Good VCs Don't Charge Their Companies For Flying First

Recently I was alerted to a post by Dan Shapiro titled "How to handle a VC who flies First" through a post on Hacker News. Good article, and you should go read it.

We faced a similar situation when OpenGamma expanded in its Series B to have a multi-national presence, and multi-national board of directors. Prior to the Series B, we had three board members, all based primarily in the London area. Adding an investment from FirstMark Capital, and taking Lawrence Lenihan onto the board meant that we now had three board members in London, and one in New York City.

That meant two things:

1. We were going to start having board meetings in both London and New York City; and as a result
2. Board members were going to start to travel for these board meetings.

To make matters worse, we had two different travel policies for our two venture capital investors:

• Accel Partners, as a policy, doesn't charge travel expenses back to their portfolio companies.
• FirstMark Capital does.

The Interesting FirstMark Approach

Accel has actually been thinking about starting to charge, as many of their peer firms already do. And that's a reasonable position to take. But if and when they do, I expect that they'll follow the lead that FirstMark does in the way that they do it.

Essentially, it's in the interest of a venture capital firm to ensure that any travel that they do is necessary and in the best interests of the company. You don't want to have your partners flying all over the world all the time, or else they'll never get anything done. But at the same time, you don't want to penalize the firm for the travel that is essential to the firm.

The FirstMark approach is simple:

• Their partners don't like to fly economy (and as someone who's done 10 transatlantic round-trips this year thus far in coach, I can't blame them);
• Their partners have preferred hotels that tend to be on the pricey side;
• This is not the concern of the portfolio company.
• The partner will make his or her own travel arrangements at times and in standards of travel that are suitable for the partner;
• The firm will reimburse them an amount based on the partner travelling just for the board meeting, and in the standard flight fares (in our case, full-discount economy) and accomodation (in our case, nice, but not luxurious) for the portfolio company.

The VC wants to fly first class London to New York and stay at the Mandarin Oriental? Great, and I'm happy that he's doing well enough to afford it. But that's not what employees fly, and not where employees stay, so anything beyond what we'd consider a reasonable expense report is on him.

If the firm is doing well enough to expand their standard of travel for employees? Then they should expect to compensate their board member VC partners more as well and consider that when they decide what the standard travel policy should be.

I think this policy is fair to all concerned: business travel can be a significant cost in a business and a drain on those travelling, so it's worthy of minimization in general; but the needs of the firm have to come first over and above the luxury of the traveller.

To me, if a VC wants to charge you more than what you'd pay to fly an employee, their incentives aren't aligned with yours.

Perpetual Motion Machine Due Diligence Documentation

I'm not a VC, and nor do I play one on TV. Nor do I even pretend on the internet.

However, I've been backed by enough of them (or just had meaningful conversations which didn't lead to funding decisions) to be part of the network of people brought in to do initial due diligence on technology-heavy startups. And I'm getting increasingly annoyed by what I call the Perpetual Motion Machine Due Diligence Document.

How Unseasoned Entrepreneurs View Funders

Let's start with a simple premise: you're seeking funding for a technology-heavy startup. This doesn't apply to a company which has already launched (and thus should have technical credibility already established), and it doesn't apply to consumer-focused startups (where the technology better not be part of the pitch anyway).

You're doing something Really Hard. Often, you're doing something that's against conventional wisdom, to the point where many people in the market might not even attempt it. That's great! That's the type of technology-heavy startup that a lot of VCs might like to back.

But first you have to get past investors. These investors may have come from a technology background, but these days they work in senior management (if they're angels), or are retired, or are VCs and don't play with much outside of Outlook and the iPads. You've given them your slide pitch, and now they've asked for additional documentation on your Really Hard Technology. You know they won't understand it (it's Really Hard! It's against conventional wisdom! Paradigm Shift!), so what do you do?

Easy! You just dumb it down to the most outrageous claims that you possibly can. "Faster-than-light travel impossible? Those guys don't know what we know!" "Infinite compression impossible? We found a way to eliminate data entropy!" "Free energy! Fucking magnets, we know how they work!" The Perpetual Motion Machine Due Diligence Document thus emerges.

What Actually Happens

The naive entrepreneur assumes that his document is going to be read by the investors, and has to be strong enough in its claims to justify an investment, but simple enough to be understood by a general audience. So every one of these documents seems to follow a general pattern:

• This commonly accepted wisdom/theorem is actually wrong.
• We're the only ones who have figured that out.
• Our technology thus solves all problems to all people.

Here's the problem: The Technical Due Diligence Document Is Never Read By The Investor.

Savvy investors know they're out of the state of the art (if they ever were; most skilled VCs were operators more than just raw techies). They know they don't have the background to determine whether your Really Hard Technology is actually good or doable.

So what they do is get a technical due diligence document from the founder, find someone in their network who is skilled with the state-of-the-art in that area, and send them the document for review.

And that's how the document that was only ever going to be read by an investor ends up in my email inbox.

Over-Inflated Claims Destroy Credibility

So now I'm reviewing a document which appears to be written to target a child, and is so laughable in its claims that it amounts to promising perpetual motion. What do I do?

If you think "Even if that's the case, surely the technical reviewer is going to be so blowed away that he'll seek out clarification directly from me, the entrepreneur" you fail at a technical startup. Why would I expose myself to the entrepreneur? What do I get out of that? Nothing good can possibly come of that.

• VC/Angel passes on investing. Entrepreneur blames it on me and smears me in the industry. Whether the entrepreneur ultimately succeeds or fails makes no difference: no upside to me.
• Entrepreneur turns into a complete time waster. I have a limited amount of time that I can devote to doing due diligence, and VCs are aware of that. If they want me to do direct face-to-face due diligence, they'll ask me specifically to do that.
• Link between investor and me gets exposed. Many times both sides don't necessarily want that exposed to the world, particularly if it's a speculative investment possibility.

So what I do is send an email or have a 15-minute phone call explaining that the claims are completely overblown, the document has no technical detail, and there's a very low chance that their claims are actually going to stand up in production.

My word isn't the kiss of death, far from it. A good investor will collect initial opinions from several people he trusts, and determine whether to go farther. If they do, they'll ask for a smaller set of people to do in-person deep-dive due diligence, and use that to further the decision-making process.

But here's the thing: if I'm asked to be one of those people, if I had to say "the initial document is completely overblown in its claims and I doubt it's possible" in the initial review, I almost always decline to be part of the deep-dive due diligence process. Because I no longer trust anything the entrepreneur is going to say.

It's even worse if you're doing the rounds, and I get asked my opinion (by a potential customer, partner, or another investor) having seen that Perpetual Motion Machine Due Diligence Document. I instantly respond that I think it's probably snake-oil and the potential customer/partner/investor should stay away. When they ask me to do another review, again, I decline. I don't have time to do a gratis technology review for someone where I've already lost all trust in the entrepreneur and his claims.

Don't Be That Guy

It's very simple to avoid this.

• Write your technical due diligence documents assuming several experts in your field are going to review it, and the investor is never even going to open the PDF file.
• The more outrageous your claims, the less believable you're going to appear.
• Don't assume a clever engineering workaround, providing a practical solution to a theoretic problem that's good-enough for most use cases, is a bad thing. It's not. It's been the foundation of numerous successful technology ventures.
• Make me, as a reviewer, want to find out more, either out of personal interest, or as a potential customer or partner of yours.

But don't ever make me feel like I've just been handed Yet Another Perpetual Motion Due Diligence Document.

The Difference Engine: Give Up And Move To London

So I came about an article about The Difference Engine, which is attempting to be the YCombinator of Europe. I'm going to have to completely and utterly disagree with Mike Butcher here when I give some pretty pointed advice: they should give up right now, this minute, this very round of startups and escape Middlesbrough and move to London.

Editorial Note: If you're offended by some soft Southerner capping on The North, or, worst of all, an American bashing everywhere in the UK that Isn't London, just skip ahead to the comments and start bashing. You won't like the rest of this article, and you'll just start flaming the comments anyway, so save yourself some time.

Mike, you're 100% wrong that Europe is somehow Exceptional when it comes to siting of startups.

First of all, let's deal with the whole "YCombinator Of Europe" thing. YCombinator started out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which already had a pretty large startup tech cluster. Then they started doing the program half-and-half with Silicon Valley. And then they finally gave up and moved the whole thing to Silicon Valley. They already had experience with several rounds of startups, and several rounds of exits. They saw that the #2 tech cluster in the US, and possibly the world, simply didn't have a big enough ecosystem. Yet somehow Middlesbrough does?

Second, let's deal with the whole "Don't Have To Be In London" thing. You're right, there are a number of European startups that are coming from NotLondon. Mike references Dopplr (Helsinki, but then also has a big London-based office) and Spotify (Stockholm, though how much of a scrappy startup they can be with the most opaque ownership and funding sources in the world is debatable). I'd add a number of Baltic-based startups to that list (like Erply). None of them started out in London, that's very true. But they all did start out in their country's gravity well for top talent.

One thing that strikes me as an American about Europe is that the vast majority of countries have one super-dominant central city that acts as a major pull for talent throughout the country, and which is usually the capital city: London (the UK); Dublin (Ireland); Paris (France); Copenhagen (Denmark); Prague (Czech); Stockholm (Sweden); Helsinki (Finland); Amsterdam (Netherlands, though this almost deserves an asterisk since the whole Utrecht-Rotterdam-Amsterdam cluster is one massive metropolitan area). Probably the place with the least sort of concentration is Germany, with its multiple nearly co-equal metropolitan areas.

All of these places are the dominant suck of talent from their respective nations, and produce the types of network effects that you need for a wide variety of knowledge-based industrial sectors. To me, it's no wonder that you're getting non-London-based startups out of these cities, rather than also-ran cities in each of the countries (how many startups are coming from Marseilles, Brno, Arhus, Den Haag, Valencia? Probably not more than a few). You need to be where the best pool of talent is.

So let's focus on what you need for a successful startup:

• A Pool of Skilled Talent: While The Difference Engine may be able to get these people on the ground in Middlesbrough, what happens when the team needs to go from 2 to 3? What happens when it needs to go from 3 to 10? Where are they going to get the talent? They'll have to leave Middlesbrough, that's what.
• Sources of Funding: This is a longer-term thing for an incubator, but you need to have the sources involved relatively early and often to make it a success; YCombinator flew the Cambridge guys to Silicon Valley just to give them experience with the funding scene, and Cambridge already has quite a few big name VCs. Middlesbrough? How many European VCs have ever been there?
• Entrepreneurial Culture and Mentors: You've got the guys directly involved with The Difference Engine, but what about other people who have run the whole cycle a few times and can act as passive or active mentors?

I contend that none of this is present in Middlesbrough, and quite simply never will be. All of them are present in London today. The single best thing that The Difference Engine could do in order to help its startup founders is to move to London next week.

And here's the best part: it's not going to stay in Middlesbrough. That's right, it's moving to Sunderland. Which means it'll end up with the types of back-and-forth that mean neither place ever sets up any type of cluster effects. Smacks to me of the type of thinking that's led to the European Parliament splitting its time between Brussels and Strasbourg.

Here's what this is, plain and simple: Yet Another Regional Development Agency Thinking One Industrial Park Will Rebuild Its Economy. How many cities and regions say "well, if we just setup an industrial park, we'll all of a sudden be the Silicon Valley Of X"? How many cities, regions, and countries say "well, if we just setup a small venture capital fund we'll build a new tech cluster?" I've seen it all before. And it turns out that the top three sponsors of The Difference Engine are all councils and a regional development agency.

Tech clusters happen organically. They can't be willed into existence by any government or development agency.

Look, I give Middlesbrough and Sunderland councils props for trying to convert their cities from the Grim Northern spots that they're known to be. But they're being, I think, disingenuous to their founding participants.

If you care about the actual founders, rather than just about wasting development funds, get your founders out of the North and into London immediately.

If you're a founder considering The Difference Engine, my personal recommendation is to ignore it. Move to London, get yourself a desk in a shared office in the Shoreditch or Bankside area, and go to town. If you're the type of person ready to do a startup, you'll probably learn more hanging around the vibe than you would sitting in the Grim North for a few months.

Chris Dixon's Startup Requirements: My Perspective

I like Chris Dixon. I've never met him, though I hope to, but his writing across Twitter, his Tumblr log and his blog are so evocative of his personality that I feel as though I know a few things about him already. Okay, enough of the fellow-startup-blogger-gushing.

Onto the posting.

Some of these are right on. Some of them aren't. Some of them are culturally relative. I wanted to pick out a few of them.

Stuff Chris Says You Need

Beer on Fridays

Come to London. We have good pubs. Everywhere. Beer everyday.

In fact, Thursday Is The New Friday here in London. So many people get out of town for the weekend we seldom go out together on Friday, because that's really intruding on Family/Friends/Personal Time (keep reading for that).

So in summary: Beer Good; Beer Not Only For Friday.

Proximity to Public Transportation

Again, come to London. Yep, our transport system largely sucks. But it sucks in the same way that the NHS "sucks", in that it transports more people more miles every day than virtually any other system in the world.

Nobody would even think to have a startup in London without being close to public transport, although Shoreditch is pretty much the worst Zone-1 location I could think of, and that's where most startups have located. C'est la vie.

Proximity to Park

This is where we kick ass over Manhattan. Y'all have like 2 parks. We have parks on virtually every other corner it seems. Almost no matter where you are, there's a park right around the corner. Sometimes it's big, sometimes it's small, but you can't really go a half mile radius without seeing a tree the way you can in Manhattan.

Mac laptops with second monitors

I like this idea, and when I saw the Cloudera offices in person, they had this policy. OpenGamma is at the "employees choose what they want" stage, so I'd say that from our perspective, if you're not doing a pure web startup, the better phrasing here is "whatever computers are necessary for developers to succeed." I prefer to let them decide that [1]. The key takeaway here to me is "don't have stupid Corporate policies regarding computers; focus on nonstop productivity."

Health care plans for everyone

OpenGamma is in London. We have the NHS. We love it. By virtue of merely residing in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, we don't ever have prospects saying "I'd come to work for you, but I'm worried about health care and COBRA and blah blah blah." Every single startup in the US should be pushing for a single-payer system.

Stuff Chris Says You Don't Need

Fancy (Aeron) chairs

Okay, lemme get on my high-horse here. Ergonomics matters. A lot. If you lose 2 days per quarter due to someone having back or shoulder pain, you're net negative on the cost of the chairs.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand where Chris is coming from where the Aeron is, in essence, the very symbol of DotCom excess. I get it. But saying "buy the cheapest chairs you can" is completely counterproductive. Aerons have actually come down in price (and you can get them second-hand and reconditioned for pretty competitive prices against second-tier new chairs), so you're looking at a price that if you search out a new chair significantly cheaper, you're basically buying something from Office Depot that's going to hurt everybody's backs.

Don't go crazy on the chair front, but don't just say "good chairs were a sign of DotCom excess and therefore you shouldn't have them at all." I actually bought an Aeron for home; I don't expect that my employees or I are going to work on something worse than I'd be willing to work on for my home-time hacking. Will OpenGamma get Aerons? Maybe. Will we get the cheapest chairs on the market to show how hard/31337 we are? No.

Vacation policy

I completely agree that you shouldn't track it, but at least here in the UK your employment contract will stipulate a minimum holiday policy. We don't currently track it; we trust people not to abuse it. At some point we'll grow to the point where that doesn't work anymore, as it will at every startup.

But don't excuse that with saying "our Vacation Policy is that nobody should take one." That's short-sighted and stupid. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint, and nobody can maintain a massive long-term effort without taking time off to rejuvinate. You pressure people to never take proper time off and you'll end up with zombies who aren't functioning at 100%. And I at least would much rather have people at 100% for 90% of the time [2] than tapering down to 70% for 95% of the time. Because I can do math [3].

Business cards

I thought this too. But OpenGamma sells into a vertical, and we know we're going to be an enterprise sale. Tried to postpone it as long as possible, but if you're not consumer and need an enterprise presence you actually have to do this and stationary and the rest of the things that make you seem more than a few guys and a serviced office. It sucks, but you have to suck it up.

Phone system

See "Business cards." Plus, I would never expect an employee to have their personal mobile number as their work number. See "Vacation policy" and switching off: you work 100% when you're at work; when you leave, it's family/personal time.

I'd be tempted to try an experiment where we all have company-provided mobile phones, but here in the UK thanks to Caller Party Pays you can tell instantly if you're calling a mobile phone just based on the number. It doesn't seem professional. So if I have to setup a whole call forwarding system, I may as well setup a VoIP system.

Central air conditioning

You ever tried to work in an office in London (or Manhattan for that matter) in August with a pretty high concentration of workstations and 30" monitors? Windows opening doesn't help when all air is stagnant, high humidity, and hot.
Update 5 minutes after posting. Chris was originally talking about the types of systems where the building controls your A/C and you don't have per-tenant control. Now I agree with him 100%. You need A/C. You also need 24/7 control over it to the point of individual zones in your offices.

Carpeting

OpenGamma's moving to a permanent office shortly. It has hardwood floors. We asked them to put in carpeting. Because we care about people having the ability to work quietly, and hardwood floors and open plan offices don't work well to minimize noise. Carpeting is great for sound reduction, which is critical to allow people to work effectively in an open-plan environment. That and monstrous headphones.

Conclusion

Chris, you rock for giving me a good excuse to blog about a whole bunch of small matters that I agree are important to startups (it's just that my list is somewhat different to yours).

Next time you're in London, let me buy you a non-Friday beer. Next time I'm in NYC, let me buy you a Friday beer.

Footnotes

[0]: Yep, I used the dl tag. Bringing it back old-skool, yo. werd
[1]: Interestingly, we offered all employees the choice. 2/3 of current OpenGamma employees are running Linux on the desktop for development, even when offered the choice of a Mac Laptop or Mac Pro. 1 runs a Mac Pro, 1 runs Windows 7. Of the 3 company owned laptops, 2 run OS X and one runs Linux.
[2]: Yep, we get 24 days plus public holidays here at OpenGamma. We're typical of London.
[3]: In that I can do simple sums. We have a quant team at OpenGamma because I can't even fathom the mathematics necessary to drive our system. Have I mentioned that I'm the only founder without a PhD? Yeah....

The Founder Visa Ignores Immigration Reality

My fearless readers are, no doubt, already familiar with the fact that I'm an American born and bred, but transplanted here to blighty to face my future amongst the whinging poms. I feel, based on my Silicon Valley-meets-London personal experience, I have something to add to the "Founder Visa" debate.

The notion of a "Founder Visa", originally coined by Paul Graham, has spread far and wide: Brad Feld, Slate, Eric Ries and a whole wave of twitches picked up the meme. The basic idea is that you'd get a visa to go and live in the US if you founded a new venture-backed company in the US. It sounds so simple a policy prescription that it must be a fantastic idea!

Exasperated Sigh

In Which Our Hero Visits Locations Unknown

I didn't move to the UK because I was a huge fan of the weather, or the food [1], or the transportation [2], or the dentistry. I moved here for immigration reasons.

When people ask me why in the world I left San Francisco to move to England, the typical answer I give is "family reasons." Which is true, but not incredibly descriptive. I think it's time to give a fuller story, and in the process out myself. [3]

When I moved here I was in a long term relationship with a British citizen. He had moved to the US with an L-1E-1 Treaty Trader visa [4], and was hoping, nay praying, that this could be upgraded to an H1-B. Unfortunately, although he was an extremely experienced financial software pre-sales consultant, with a BS from a quite reasonable UK university, and paid quite significant taxes for precious little in return, this wasn't going to happen. We lived for several years under the threat that if his firm decided to let him go for whatever reason, he had two weeks to leave the country forever. Given that his firm wasn't doing particularly well at the time, this put a major strain on his life, and thus our relationship.

After New Labour was elected here in the UK, one of their first actions on taking power was to rationalize gay immigration rights. Essentially, they said that if you were in a same-sex domestic partnership akin to marriage, that would be considered as though you were married for immigration purposes. Thus, I was able to move to the United Kingdom based on our relationship [5]; the converse was not true. We didn't have the option to get married in the US or the UK, and even if California had same-sex marriage at the time, it didn't matter for immigration purposes. [6]

So I gave up a career in Silicon Valley, where I had already been a founder of one firm, and worked in senior technical roles in several others. No doubt I would have started at least one firm in the Valley since then. I was a net win for the US in every single respect: I paid a lot of tax, I didn't use very many services, and I created a lot of high-tech jobs. The US lost me because certain Americans view my sexual orientation as, well, wrong.

Recently, I've started a venture-backed technology startup in London. Even though we've only been incorporated one month, I'm already benefiting the local economy and tax base. I'm creating jobs, hiring service providers who employ local staff, and spending money that creates jobs out of work. I pay personal taxes, and pay corporate taxes that help raise the tax base of the country as a whole. From a purely economic perspective, it's absurd to alienate someone like me from the US, but that's precisely what's happened. I don't plan to move back anytime soon. [7]

In Which Immigration Policy Becomes A Morass

Fundamentally, US immigration policy is a complete nightmare. All the vested interests, all the religious/social/conservative arguments, all the animosity, it's all a nightmare. And it's much more the third-rail of US politics than even health care or social security. Even though the Shrub had massive majorities in both houses of congress, he still couldn't push through even the most minor (to me) immigration reforms. What hope do a bunch of VCs have?

The UK, Canada, and Australia have solved this in a very clean way. They take a person, weigh them up on purely objective criteria, and determine whether the country believes that they will be a net-win to the country; if so, they get in. The UK calls this the Highly Skilled Worker program; Australia calls it the General Skills Migrant program. Why can't the US do the same thing?

Because when I hear about things like a Founder Visa program, what I really hear is a general denunciation of US immigration policies and procedures. What I really hear is "We can't hire the people that are necessary for the industries that are important to the country, and we're picking the edge case that we understand the most." That's not good enough. The edge case isn't the problem, the system is the problem.

In Which VCs Run A Chocolate Factory

Let's say that we had a Founders Visa. Let's say that we had this single exception to the insane US immigration policy morass. Here's my worry from a policy perspective: it changes the power dynamic for early stage investment with a non-American founding team so drastically it disturbs me. Top-tier VCs I'm not worried about; it's the less scrupulous sources of money that trouble me. [8]

Right now you have a power dynamic that, in general, involves equity investment by a risk capital firm in a firm founded by one or more entrepreneurs. Now let's say that in the middle of those discussions, you also had the dynamic where an offer of funding would also change the founder(s) immigration rights dramatically. Don't you think that would be detrimental?

Because I could easily see situations where bad sources of capital would essentially give a term sheet, wait until near closing and the founder(s) had started to make plans on living in the US, and then change the parameters of the deal in the docs stage. Because if you've already taken a lease on a home, started moving your stuff, started thinking you're going to live there, what's a few extra percent off the top if it preserves your visa?

Personally, I'm against the Founders Visa because it conflates immigration policy with risk capital investment. I'm in favor of rationalizing US immigration policy because it's the right thing to do.

Epilogue

If you start thinking that you can address US immigration policy without addressing my personal reasons for emigrating, think again. You have to reform the system as a whole, and you have to convince Americans in places that don't have a startup scene that immigration of people Not Like Them can be good for the country. If you don't start from first principles, you're doomed to failure.

I was forced to leave the US because there are people in the US who believe that the country would be better off without me, and those people have legislative power. I accept that, and it's why I'm not planning on moving back. Unless you manage to convince those same people that your plans to allow immigration are better for the country, and for them, you'll never succeed.

I wish you all the best of luck. I won't help you, because I think you're targeting an edge case but disregarding the fundamental iniquities in immigration policy. Furthermore, your policies wouldn't have kept me in the Bay Area, and I'm still bitter.

However, if you manage to fix things, I might just move back to Silicon Valley for the next startup.

Footnotes

[1]: I kid, I kid. Seriously, the food in London is fantastic, if you can afford to dine at the fantastic restaurants.
[2]: My commute in the San Francisco bay area: 45 miles; 45 minutes. My commute in London: 5.5 miles; 45 minutes. Then again, I've never been allowed to drive here, and I've never missed it, so it's a mixed bag.
[3]: I've been careful to never allow my sexuality to enter my public persona. I feel strongly enough about this matter, and it has affected my life so personally, I can't remain silent about it.
[4]: You've likely never met someone with this visa; it's exclusively for sales professionals of a foreign firm selling into the US, and nothing to do with the more common L-1 for consulting purposes.
[5]: The fact that I was obviously a net tax win for the UK made the application a formality, but it wasn't part of the official evaluation at the consulate.
[6]: People seem to forget about immigration in the US state-by-state same-sex marriage debate. It's a pure federal matter, so as long as DOMA is in effect, single-state same-sex marriage doesn't affect immigration rights.
[7]: I don't plan to ever move back as long as the official stance of the US government is that I am a lesser citizen by virtue of my sexual orientation.
[8]: And don't pretend they're not around. We all know that for every Accel, every Benchmark, every Index and KPCB and Red Point and Sequoia, there at least 2 firms that prey on entrepreneurs.
Updates since original posting:
I was corrected in the type of visa my partner had. It was an E-1 Treaty Trader, not an L-1 as I originally said.

Hardcore Once More

I've mentioned a few times that I've been working on Something Big, and it's time for me to expose myself a little more publicly. It has bearing on the types of things I'll be writing about, so I think it's time to fill in the loyal Kirk's Rants readership.

As most of you know by now, I moved to the UK five and a half years ago after starting my career in Silicon Valley working for pure-technology startups, specializing in the database and web application infrastructure space. When I moved here, I looked at quite a few early-stage technology startups, but ultimately decided to sell out and work in the financial services area. I did this for a few reasons: London at the time wasn't particularly conducive to working in a pure technology startup; financial services were where the Cash Money was at; and I wanted a chance to build a Next Stage for my career. At the time, I felt that working in financial services, given the concentration of financial technology jobs in London, was the right next step for my career.

Over the last few years, I've run the gamut of financial services firms: I started out in charge of the risk management and analytics software for a hedge fund management group; I was in charge of Front Office Technology architecture for a medium-sized derivatives trading group; I worked as a grunt contractor for a Very Big American Bank.

Am I glad I've done it? Most certainly. I've worked with a great group of people, made great friends, and learned a massive amount about how the financial industry actually works. I think it was the right choice for me five and a half years ago. But it's not the right choice for me now.

Since my 6-months at Big Bank B came to an end on Friday, I've taken the Leap of Faith and have co-founded a technology startup. I've joined the circle from Hard Core Startup Geek to Financial Services Sell-Out back to Hard Core Startup Geek.

I can't say precisely what we're doing at this stage, except to say that along the way I've seen a lot of inefficiencies in the way that financial services firms develop software, and I think that we as an industry can do better. I think that financial services are too important to the global economy, and software engineering is too important to modern financial services, to accept the status quo: not only can we do better, but we must do better. Most importantly, I believe that what we as a startup are doing will help.

I'm joined by two exceptional co-founders, and have a network of other technology startups in London that didn't exist a few years ago. As I've written before, London is now a phenomenal location for a technology startup, and what we're doing we couldn't do anywhere else in the world. If you've been on the fence, take the plunge. London is now a fantastic place to do a startup, and this is a fantastic time to do it.

In short, watch this space.

P.S. Maybe I was too entrepreneurial after all.