Ask any investor in the US about UK startups, and they'll tell you one thing we all have in common: we're safe. Not ambitious. Safe.

Here's a test for every founder reading this. Say it out loud, right now:

Sit with that for a second. Notice how it feels.

I'd bet in a lot of cases, it felt uncomfortable. Maybe you told yourself it's not about the money. Maybe it felt unrealistic, even arrogant to say. Now picture a founder in the US saying the same sentence. I'd put money on the fact that most of them already talk to themselves like this, every day. That gap - between flinching at the sentence and living inside it - is one of the reasons we in the UK, in Europe, don't think big.

And it doesn't end with founders. It runs straight into our investors too.

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The more I sit with this, the more I think the entire UK startup ecosystem is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Founders aren't ambitious enough. They don't claim what they're worth. They pay themselves minimum salaries, if they pay themselves at all. And a lot of that isn't choice - it's math. The average pre-seed round here, SEIS-backed, sits around £250,000. Ask any founder what you can actually build with that. Not much. You can't hire the people you need. You can't pay them properly. So you do your best, because there's no other option on the table.

In the US, it's a different reality entirely. More capital, earlier, at higher valuations - which means better hiring, more room to be ambitious, from day one.

It starts with the founder. The fact that we don't dare ask for more. That nobody looks at a UK founder and thinks they're crazy for aiming too high - because we rarely aim that high in the first place. And that's where the investor side of this comes in.

Most investors in the UK aren't former founders. They haven't built something from nothing, haven't had to sacrifice or take real risk to keep a company alive. Many come from finance. They understand numbers - that's exactly what they look for. And because of that, UK and European investors, as a group, run conservative.

Everyone in this ecosystem already quietly knows that "pre-seed" here doesn't mean what it means in the US. It exists on paper. In practice, it's a different category entirely.

Early traction requirements became normal, and it’s kind of understandable. But the new friction I see now valuation. A lot of UK investors are still working from old playbooks, old benchmarks, conservative numbers that don't reflect what's actually happening in new categories of startups where there simply is no established benchmark yet - only whatever's happening in the US.

And here's the asymmetry: in the US, founders talk to multiple investors, and the investors effectively bid the valuation up - founders pick the best offer on the table. In the UK, it runs backwards. Investors ask founders to justify their valuation. And if you try to price anywhere near what your US peers are getting, you'll often just get laughed out of the room - because, again, that pricing reality doesn't exist here.

So we end up with founders who won't stand up for themselves, and investors who won't back ambition - instead fighting founders down to the best deal they can extract. Long-term, that doesn't work. Founders lose motivation running businesses they don't really own. And the same investors who negotiated them down then push them to take smaller salaries, work longer hours, squeeze more out of less - without the capital or support to match the ask.

Then we act surprised that Europe doesn't produce many unicorns.

For context: the US has around 806 unicorns today. The UK has somewhere between 53 and 61, depending on whose count you use. That's not a small gap. That's two different ecosystems operating on two different sets of rules.

The more time I spend talking to investors, the clearer this becomes: founders and investors here are living in two different dimensions. Founders - at least the ones paying attention - are plugged into what's happening in the US, into the trends moving in real time. Investors, broadly, are behind.

I've spent the last few weeks talking to investors about our journey with SoPhy. Plenty of them get excited about the product. But most fail to grasp the real value underneath it, because they don't have a grip on the basic fundamentals of what's actually happening in AI right now.

Talk to US investors about the same thing, and it's an entirely different conversation.

Take Instinct - the AI agent startup that just raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. Pre-product, essentially. Fourteen people. That's one of the newest categories of startup to emerge, built on a monetization model most UK investors don't yet understand. They're cautious on anything consumer-facing. They're not adapting fast enough. And in my conversations, the majority of investors I've spoken to weren't even aware this was happening - despite it being everywhere, on every channel, impossible to miss if you're paying attention.

Which gets at something else. There's an old line - usually credited to Twain, though probably apocryphal - that goes:

Pay too much attention and you risk overcorrecting on noise. Pay too little, and you're simply out of touch with where the world is actually heading.

Realistically, I don't know how you fix this overnight. You can't force a whole ecosystem to suddenly write bigger checks at higher valuations. You can get there - if you build enough investor interest and competition for your round, you can push it - but there's a ceiling here that doesn't exist in the US. Looking at what's happening with our peers across the Atlantic, it's genuinely a different universe. Some days I want to just shut off Twitter so I don't have to watch the gap widen in real time.

But this is the reality. And the more honest we are about it - founders and investors both - the better chance we have of actually changing it.

✅ Know a founder pricing their round so nobody laughs at them? Forward this their way. The valuation they're afraid to ask for is the one a US peer is already getting.

(👉 Vote now - we’ll share the results in next week’s issue. All votes are anonymous.)

(Last week’s poll results)

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