Monday, January 26, 2009

More on London vs. Valley

Just a quick follow up on this morning's epic rant about London and Funding.

Read this from the Futurist: "Why Government Is Set to Extinguish Silicon Valley."

Whether or not you agree with the argument, he makes four key points here:
  • SOX compliance makes it difficult to justify an IPO. No worries about that here, and the London Stock Exchange's AIM still has some IPO activity.
  • Immigration Torture. Again, not only do we have all of Europe here, the UK actively encourages anybody who has excellent skills to relocate here from wherever you are under the Highly Skilled Worker program (hint: if you can work in the Valley at all, you qualify).
  • California Taxation. Yep, Cali is completely ungovernable and taxes are going to go up a lot. We don't have a split between federal and state taxes here.
  • Federal Taxation. Yep, your taxes are going up. Ours are as well, but much less on current projections (if nothing else, no matter how broke UK.Gov is, our debt as a percentage of GDP is much less). We also don't have an AMT here to contend with.
Still think London isn't a desirable place to locate a startup?
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