slightly more coherent post

so it's day two in london and i just had a very, very late breakfast with alastair mitchell of huddle. huddle is one of those companies trying to web 2.0-ify business (i know, insert eye-roll here) but is actually doing it in a pretty interesting way. but i'll save that for another post.

alastair and i had a great several hour chat about the differences in entrepreneurship between london and the valley and rather than broadening my horizons, it ended up confirming a lot of the valley boosterism i always hear (and sometimes write myself).

he said in london, people are much more likely to go sit on an island if they have a big win, rather than turning to friends and saying "so what are we doing next?" there's no startup "game" here like there is in the valley that continually sucks you back in, whether you want it to or not. so success doesn't necessarily beget success in the same way it does in the valley.

i'd heard before that was a factor of entrepreneurs not sharing the stock option wealth-- so you don't have the story of the secretary going to work at google and becoming a millionaire that makes every secretary want to work for a startup. i still think that's part of it. but for alastair it all seems to come down to this issue of a "scene."

amid startups in london there is no "scene"-- there's not a place where you go and see the same people regularly. it's not as interwoven into your entire world. he sees internet people once a week, maybe, outside of work. there are some cliques (like the lovely one that kept me out until 3 am!)-- but no larger scene where the cliques combine and interact. (i realize now i used the word scene in my bleary eyed 3 a.m. post...."clique" might have been better.)

alastair argues in the financial sector of london, there is a valley-style scene, it's so huge and all-consuming that when someone closes a big deal, they're immediately sucked back into another one. alastair's company organizes something called DrinkTank where london entrepreneurs and investors can all hang in an attempt to remedy this. it's similar in spirit to Robert Loch's efforts to spur a "scene." He organizes a lot of events and generally tries to create a critical mass where people can come together and connect and share ideas, sort of like Arrington's living room in the early days of techcrunch. (of course the valley scene is way bigger than that, and certainly pre-existed Web 2.0, but it's so big you almost need niches for each new wave of innovation)

it'll be interesting to watch how all of this evolves over the next year, through a downturn. in the dot com days, entrepreneurship just washed out of london and europe when the market crashed. they were late to the party anyway. but now, london has had three bonafide web 2.0 hits with skype, bebo and lastFM. this time, with a downturn is coming, do they spawn other ventures, or just remain a few isolated big hits in the history books?