2 british blokes in a shed doing what an entire team of corporate engineers cant is an incredibly strong part of British culture. They strive to be scrappy. They dont like making a show of things. They dont like to ask for more.
Essentially they draw a hell of a lot of national pride from this 'doing more with less' attribute. It came about out of necessity during ww2.
Is it really surprising that this culture produces companies that manage to do more with less? No.
Germany has a strong safety and reliable robust engineering culture of ensuring things are always done perfectly to spec. Is it surprising their companies have a reputation for making reliable machines? No.
Does British scrappiness and pride in their modesty mean they're somehow better than other cultures that prefer to go all out about things? No.
Sometimes you just cannot do something with 2 brits in a shed taking pride in their modesty and NEED that american exceptionalism and balls to the wall with everything attitude to get things done.
Thats one reason that i believe america produces more unicorns at a faster rate relative to population than the UK, Americans believe in themselves harder and go big or go home more often with less reservations.
As an investor it shouldn't make you consider the UK any less risky, as Brits may go modest and go home just as often as any American company can goes big then home.
> Essentially they draw a hell of a lot of national pride from this 'doing more with less' attribute. It came about out of necessity during ww2.
Two of my best success stories are along those lines, and I thought might hit favorable "10x" and "startup agility and resourcefulness" notes.
But in the US, I think the stories often land with the unspoken reaction of, "strange flex, bro: if that company were better, it would have raised more, and had rapid growth of headcount, on the way to a successful exit."
This might be a good application of LLM to large text corpus: label instances of US startup people of the past 2 decades (i.e., ZIRP, followed by crypto and AI gold rushes) speaking of how much they raised, and also label instances of them speaking of how scrappy they were with limited resources. Compare.
Yep, as a brit abroad I tend to think the brits end up on the side of excessive tightfistedness too often for their own good. Their approach also does not scale up well, since they optimize at too small a size.
One big upside of UK business culture that I don't see much of anywhere else is once your proverbial two guys in a shed are making something useful then people do come out of the woodwork to help. The US seems to do that through investments, but the UK it's often customers deliberately paying more than they might strictly have to. I think everyone that has seen success of this form has stories of customers showing up and writing cheques bigger than the amounts asked for.
There's more than an element of truth to this, we do not always dream big enough or take enough risk. We are efficient and frugal sometimes to a fault.
However it's not the whole story, there are actually people who want to swing for the fences, but who cannot and ultimately end up either scaling back, failing, or moving to the US. There isn't good access to early-stage funding here, and there is no real ecosystem either.
We have absolutely obscene amounts of untapped potential, it's infuriating.
Essentially they draw a hell of a lot of national pride from this 'doing more with less' attribute. It came about out of necessity during ww2.
Is it really surprising that this culture produces companies that manage to do more with less? No.
Germany has a strong safety and reliable robust engineering culture of ensuring things are always done perfectly to spec. Is it surprising their companies have a reputation for making reliable machines? No.
Does British scrappiness and pride in their modesty mean they're somehow better than other cultures that prefer to go all out about things? No.
Sometimes you just cannot do something with 2 brits in a shed taking pride in their modesty and NEED that american exceptionalism and balls to the wall with everything attitude to get things done.
Thats one reason that i believe america produces more unicorns at a faster rate relative to population than the UK, Americans believe in themselves harder and go big or go home more often with less reservations.
As an investor it shouldn't make you consider the UK any less risky, as Brits may go modest and go home just as often as any American company can goes big then home.