Mission to the Valley: Why San Francisco beats Britain for entrepreneurial support

Jasper Westaway, one of 20 UK-based technology entrepreneurs who recently took part in a special trip to Silicon Valley, explains what Britain has to learn about supporting start-ups.

Technologists are brutalised, through experience, into innate scepticism and dour perspectives. Through this prism I anticipated WebMission 2011, a weeklong trip to San Francisco for 20 UK technology startups. I attended the painfully pointless (but enjoyable) UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) trip to Austin for SXSWi in 2010, and expected more of the same: High-fives between pointless UK startups, humiliated by the US competition.

On this occasion, perspective and reality inverted. WebMission 2011 was an incredible trip: fun educational, productive and relentless. The selected set of startups contained amazing companies, some of which are already outstandingly successful businesses (take a bow skyscanner and Crisp Thinking).

The week in San Francisco was split between meetings and partying, woven together by a thread of extraordinary networking. WebMission organised visits to Twitter, Microsoft and salesforce - my highlight, as Parker Harris, the cofounder, announced to the group that he loved oneDrum's product. 

Interestingly, many peoples favourite visit was to the smallest business that we met: AngelPad, an incubator for startups, where eg-Googler, Thomas Korte, laid out the extent to which technical and entrepreneurial talent is treasured and nurtured in the valley.

The evenings saw parties at Bebo founder Michael Birch's awesome palace, where I met some of the DropBox team, networker-extraordinaire David Hassell and many more startups and journalists; and the UK consulate where the UKTI team did an amazing job gathering a set of high-profile guests from across the Valley, all hand-picked for their relevancy to the WebMission startups. I should also mention Telegraph correspondent, Milo Yiannopoulos', cough cough, personal tour of 'real' San Francisco bars.

I’ve spent a lot of time in California over the last few years. It's difficult to understate how different to the UK the culture is for creating a business. People want to help. More surprisingly, they can help – insightful feedback, powerful personal networks they open to you, and extolling a belief that you can do it.  It’s a depressing cliché, but in the UK the defaults are set the other way.

For example, oneDrum was able to arrange private meetings with four of the most famous, and largest technology companies in the world - some of whom we nominally compete with.  In each case our guests not only brimmed with enthusiasm about what we’re doing, but went out of their way to help and direct us. Between the various startups attending WebMission, I strongly doubt there was a single major software company in California that did not host a private meeting.  

Would this attitude occur or be reciprocated in the UK, and can efforts like WebMission assist in addressing the broader cultural issues? Yes, but not easily. The odds are that American companies will buy many of the attendees businesses, and their talents will disappear into America and be lost to the UK. We have to create a critical mass of startups that put us on the right side of this curve.

There is a lot of talk about Shoreditch in London becoming a hub for startups (indeed oneDrum began there, before moving to Scotland). But it was interesting to note that many of the more impressive startups on WebMission did not come from London at all. I'll also note sadly, that the only female attendee – Alexandra Chong from Luluvise – was not even an official part of the group.

I'm not going to attempt to thank everybody that helped WebMission. That would be tedious for the reader, and too many to be practical. WebMission needs to become an attitude and not just an event. If you are a UK startup in the technology space then you need to be in California every few weeks, and ideally, retain staff there. You need the culture and energy that their DNA offers, but more importantly, technology firms prosper only with partners and those partners are in California. 

Jasper Westaway is CEO of oneDrum.