Yesterday I was one of the "response" speakers to Jimmy Wales' talk at the London Mayor's
"Technology: Disruption and Convergence" debate. Facilitator Nico Macdonald had asked me to focus on what London had to do to foster Innovation in new technology (and, by extension, startups in London). According to the hype, we have the skills, we have the people, we have the creativity, we have the Accelerators, we even have Tech City.
Hype notwithstanding, we are probably all also familiar with the major barriers the UK has for startups getting big, ie:
- Unadventurous Venture Capitalists, leading to the "Equity Gap" after Friends and Fools money runs out
- A (relatively) small home market, so we can't grow gargantuan companies before going abroad
- Reluctant "small c" conservative public who don't like to try things early
- Higher amounts of "Red Tape" for British SMEs vs the US, making it harder to hire/fire and reward.
- A culture that punishes a failure rather than sees it as painful experience
- An unresponsive environmnet in dealing with other countries' subsidies and indirect benefits (See Games Industry, loss of...)
However, when you look at Wikipedia. it wasn't relying on VCs, its product inspired people worldwide to contribute en masse, wasn't up against subsidised industries, wasn't shooting for "success" and it was hardly a company structure being Not For Profit - so, none of these UK disadvantages mattered.
So, why did JImmy Wales, an ex Chicago currency trader, set this up in the US rather than some UK person set it up here (Heck, we have enough ex-currency traders of our own)?
I suggested 3 hypotheses, assuming our Entrepreneurs were no less creative than anyone else's:
- Numbers - there were just more entrepreneurs in the US, so it was more likely there.
- The Silicon Valley ecosystem - something in the air makes things happen
- A combination of all the disadvantages that I listed above, that becomes a whole raft of "small frictions" and add up to a far lower likelihood of success as they play through.
Wales's view was interesting (bear in mind he is now living in London so has some familiiarity with the scene). He said he wasn't in Silicon Valley, and set up Wikipedia far from the "SV bubble", and that he would have set it up wherever he was. He agreed that the "large number of small frictions" is a factor in the UK, but said one of the biggest risks was.....
.....UK Libel Laws
Wales said Wikipedia still does not put any of its servers in the UK owing to the risks posed by UK libel laws. Its not just that they overprotect and can deliver large damages, but they are also unclear and unpredictable which adds cost, time and hassle and would make it very dfficult to operate Wikipedia effectively.
So, there you have it.
Wales feels the UK/EU laws around content, and its freedom. are major barriers to content based startup success. Which points to an issue for the UK, and London in particular. As another spot speaker,
Dean Bubbley, pointed out, there is not much "Silicon" in Silicon Roundabout (or in the UK overall really), and creative content (media, software etc) is where the UK punches way above its weight in (the traditional British succesful startup is a world class rock band, not a world beating Tech company).
And yet, and yet..I am still sitting here wondering why someone - anyone - in the UK didn't do something like this, even if it became an heroic failure...... so, do we need to look at our much vaunted innovative creativity again, or maybe Jimmy's 3 previous failures were what winnowed Wikipedia?
Update - interesting response from El Reg -on British Wikipedias.....
In fact, Britain has had several online encyclopaedia projects that anyone can contribute to. One is the Knowhere Guide, which has been online since 1994. It is archived at the British Library, but doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. Another general-purpose effort is the H2G2 encyclopaedia. Both have trundled happily along for years.
....and on their scaling:
We can see that Britain does have wiki-style distributed user-contributed projects. However, what it doesn't have is a "Wikipedia Cult": our collaborative projects don't have utopian aspirations, and don't claim to save the world. Ours aren't given utopian status by slack-jawed journalists, pundits, management consultants and gabfest organisers. Ours don't have a Messianic leader; Wales styles himself as Wikipedia's "spiritual leader". You could make the case that the British projects are Wikipedia done properly – without The Bullshit.
I think he may have something there, we tend not to boost technology in the UK. I was reflecting on this last night, when on BBC's premier Newsnight analysis priogram neither the Mars landing nor Bernard Lovell's death were covered, whereas the death of an Arts TV prersenter was
(Twitterstream of the event is
over here)
