And there are a few places globally that have that vibe

London ends up being this amazing on-ramp into global tech, but not quite the place where the biggest companies finish their journey

Europe has plenty of cities that are great if your goal is "build something useful, make money, don't sell your soul," and those don’t show up in these charts

That probably applies to many cities of economically advanced (or even less advanced) countries. I think the (Anglo-Saxon) startup narrative for too long has been about growth at all cost, go big or die trying, sell out your company as early as possible to VCs and be essentially employed by them as a founder. Starting a normal innovative, profit-making company and growing it sustainably is just non-news, unfortunately.

And for a city that wants to be a global startup hub, that kind of frictionless mobility matters way more than people realize

So London feels less like a Silicon Valley replacement and more like the world's best startup nursery

London's basically great for:

  1. Startups
  2. Scaling/Growth
  3. Existing company expanding from USA->Europe or Europe->USA

It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA.

For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.

For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.

For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.

In a way this feels less like inventing something new and more like rediscovering and formalizing old techniques with modern safety constraints

It's important in these cases to preserve the lineage of where they came from.

There's a tendency to start calling them 'western medicine' and crediting it to the person who formalized it in the west rather than the source culture where it has existed for centuries.

The conversation is bit 2010, but the point still stands.

It's probably a mix of "this species happens to be unusually well-suited" and "this is the species people bothered to study rigorously first."

The fact that tilapia skin was basically waste, yet turns out to have higher collagen content, better tensile strength, and better moisture retention than human skin is kind of remarkable

Motion sensors and push plates aren't perfect, but they remove the contact vector entirely instead of trying to mitigate it after the fact

Where I think this kind of idea tries to make its case is in places where cleaning is infrequent, inconsistent, or happens long after peak use