If you’re investing, this is a solid argument you should consider a UK VC over a US one.

Same data, different perspective and probably more the angle they were going for. Obviously ROI is ultimately what matters but risk tolerance is a thing.

UK's financiers have always been risk averse.

> The US market doesn’t pride itself purely on unicorns created, but on the fact that it’s a vibrant ecosystem that invests in ideas even if they might not become a unicorn. That fact seems lost on the meaning of the headline

That just seems like spin on what is essentially burning cash. I don't think it's a morally superior posture to invest in things that fail. I assure you VC's are turning down plenty of things because they don't seem like unicorns.

I mean Sequoia invested with SBF while he was playing league of legends in his pitch meeting. We're not dealing with geniuses here.

> but on the fact that it’s a vibrant ecosystem that invests in ideas even if they might not become a unicorn

Most venture capitalism in the U.S. is basically snake oil. Companies with tenous ideas at best get pumped and pumped until they're dumped and the VCs move on to the next grift. Most recently, it was self-driving cars, then blockchains and cryptocurrencies, and now AI. I'm sure they'll move onto something next soon.

> 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.

I'm a brit.

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.

They pretty clearly state their metric for performance is "unicorns per $1bn" (3.08 vs 1.22).

They're suggesting dollars invested in UK startups are more likely to create a unicorn than those same dollars put into us startups, hence higher performance.

Yes. If the UK matched the US per capita it'd be ~285 unicorns, so it's actually performing at 37%.

Do you have something to back up this claim?