> Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth
Curious to see you prove that beyond an imagined stereotype. It's not as though we are in the first generation of US entrepreneurship and there is not a huge quantity of US inherited wealth in those VC funds. The founders of Intel, Apple, Walmart, Standard Oil etc. have all passed on. And on the other side, it's not like there haven't been a dozen generations since Norman lords chopping up all the land wealth. I think only one British billionaire is an aristo, the rest are business folk.
People underestimate the effect of how wealth attracts wealth in terms of commercial hubs - money chases opportunity and opportunities chase money and they end up in the same place for all sorts of reasons. It's just a system effect rather than a consequence of higher virtues that some love grant themselves.
- Dyson: actually an innovator! Made many of the same criticisms of the UK lack of tech strategy. Promoted Brexit, which has made the situation worse by erecting barriers to a key UK market.
- Ratcliffe: owns INEOS: oil refineries. Old school engineering? Or just provision of capital?
- Hinduja: purchaser of Ashok Leyland, which became a huge success once unshackled from disastrous management of British Leyland. Counts as "engineering" but not "tech"?
- Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster: classic aristo landlord. Owns large areas of London.
- Platt: hedge funds.
""The reality is that there is no willingness within the Eurozone to share wealth," he said. "In the United States, if California is having a really difficult time, the rest of the United States will send money to California. This is not the case in Europe." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Platt_(financier) , perhaps a surprising advocate of redistribution
- Coates: gambling. Counts as "tech startup" (bet365)
- Bamford: heir to JCB, the excavator company. "Engineering". Brexiter, as a result of being sued for antitrust by EU
- Branson: definitely self-made, across a large number of different companies. Space billionaire, closest figure to British Musk.
- Currie: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.
- Reece: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.
- Cadogan, 8th Earl Cadogan: aristo. Dead.
- Lewis: trader. Like Soros, profited from Black Wednesday. Under arrest in Manhattan.
- Reuben: metals. Seem to have made a killing from 90s Russia.
- Graff: diamonds. Looks like classic self-made from nothing story?
- Calder: Jive records.
- Morris: Home Bargains. Wildly successful discount shopkeeper.
(you know who's NOT on this list? Anyone to do with ARM. Even Hermann Hauser appears to have only £150m net worth)
Indeed. You can see in some of the comments here the American mentality simply could not have made ARM successful because they would have been too busy competing with their own customers. For ARM to take off and be trusted they had to knowingly leave valuable profit margins around for their customers to be able to take advantage of.
The defining question is if the world is better off by having people play that game or the one where everyone tries to takeover everything all the time.
Where are these third party developers that made decent money and Microsoft didn’t subsequently try to eat their piece of the pie?
It is a repeated pattern and people are not stupid. (See also the Sherlock phenomenon with Apple). Valve, for example, have to invest in proton as the ultimate back up plan. For me personally that has proven quite helpful, but your initial business has to be wildly successful for you to be able to play defensive moves like that.
This leads to a situation where mid sized companies are few in number and unstable.
> and Microsoft didn’t subsequently try to eat their piece of the pie?
That second part wasn't in the original claim, though. The parent comment is right. Sure, 21st century Microsoft has come for the utilities market, for the Lotus-to-Evernote market, etc., etc., but an entire software industry really did spring up in the eighties through to the early 2000s filling gaps in Microsoft software.
Oracle, SAP, Adobe, VMware, Intuit, AutoDesk, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, just to list a few still surviving companies.
Microsoft absolutely expands into areas it considers strategic profit or capability centers. E.g. office productivity, web browser, database, gaming, etc.
But they, and especially early/smaller Microsoft (90s-00s), left a ton of money on the table for the good of the platform. Because they realized they couldn't do it all and be best-of-everything.
The fact that Microsoft can deploy its level of resources (e.g. crush Lotus) when they decide to doesn't mean that they always decide to.
SQL Server, Dynamics, TrueType/Silverlight, Hyper-V, Microsoft Money, Softimage was owned by MS, Activision are in the process of being bought by MS, Epic and EA both compete with MS.
In the case of the above Microsoft has tried to compete with, kill, or acquire all of them. That's using others to do the hard work of market discovery.
Indeed, Microsoft has offerings in many of these categories, one reason I specifically mentioned databases.
And yet, these companies are all extremely large and healthy.
Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard is a great example, because it speaks to the modern competitive landscape.
Microsoft isn't "using others to do the hard work of market discovery." Activision Blizzard has a USD$72b market cap.
That's a hyperscaled conglomerate attempting to buy a still-huge company.
And if you want to suggest Microsoft's behavior is unique in that... I'd suggest we start with redressing the lax competitive laws that (a) make Microsoft feel it needs to do that to compete with its rivals & (b) allow Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard.
Those companies are only that big because of profit on non-Microsoft platforms, including these days the web and mobile. For example, Activision (founded to make Atari 2600 games) are being acquired because of their console and mobile properties - the value derived from the PC is there but relatively small and historic. The amounts Microsoft have burned trying to make money from gaming defy belief, instead they seem determined to destroy the viability of the market for everyone.
One reason I am pessimistic about Arm's future is they will struggle to balance raising money for future needed R&D without creating the appearance of being too lucrative a target for a nVidia or SoftBank wanting to play monopoly. That is going to push people to RISC-V. I hope they manage to do something, but they're in for a rough time.
If they collected much more profit from each device sale then they wouldn't have market-dominating IP. Because they'd have competitors who could undercut them.
As it is, a tiny firm of people make an extremely good living off a margin that nobody in the business can really quibble with, and it has without conflict sustained them to do greater and greater work that has changed the world.
You watch: ARM post-IPO will inevitably have to start squeezing more juice out of the market to give to greedier, more transactional, more activist shareholders, and this will fuck up the balance entirely.
An ARM IPO isn't really going to be good for anyone, I think.
I would be surprised if many Brits know of ARM as a British success story. Ditto for Raspberry Pi or Deepmind. These things are just not celebrated, it seems.
If you ask people in the street to name a famous living British technologist, they might come up with Tim Berners-Lee or James Dyson, but they are never going to name Sophie Wilson.
It is upsetting to me but you are right, they'd know Dyson. (I wish they would instead know the name Chris Duncan, the inventor of the Henry vacuum cleaner and while still a Brexiteer, a man who hasn't subsequently kicked dirt in the eye of the UK).
They wouldn't remember Tim Berners-Lee's actual name but they would be able to say, the web guy. (Which is probably better for him when he goes shopping).
But yes, few people who actually _build_ things, get to be famous public figures. Possibly due to being too busy to engage with the media nonsense or even worse social media nonsense.
Alas pjc50 specified living British technologists.
I mean, Britain has many great technologists if you're willing to count the likes of Arkwright (died 1792), Babbage (died 1871), Watt (died 1819), Faraday (died 1867), Randall (died 1984), Bell (died 1922), Harrison (died 1776), Logie Baird (died 1946), Stephenson (died 1848) etc
But some would say if a country's list of technology greats has so many dead people on it, perhaps that country's glory days are over.
£50 pound note, william churchill is the one on the £5 note.
This is burned into my brain. because I heard a joke when the redesign came out about him going from not being accepted by his country to not being accepted in Lidl. (£50 notes are often refused in the UK for fear of counterfeit.)
I cannot prove it, and this is entirely anecdotal, but my friends and I have observed it first-hand from VC dealings and friends in the right UK circles. Inherited generational wealth and class in my experience powers UK investment, particularly in the start-up scene, much more than in the USA. Of course, there are some exceptions I can think of in the UK but it is very much tied up with the class system there and understanding this makes life easier. The same situation affects other European countries to some degree, and many people I know have had to go to US VC firms to get funding. I have spent a lot of time working in all of these countries to some extent and the UK class system seems to be increasingly stifling. YMMV though.
Nah, the OP is talking bollocks. The angels I know are all middle/working-class entrepreneurs. There is no upper-class conspiracy holding people back, there just isn't much money. Non-Brits don't really understand that class is not money. Red trousers are closer to farmers than businessmen. If you are British and want to be a tech investor, you go to the US too.
> There is no upper-class conspiracy holding people back, there just isn't much money.
I think the argument is that there _is_ plenty of money, it's just parked safely and quietly in property rather than investing in production or R&D. And not a "conspiracy" as much as the blank look the property investor class give you when you can't promise risk free leveraged 7% forever.
Most folks I know and have read about didn't go to the loan shark or local mafia for 'money' even though that is even more readily accessible and with zero paperwork.
Thanks for the kind words. I actually agree a lot with what you say, and would just add my personal experiences, and be interested in learning more, but I don't think you established the tone for further conversation here.
Absolutely. As others have alluded to: angels abound, but look at the pedigree of the associates and partners at VC funds based in London and it all falls into place. I assume it’s because it’s a relatively easy job that you don’t need much talent for. Perfect for an intelligent but bored dauphin.
Curious to see you prove that beyond an imagined stereotype. It's not as though we are in the first generation of US entrepreneurship and there is not a huge quantity of US inherited wealth in those VC funds. The founders of Intel, Apple, Walmart, Standard Oil etc. have all passed on. And on the other side, it's not like there haven't been a dozen generations since Norman lords chopping up all the land wealth. I think only one British billionaire is an aristo, the rest are business folk.
People underestimate the effect of how wealth attracts wealth in terms of commercial hubs - money chases opportunity and opportunities chase money and they end up in the same place for all sorts of reasons. It's just a system effect rather than a consequence of higher virtues that some love grant themselves.