twopointouch

You’re absolutely right Ian and it’s not just banks! I’m fairly close to the London business angel community at the moment thanks to the ‘Creative Business Accelerator’ run by the London Business Angel network and my experience is that the stereotype of the British business angel as retired, male, grey-haired and largely risk-averse is quite accurate and does not sit well with the Web 2.0 startup community and our needs for a tech-savvy investment community such as can be found in Silicon Valley.

That having been said, I would also point out that perhaps we are in somewhat of a catch-22 in the UK. In order to launch, fund, grow and exit from a high-risk, high-growth Web 2.0 startup venture (many of which across the pond do not have revenue models) you must typically be highly motivated for a trade sale exit. With less ‘activity’ in the Web 2.0 space over here, there is less perceived opportunity for ‘entertaining’ such a sale with the big potential buyers, most of which are HQ’d in the States. Let’s hope all that is changing gradually.

Having said all that, counter-intuitively I would also argue all that works in our favour. The US have a huge market of their own and are often reticent to cross the pond to Europe before gaining a major foothold over there (wisely). This gives the UK a tremendous advantage of a protected market which can be leveraged by the right opportunity.

Hi Ian,

Your point is well made and all too familiar (sadly).

In regards to the same issue, NESTA’s new chief exec has just issued an interesting statement - Business support vital to bridging “equity gap” - that I’ve just posted about.

Best,
Deirdre

Thanks Ian, i just stumbled upon your blog thanks to the good workings of Technorati. Perhaps Technorati should also be factored into NESTA’s ‘business support’ equation… no I mean really!

As for Tony Blair blogging, that’s a definite “no comments” scenario

I’ve been wanting RSS for over a year now, but we are a not-for-profit organisation and making further enhancements / additions to the NMK site’s functionality is very expensive and resource-intensive for us (but other things, like our range of events, have been getting better). It will happen eventually….

I agree. The UK will be a slower, less hyped and more stable market compared to the US. We will focus more on proper business principles and as a result will have a lot of medium term ’strong’ web performers but will be unlikely to fuel the next Google (and also therefore WebVan!). Large generalisations but you get the point.