One of the chief complaints from friends in the Valley is that it sucks jumping into your car to drive around town from meeting to meeting. I realised yesterday how awesome London is (even compared to NYC!) for not wasting time travelling between meeting web startups. Yesterday I walked from Greenpark to Soho and ran into an exec of a large media company grabbing take-away sushi, had a mtg at VC firm, met with the Partnership team at Facebook and finally a startup, all in 3.5 hours.
The epiphany that I had was that London feels like it is finally coming together in terms of having a ‘thick market’ full of high quality/hyper growth startups. One of the best things happening here right now is large US HQ’d companies are coming over and establishing a European presence. Twitter, FB, Wildfire, Buddy Media, Yammer, Spigit, Gilt Group etc are all hiring sales teams and engineers. What will be interesting over the next couple of years is watching the bright young employees spinning out of these companies and establishing next wave of innovation. Like totally awesome.
