Stuck on Silicon Roundabout

Yesterday Business Insider published their 2011 Digital 100: The World’s Most Valuable Startups. The top 100 are ranked by estimated valuation. The top 4 contains no surprises – Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter. A couple of small surprises feature in the rest of the top 10 – sites like Wikipedia (difficult to value a non-commercial organisation) and an analytics company called Palantir which I hadn’t heard of before.

Least remarkable was the dominance of Silicon Valley addresses. Now and again start-ups from outside the Valley pop up – Chicago, Washington DC and Paris all feature as top ten start-ups’ locations. New York, Finland and Sweden appear in the top 20. Seattle, Moscow and Shenzen, China feature in the top 50.

You’re probably seeing where I am going with this now – looking at home. You have to get to number 65 to find the first British company – Mind Candy, the founder-owners of Moshi Monsters, has an estimated value of £250m – and then on to number 86 to find the second – miniclip.com, an lesser-known online gaming company. One more – Shazam – at number 91 and that’s it from the UK.

Now there are plenty of countries without a single company in the top 100, so maybe I am being harsh on Britain. But then maybe not – how is it that a country with such a rich seam of creativity, with such an apparently vibrant tech scene on the street, cannot manage to grow companies to any significant value – or at least not more than three? Google’s Eric Schmidt was in Edinburgh last month blaming it on our education system not turning out engineers. And there’s a broader view that British entrepreneurs tend to sell out too early, before their companies reach the nine-figure-plus valuations that get you soaring up this sort of list.

Whatever the reason, we’re punching below our weight on the world start-up scene and we need to work harder on finding the reasons why…