While it's interesting to note pg is English, for some reason he chose CA to set up in. I'm English too, but based in NYC. As I told everyone when I started my humble startup :
If I tried hard and succeeded in the US people would want to emulate me, in the UK they would wonder who I had to screw over to get there. If I tried hard but failed in the UK people would remember me as a failure, in the US people recognize someone who tried...
You go where the best chance for what you're trying to achieve is. For pg it was silicon valley, for you it's NYC, for investment funds in Europe it's going to be London, for engineering in Europe it's going to be Germany.
I don't think your analogy is that accurate, we have plenty of successes here (James Dyson, Theo Paphitis, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson) as well as the many smaller ones noone knows about. Also, failure is relative. In the industry I work in, there are people that I know well who have exited on good terms, my main business makes a fraction of what they made, but I enjoy the freedom more and (to the best of my knowledge) so do the guys that work for me.
I do agree about the difference in the cost of failure though. Personally I blame Del Boy Trotter for a lot of that.
Actually, I didn't come up with my 'upside vs downside analysis' here on HN : it's how I've been explaining why I'm in the US to anyone who asks. I've had far more nods of understanding from the people back home (in the UK) than anywhere else.
More than anything it gives me hope to here that. I've been relying on last.fm to count as the defacto startup of choice for too long. I hope it all works out for you, whatever you're doing. If you need an upvote somewhere or a celebration of what you're trying to achieve, please send me an email.
Even treating the UK as homogeneous is silly - even within somewhere as small as Scotland there is a huge amount of difference in how people view entrepreneurship depending on which region you are in:
- Post-industrial Glasgow
- Finance and government based Edinburgh
- Oil oriented Aberdeen
- Farming/fishing/tourism of the Highlands
In fact the very first time I heard anyone talking about trying to get finance for a business was a school friend of mine when we were 20 - he was trying to raise enough money to buy his own fishing trawler.
I grew up in an environment in the North of Scotland where there were no large employers and a lot of small independent businesses - starting your own business wasn't seem as a big deal.
Of course the UK isn't homogeneous - there's obviously an enduring entrepreneurial spirit everywhere. My only point was that (as a social convention) people with aspirations behave differently there than they would in (say) New York.
If I tried hard and succeeded in the US people would want to emulate me, in the UK they would wonder who I had to screw over to get there. If I tried hard but failed in the UK people would remember me as a failure, in the US people recognize someone who tried...