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WeWork founder remains a billionaire even with firm’s bankruptcy | The Straits Times
(www.straitstimes.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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I worked for a VC for several years, and this rings true so much. Even outside of exiting, there were so many fabrications in getting funding, even from investors that didn't know the difference between a "hit" and a "visitor".
I've got many of my own opinions of the tech scene here, but one thing that was often said by outside investors was that in the UK, someone will make £1m and sell up, whereas in North America someone will make £1m and pour it into their next venture. It probably explains why the UK has always struggled in tech, despite having 4-5 elite level universities, and dozens of top universities used by people all around the world. There just seem to be so few real success stories here, and a lot of that is probably down to the political climate.
It's a cultural problem in the UK at several levels.
For example, a founder who has tried and failed in the UK is finished and will not be given more chances whilst from what've heard in the US it's actually treated as a positive because it means he or she will start his or her next venture with more experience.
Other problems are in the broad access to opportunities: the UK is very classist - to the point that upper classes have theit own accent - and there is quite a well entrenched structure, involving even the mechanisms for access to the best universities (the pair being often named Oxbridge, for Oxford & Cambridge) that means that almost everybody from the upper classes has access to some opportunities and that specific network of interpersonal connections but only a small fraction of people from other social layers have it. That means that the pool of people who have the opportunity to gain the qualifications relevant to be a founder in Tech is limited mainly to those from a subset of society (about 10%) quite independently of merit AND on top of that not having the right accent and language (i.e. the "right" upbringing) results in those who aren't from those layers of society to be descriminated again.
As for Tech specifically, in the UK an Engineering degree is considered lesser than, say, Law or Political Sciences (quite likely because of the whole mechanism that guarantees upper class people can get into the top universities independently of educational merit and capability, and one can't really talk one's way through a degree in Hard Sciences or Engineering as one can in Law) - to the point that for people there an "engineer" is a guy who drives trains or installs heating boilers - or people from Finance (a surprising meritocratic industry there for positions up to Managing Director).
Unsurprisingly, during my time in there what I saw was that the techies were overwhelmingly foreigners, whilst the founders tended to upper-middle and upper class locals.