I have just arrived in London (today) after spending 2 weeks in San Francisco and Silicon Valley with a group of 24 other British founders.
We came as group ( http://www.ldn2sfo.com/ ) to learn about what makes Silicon Valley special, about the pay-it-forward culture, about the optimism and support, about the venture culture.
The stand-out questions at almost every session and meeting that we had was this: "How are the immigration issues overcome?"
Most of us will take the things we've learned and just apply them to where we are, knowing that even if we individually overcome the hurdles we are unlikely to achieve the same for our teams and people we would love to hire. Only a very few of us are likely to take on the immigration challenge.
Instead, the immigration issue will lead most of us to re-evaluate our local advantages such as access to talent (London does not have the scarcity issue of Silicon Valley for example), cheaper housing, free health... and because of the immigration spanner in the works, those suddenly seem to be bigger advantages.
They're not really that big an advantage... but the immigration issue is that big an issue.
The thing that mentally holds me back, rather than the immigration issue, is the threat of patent trolls. I don't know whether this threat is real or imagined, but it appears to be a non-issue if you're operating outside of the US.
We came as group ( http://www.ldn2sfo.com/ ) to learn about what makes Silicon Valley special, about the pay-it-forward culture, about the optimism and support, about the venture culture.
The stand-out questions at almost every session and meeting that we had was this: "How are the immigration issues overcome?"
Most of us will take the things we've learned and just apply them to where we are, knowing that even if we individually overcome the hurdles we are unlikely to achieve the same for our teams and people we would love to hire. Only a very few of us are likely to take on the immigration challenge.
Instead, the immigration issue will lead most of us to re-evaluate our local advantages such as access to talent (London does not have the scarcity issue of Silicon Valley for example), cheaper housing, free health... and because of the immigration spanner in the works, those suddenly seem to be bigger advantages.
They're not really that big an advantage... but the immigration issue is that big an issue.