Rarely offered health care but - for all its flaws - our National Health Service is pretty good.
Shares - yup, they're almost always going to be worthless.
Pension - every company has offered me at least 5% matched pension - some more. The Government is mandating that even small employers will have to put you in a pension scheme soon - which is good.
"Soft" benefits like gym membership / conferences / etc depend very much on how confident the business is in itself. If it can afford them, it likely will - because they know that people can get them at mega-corps.
Pay - ah, there's the kicker. Yes, most startups try to save on the salary costs. Usually they get a pretty rude awakening when they try to hire someone with more than 5 minutes' experience. So they try to make it better with "up-titling". I could have been "Global Head of X" at a company barely looking at sales outside the city.
Joining a start-up is fun. But, like a pyramid scheme, you've got to get in early if you want to reap the share bonanza benefits.
I do wonder why the UK scene doesn't seem quite so vibrant - especially as healthcare costs (which I understand to be the biggest burden in the US) are essentially nil.
A culture that promotes self-actualization and risk-taking at the expense of your family or future family.
YC
Centralized (location) and relatively easy to access angel money. Don't talk to me about the VC in London, nobody cares. It's an insider's club. I can walk out the door today and start bumping my side project for seed money (Mountain View). I can't do that in London.
Strong culture of entrepreneurship in alumni organizations (Stanford LOVES this stuff)
Lots of high quality incubators besides YC (my last startup I served as CTO at incubated at StartX)
---
You're not going to get me to move to the UK unless there's an aggressive visa program and seed money involved.
> Don't talk to me about the VC in London, nobody cares. It's an insider's club. I can walk out the door today and start bumping my side project for seed money (Mountain View). I can't do that in London.
Silicon Valley VC money is a tiny speck compared to the money flowing through the capital markets of The City. So that begs the question: why is it harder to just walk out the door and round up seed money in London?
Rich money managers are not good angel investors. Slow to act, risk averse, no value add.
London has plenty of rich people, but they're usually old money heirs, or Russians/Middle-Easterners/etc. who didn't make money from tech, or people who work in the City. Not people who got rich by being employee 1-500 at Google, Yahoo, eBay, etc.
(Frankly, UK banks are obsessed with property, which is one of the things that holds back the UK economy: small business lending in the UK is throttled by growth in house prices because the only reliable way for small business startups to raise seed capital is by mortgaging their personal property. Hence a stop-go economy which lurches between over-expansion and contraction as the property market goes from boom to bust.)
I do wonder why the UK scene doesn't seem quite so vibrant
You just go through a list of state-required benefits or drains on individual risk taking and then you wonder at why the startup scene isn't quite so vibrant?
Risk taking requires the ability to... uh... take risks.
AFAIK Israel has more startups per capita than any other country in the world, but the legally mandated benefits are very similar to those in the UK (with slightly less vacation time).
Actually, I think some form of social safety net is supportive of very entrepreneurs. From personal experience, the only people I know who quit their job to work full time on a startup had significant savings from previous jobs. Also it's quite common in Israel to start working on your startup while getting unemployment benefits.
>Pension - every company has offered me at least 5% matched pension - some more. The Government is mandating that even small employers will have to put you in a pension scheme soon - which is good.
Not really. Accounting for pensions requires the ability to project economic and biological conditions 20-40 years into the future. Humans aren't capable of this yet, and it results in dealing with fudged numbers (see the myriad pension funding crises around the world).
Another problem with pensions is that they are unaffordable. If they were affordable then you would see private companies offering annuities for sale, for as cheap as what pension actuaries "project" the cost to be. But it's far, far more expensive to buy yourself an annuity, because of tighter regulations in the private insurance market.
Finally, there is no reason to tie up your future with one employer, or the employer's future with old employees. If you want a pension, fine, demand $5,000 cash so you can buy yourself an annuity. But why someone would trust an anonymous person 20 years in the future with their compensation is beyond me. Your pension money can be gambled with, get lost due to corruption, or because it's all invested in the same funds in public companies, required government bailouts of private markets (see 2008 stock market crash).
edent was talking about DC pensions and not DB so DC is afordable.
And the Uk has some nice tax breaks for pensions tax relief at your highest rate of tax plus over $20k capita gains tax allowance per year. and you can shelter £12k every year from tax in ISA's
Even the basic share save is very tax efficient I know people who made $50k from a sing years share save at a big uk company - and thats the one everyone from the lowest clerical assistant gets.
Salaries in the UK are lower than the Bay Area, but I wouldn't say they're "horrendously low". I can see why that ad would make you think that, though: it really is absurdly low for London, but I don't think it's representative.
I can't name the company, but this isn't limited to the UK. It's found in other countries too. Maybe there's too much history/tradition/peer-pressure/competition in the States for this kind of arrangement to fly.
I'd immediately bolt for the door if someone demanded such a structure on me.
Smaller Norwegian companies which offer shares to employees often have a "if you quit within 5 years, the company is allowed to buy all your shares back at the price they were when you received them" clause, or something similar. Obviously you'll only get sub-par or naïve people with such a policy.
Depends on the scheme. I was even allowed to vest mine early when I left BT and latterly Reed Elsevier - I even get to pump another 6 months into the Elsevier one. My options at 4.10 REL is currently 7.65
What you don't get is the insane tax liability on worthless shares which the USA has. In the UK you only pay tax on a gain -after subtracting your Capital Gains allowance
Holiday 28 days minimum - as per law https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement
Rarely offered health care but - for all its flaws - our National Health Service is pretty good.
Shares - yup, they're almost always going to be worthless.
Pension - every company has offered me at least 5% matched pension - some more. The Government is mandating that even small employers will have to put you in a pension scheme soon - which is good.
"Soft" benefits like gym membership / conferences / etc depend very much on how confident the business is in itself. If it can afford them, it likely will - because they know that people can get them at mega-corps.
Pay - ah, there's the kicker. Yes, most startups try to save on the salary costs. Usually they get a pretty rude awakening when they try to hire someone with more than 5 minutes' experience. So they try to make it better with "up-titling". I could have been "Global Head of X" at a company barely looking at sales outside the city.
Joining a start-up is fun. But, like a pyramid scheme, you've got to get in early if you want to reap the share bonanza benefits.
I do wonder why the UK scene doesn't seem quite so vibrant - especially as healthcare costs (which I understand to be the biggest burden in the US) are essentially nil.