Joseph Stalin didn’t know much about startups. But the slogan he popularised in 1935 applies just as well to the entrepreneurial world today as it did to the Soviet Communist Party back then: “The cadres decide everything.” The most critical determinant of any startup ecosystem is the people who populate it. Where the world’s most talented founders and investors choose to work will largely determine the economic success or failure of nations in the 21st century.
For decades, the giant sucking sound Europeans heard from the other side of the Atlantic was caused by the flight of so many of the region’s best tech talents. San Francisco and Boston have been the natural destinations for ambitious entrepreneurs wanting to put a dent in the universe — and/or list on the world’s most liquid stock markets. And several of the world’s richest universities — most notably Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard and MIT — have proved an irresistible draw for the world’s top researchers.
But for perversely political and personal reasons, US president Donald Trump is now shredding the federal funding of the country’s top universities and public research agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, and clamping down on immigration. As the investor Bill Janeway wrote recently: “The commanding heights of America’s innovation economy are under siege.”
If Trump 2.0 really does result in a mass exodus of tech talent, the intriguing question is: where will it go? Can Europe seize the opportunity and engineer an “attractivity boom” (in the hideous phrase of a recent letter from 12 governments to the EU commission) to welcome footloose techies?
The latest report from Zeki Data, which tracks where the world’s top 800k AI experts work, predicts that the US will see a net outflow of talent for the first time ever this year. First on the airplane may be the 40% of the US’s pool of 322k experts who moved there from abroad. The main beneficiaries of any such exodus are likely to be India, the UK, Canada and Germany, which have the most nationals working in the US tech sector. But some US researchers and entrepreneurs may also be tempted to move abroad, becoming Trump tech refugees.
Europe, including the UK, currently has 245k top AI talents, or 30% of the global pool.
Tom Hurd, Zeki’s CEO, says that London has several big attractions for international talent: the magnetic pull of Google DeepMind, deep knowledge pools in hot areas, such as drug discovery and precision medicine, and a particular expertise in responsible AI. “The biggest opportunity lies with the UK because it has a diverse ecosystem with distinct centres of excellence that will attract the best emerging talent, which is both highly mobile and highly selective,” he says.
Interestingly, Zeki also reports a drastic reduction in the number of software engineering hires in the US as the big tech companies automate so many of their processes with AI. That may further slow the inflow of foreign workers to the US providing a further opportunity for other countries to retain or poach these engineers.
But some in the UK fear there is still more of a talent outflow problem among the broader tech community. Many founders and investors in Britain have already grown disillusioned with the Labour government because of its cuts in tax relief offered to entrepreneurs and non-doms. The scale of the market opportunity in the US and the comparative ease of raising risk capital also remain massive draws.
Dom Hallas, executive director of UK tech lobby group Startup Coalition, says the British government needs to do a better job of cossetting the 3k founders in the UK who really matter when it comes to boosting GDP. “These founders are like babies. You have to tickle their tummies and tell them that they are loved,” he says.
He suspects there may be a better chance of attracting university researchers from the US than entrepreneurs and operators. “There is still a fundamental net outflow problem on the entrepreneurial side but an opportunity on the university side,” he says.
Britain may have a lot of tech talent. But if it is to compete in an increasingly tough world, it is going to have to work harder to keep more of its best entrepreneurs at home and attract more of them from abroad.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/britain-needs-talent/
