As someone who lives in Europe, I feel the reasons are partly cultural, partly due to the business environment here.

For one thing, there is definitely a lack of ambition compared to over in the States (and likely quite a few other parts of the world). People really question you if you say you want to run a company, and don't value entrepreneurial mindsets at all.

So many would be founders will either move away, or give up on their dreams because of how friends, family and society see them for trying to strike out on their own. Meanwhile the vast majority of people simply don't care about anything other than working 9-5 and partying at the weekends. They're not career driven at all.

And the lack of ambition doesn't end there. It's true of companies too. Companies here seem to well... suck at marketing compared to their US counterparts.

They seriously do. They virtually ignore social media marketing, ignore inbound marketing, struggle with organic SEO, don't see the importance of creating content to get people to their site/products and seem to be terrified of actually going out and selling to people. So of course our startups will struggle; they're not getting their message out there as well as their Silicon Valley counterparts. They just assume that 'build it and they'll come' works.

(though to be fair, nor are our regional divisions of large companies either. Nintendo UK has always sucked at marketing compared to the American branch for much the same reason).

As for the business environment reasons? Well, it's due to two things:

1. Our investors offering very little money compared to their US counterparts

2. And investors/funds being terrified of B2C companies

For the former, well compare the money on offer for UK investments to their US counterparts. Over here, it seems like a few hundred thousand is a 'high' investment in a startup, whereas over there it's in the millions. Okay, business TV shows probably aren't a good gauge of anything here, but come on... when the likes of the Apprentice and Dragon's Den think between £50,000 and £250,000 is a decent reward... well you're not exactly going to get the next Facebook or Uber or Netflix popping up here.

And you're not gonna get the level of talent here either. Why would a software engineer work for about £30,000 in a UK startup when US ones will offer then a few hundred grand a year instead? They wouldn't.

So the rockstars go off to the valley, and the people who stay here tend to be the less ambitious, less skilled types.

Still, it's not like the most ambitious businesses would get backed here either. Our VCs are heavily focused on B2B businesses, perhaps because of the 'guaranteed' revenue stream from enterprise markets.

However, it's usually the B2C ones which become the mega breakout hits everyone knows. Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, etc... they're focused at end users. That's what big companies tend to be.

But it's also a risk, and apparently one that our investors don't seem to feel is worth taking. So they ignore what could be the next Facebook or Google in favour of the next Moz or SEMRush.

So yeah, that's my take on it. We're not ambitious enough here, we're in a society that seems to frown on striking out on your own, the money that is available is far lower than in Silicon Valley and our VCs seem scared of investing in moonshot end consumer focused businesses.