I saw a number earlier that around 45% of US businesses have a paid subscription to an AI service/tool. You just can't get to this kind of scale and revenue with consulting.
TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
Also UK contract law is well established and it's easy to find experienced transatlantic lawyers and firms (there's a reason UK lawyers can practice in NY and why both Hong Kong and the Emirate of Dubai kept poaching British judges with contract dispute into their business judiciary).
In most cases when we'd invest in a startup abroad, the founder would often structure their startup as a subsidiary of a US, UK, Singapore (especially Indian/Chinese startups), or Cayman Islands (it's a BOT so you basically get it for free) corporation.
Ironically, this ease of financial access is what makes it difficult to seed a lasting DeepTech startup in the UK because capital would often be deployed to invest in other startup ecosystems. I wrote about this before on HN as well [0][1][2]
London and UK for that matter is great and seeding Startups...high quality universities, entrepreneurialism and attractive tax benefits for angels but for real growth capital it lags massively behind US and has forever.
"Freetrade built a profitable trading app, got acquired by IG Group for £160M after targeting a £700M valuation"
That is not an accurate recollection of history. Freetrade raised money at a £700 million valuation at the very top of the market when money was plentiful, then, when the money dried up, and they were forced to go from losing money to making money, and they cut all advertising, they were able to just about scrape profitability. At the point of the acquisition, Freetrade either needed more investment to fund more advertising, or get acquired. After 10 years, a dozen rounds of fundraising and capital drying up, £160M is a good exit. Freetrade was significantly overvalued at £700 million.
And also, IG Group is a British company, HQ'd in London, traded on the London Stock Exchange. "British stock trading company acquired by British stock trading company" is a pretty boring event.
The majority of IPOs in 2025 were in 4 markets - US, China, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea [0]. It's really hard to exit in the LSE currently, and this article is self congratulatory while ignoring major recent (past 2-3 years) mistakes that negatively impacted the entrepreneurship scene in the UK (eg. the revocation of funding for Tech Nation [1] and the ongoing leadership crisis at Monzo [2] which makes no one look good).
Plus, the FTSE 100 returned 25.8% last year. That is not a shrinking market!
EDIT: I'd prefer you not change the subject away from your capital markets claim, but to address the other links:
1. I didn't say London was a top 4 IPO location, just that it's market aren't shrinking.
2. Tech Nation still exists, and still administers that visa. I don't know why you posted a very out of date article about it.
3. It's not ideal that such a high profile company is having issues like that, but hey, stuff happens. OpenAI had a whole goddamn coup and counter-coup happen!
I don't know Aakash Gupta so I can't say if he's lying or just didn't do his research, but I know the IPO figures he cited there are wrong, like very wrong, which puts everything else there in doubt.
Not to mention location of IPO not being all that important. But that's a whole separate thing.
The post itself contains a fascinating historical precedent that maps pretty well to the current situation:
Knut Hamsun (Literature Prize 1920): In 1943, the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun travelled to Germany and met with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. After returning to Norway, he sent his Nobel medal to Goebbels as a gesture of thanks for the meeting. Goebbels was honoured by the gift. The present whereabouts of the medal are unknown.
I wonder how many non-English speaking countries adopted hello as the default phone greeting. In Russian "allo" is used, which is pretty clearly traced to Edison's hello.
On the other hand, my US-born teenage kids don't seem to be continuing this grand tradition, presumably due to most peer communication happening over text. When called, they just pick up the phone and wait for the caller to speak first. If I stay silent as well, I get an annoyed "yes?" eventually. My lessons in phone etiquette have gone unheeded.
You know why this is, right? Most phone calls these days are spam or otherwise annoyances. Many are literally just seeing if a person picks up. They’re listening to see if you’re a real human being.
This would be true if caller id didn’t exist. I suspect that these kids know perfectly well that it is someone they know on the other end of the line since it is incredibly rare these days for a person to call someone they know from an unknown line.
I agree with the general point, and I myself don't pick up any unknown numbers. But - the kids definitely know when a parent calls, so don't think the spam thing applies here.
That was fun until I got to the point where no progress could be made and I had to undo a whole bunch of times to get to a workable configuration. Perhaps add a notification of some kind that I've gotten myself in that situation, rather than letting me kill a bunch of time solving an unsolvable puzzle. Still, very enjoyable!
lmao same. actually a really cool fun/concept it's definitely wordle popularity caliber, but once i got to the last 3 words and ended up in this scenario and the hint button said that i was like -_- owned.
not sure what the right game experience would be for that. a notif that says "You can still solve more words but you'll never solve them all!" doesn't quite work here, because it's sort of saying "there's only one _right_ way to win, but good luck figuring out the right order". Still, it would be better than me finding that out at the very end.
it would probably be pretty important to design levels so that the unwinnable states can't happen early in the game, but it's getting a little abstract to think about at this point. sort of brings me back to that unblock it game from the old ipod touch days.
Same here. On yesterday's puzzle I got into an unwinnable state on my very first move, using the topmost word (spoiler: I made "hut" instead of "out").
maybe a percentage chance of solving puzzle tracker that updates a bit randomly slow so you don't necessarily know right away that you made a mistake, although it would have to be a bit weird, for example when you start you are not at 100% of solving puzzle.
Oof, Cloudflare has been one of the most interesting tech companies for me, and one I would have worked for in a heartbeat. But the MAGA pandering in this tweet is quite disappointing. I get it, running a large business in the US these days requires a certain amount of bootlicking, but still. And I say this while generally agreeing with Matthew's stance.
The "haters" who long ago have warned about the risk of Cloudflare MITM'ing global website traffic have been proven right. In the end, Cloudflare is another mass surveillance tool next to Meta/Google/Apple which will be weaponized in the interests of the current US administration.
Not just Google. I had ChatGPT regurgitate my HN comment (without linking to it) about 15 minutes after posting it. That was a year ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42649774
> Gemini pointed me back at MY OWN comment, above, an hour after I wrote it. So Google is crawling the web FAST. It also pointed to: https://learning.acm.org/bytecast/ep78-russ-cox ... I had ChatGPT regurgitate my HN comment (without linking to it) about 15 minutes after posting it.
Sounds like HN is the kind of place for effective & effortless "Answer Engine Optimization".
As someone who paid for a lifetime license of Tailwind UI, unlike, I strongly suspect, simlevesque - I 100% agree with this. The negativity is completely uncalled for, please take this somewhere else and do some self-reflection.
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