5 Startup Lessons From London Tech Week
Upstarts toured London Tech Week, hosting our first international event and meeting with a number of founders and investors. Here's what we heard.
Cheers from London, where Upstarts has spent a jam-packed week – literally and figuratively – meeting with local leaders in the startup ecosystem.
Early in the week, Upstarts stopped by London Tech Week, a British-flavored tech convention that featured talks by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and bunch of other luminaries; at the private Investor Forum, we hosted a roundtable on how investment opportunities have shifted in the AI era.
Then on Wednesday, we hosted our first international Upstarts event, with the support of partners LocalGlobe and Milltown Partners. I had a blast chatting with the subject of one of our favorite Upstarts stories so far, Granola co-founder and CEO Chris Pedregal. Then Marker co-founder and CEO Jon Steinback turned the tables on me, asking how we’re building Upstarts and approaching startup storytelling.
It was great to see some of our Founding Upstarts and subscribers in attendance and throughout the week. We’ll be excited to return soon. In the meantime, I’m happy to share five things I learned in London this week with you, the wider Upstarts community – distilled from the week’s whirlwind of meetings and events. I’ll be curious to keep tabs on how these trend lines evolve, as well as how you all may or may not agree.
1) The vibes are (mostly) good
Attending various official and fringe London Tech Week events just a few days after running around New York Tech Week, we saw a similar mix of boosterism and optimism, sprinkled with ‘little sibling’ energy that could veer toward defensiveness that can be boiled down into this subtext: We’re here, and we’re just as good as San Francisco! You don’t need to move there to build a big business!
But some tech veterans who have lived in both ecosystems are genuinely bullish. Suranga Chandratillake, a general partner at Balderton Capital who previously worked in startups in San Francisco, argues that both markets are flourishing in what is not a zero-sum game. “It’s as buoyant here as it’s ever been in the U.S.,” he says. “There are some things that will be hard to do” to reach the European market, he adds.