 2-3
specialized hackathons.

There's typically 50-75 tech/startup events a month in London these days.
Pretty much by any standard it has an active social scene. Facebook Developer
Garage London and Devnest are the largest monthly Facebook and Twitter
developer events in the world.

The negative about London:

New York is still a better place to raise investment. We've no USV, we've no
Fred Wilson. The number of VC funds is far smaller.

The number of tech angel investors is fairly small, the majority of the angel
investors in London are not from tech backgrounds which obviously makes
raising money harder.

On the other hand the number of US investors who are now investing in UK
startups is actually growing pretty rapidly. Being based in London doesn't
mean having to raise money only in London.

