Expanding on a comment from earlier in the week - the market for ideas is global.
So is the market for startups to implement ideas, and for people to work for those startups.

This was a response to a post on the Picklive (UK Fantasy Football) blog, describing Dave McClure's reaction to a question about language for a startup's description of itself. Tim Morgan suggests that UK companies shouldn't try to be Silicon Valley companies, but focus on doing something where they have a focus - by which he means an economic comparative advantage, I think.
Later he says that "the UK market is easily big enough for a startup to get traction and later become global."

This is certainly true for some things - particularly entertainment software. It may not be true for markets where there are very few UK based early adopters, or where the implementation of the idea requires actual hardware.

The UK market is comparatively small - the adjacent European market is fragmented by language/tax/law/currency.

The US market, and specifically Silicon Valley, has demonstrated success at selling technology into and buying from much bigger markets, including China and India (look at how many people from there, or with parents from those countries, live in the Valley). The Valley speaks (American) English, among other things. It's by far the easiest stepping stone to the global market. You don't have to move the whole company here - but having a sales and marketing presence here tightly coupled to the UK product management and developers will make scaling up and long term success much more likely.

The UK used to know how to do this, but has had much more success creating global scale financial services companies than it has had building big technology companies in the last couple of decades.

Picklive blog post

http://not100percentaccurate.com/why-uk-startups-should-stop-trying-to-b...

Cunning Systems evaluates product and service ideas in computing and communications. If you would like to discuss an idea, contact us at info@cunningsystems.com