I'm writing this from San Francisco.

I came out here last Wednesday because I know our seed round, roughly twelve months from now, will have to close here. So I'm using the trip to explore the scene, build connections, and get a feel for what we're walking into.

What I've found has genuinely changed how I think about the way I run my business in London. And I'm going to be honest with you, because that's the only way this post makes sense.

I think most European founders don't know how to work hard. And I think that's a big part of why we don't have the same success rates as our peers in the US.

I know that's going to upset some people. I've already had backlash in London for "promoting" hustle culture. Fine. Read the whole thing first.

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SF is insane. It's a startup accelerator that operates 24/7, and if you can't fit in, it will simply chew you up and spit you out.

It's expensive. It's lonely. It's all about hustle culture. It's full of delusional, super-ambitious founders who've come here from all over the world because this is where the opportunities are. The money is here. The top accelerators are here. The top talent, the top funds, the top minds - all of it within walking distance of each other.

Unlike in the UK, you meet founders who've raised every single day. It's not rare. Every third founder you talk to went through a top accelerator. Everyone is utterly, almost uncomfortably, obsessed with what they're working on. And they are happy to pay whatever the price is to make it work.

The price is high. And I'm not talking about cost of living - though that's also brutal.

I'm talking about loneliness. Almost everyone I've spoken to here tells me the same thing. SF is hard to connect with. Not LinkedIn connections - real relationships, the kind where you actually want to see someone again. People are friendly, they'll help in the moment, they'll do an intro on the spot. But it ends there. Because nobody has time. Everyone is grinding.

I met one founder who's a survival show celebrity, now living out of his car so he can put more money into the business. Last Saturday I walked past Corgi Café - a 24/7 spot popular with founders - at 10pm on a weekend. It was packed.

Entrepreneurship is hard everywhere. Here it's brutal.

You can argue with my impressions. You can't really argue with the data.

Europe attracts dramatically less capital than the US. European startups raise much less than American ones, especially in areas like AI, biotech, and defence tech. And it's not just about money - the structural setup is fundamentally different. Only 30% of European startups are headquartered in a tech "superhub" compared to almost half of US startups, which means access to talent, capital, and density compounds for American founders in ways most of us in London or Berlin simply don't experience.

The cultural gap is wider than people think too. A McKinsey-related media study found that positive portrayal of entrepreneurship was 17% in Germany compared to 39% in the US. And only 5% of the population in Germany has any plans to start a company at all. The default attitude toward founders here in the US is admiration. In Europe, it's still closer to suspicion.

And then there are the hours. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has the average full-time American employee working 47 hours per week - almost an entire extra day compared to the standard 40-hour workweek in most of Europe. That's just average employees. Now think about what that means for founders, where the gap is compounded.

The 996 debate that exploded across European tech earlier this year tells you everything. Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky criticised European startup entrepreneurs publicly for not working hard enough and valuing work-life balance too highly. Index Ventures partner Martin Mignot wrote on LinkedIn that 996 - 9am to 9pm, six days a week - has "quietly become the norm" at startups internationally. Even when European VCs pushed back on the framing, almost none of them actually disputed the underlying gap.

I want to be fair about one counter-point. Antler surveyed 128 European founders earlier this year and found that 75% work more than 60 hours weekly, with 19% exceeding 80 hours - and German founders coming out as the hardest workers, with 94% over 60 hours. So yes, some European founders work hard. The Antler study is real. But notice what's missing from the picture. The hours might be there for the most committed cohort, but the cultural reinforcement, the celebration of grind, the network density, the capital, the urgency - all of it is absent.

You can grind in Berlin. You'll just do it alone, with less money, fewer accelerators, and a quiet sense that something is wrong with you for doing it.

Here's the part that bothers me about the UK scene specifically.

Too many founders quit their jobs, try something for a few months, and give up if it doesn't immediately work. The reasons are always the same - lack of resources, lack of money, lack of connections, lack of "ecosystem." Many finish work at 5 or 6pm and then attend endless events in the evening, treating networking as a substitute for execution.

One ex-YC founder told me this week that none of the genuinely successful founders here in SF go to events, unless it's organised by YC itself. Going to lots of events is actually frowned upon. The interpretation is simple: if you have time for events, you're not committed enough to your business. The work is the work.

I'll be honest, this is a slightly awkward thing for me to write, because I'm in the events business. We run Rare Founders. So I have skin in this argument in both directions.

But here's what I actually believe, having sat on both sides of it. The problem isn't events. The problem is how most founders use them. If you're going to three events a week, eating canapés and collecting business cards, you are not building a company - you're avoiding building one. That's not networking, that's procrastination with a glass of warm wine in your hand.

What does work - and the reason I keep building Rare Founders rather than running it as a one-off business - is the opposite of that. It's showing up consistently to the same community, meeting the same people more than once, and letting actual relationships develop over time. The people who come to our open mics regularly stop being strangers after the second or third visit. They start texting each other between events. They make introductions for each other when one of them is raising. They become each other's first customers. They cover each other through the hard weeks.

That's not what most founders are doing on the event circuit. Most are sampling. Most are looking for a shortcut. And shortcuts don't build companies - communities do, but only when you commit to them properly.

So no, I'm not saying don't go to events. I'm saying be selective. Pick one community, show up consistently, build real relationships, and put the rest of those evenings into the actual work. The founders I most admire here in SF would have done exactly that with the time I've seen too many London founders spend.

I don't want this post to read as me preaching from a comfortable distance. Let me tell you where I actually sit.

I work six days a week. I usually finish around 10pm. I don't have resources to fall back on - no rich family network, no warm intros to top funds, no safety net. So I make up for it the only way I know how, which is to outwork the gap. When people ask how I'm doing what I'm doing, the honest answer is: I'm working hard, and I want to achieve my dreams, and I'm willing to pay whatever this is going to cost.

In London I've felt guilty about this. I've had peers push back when I talk about it openly, as if working this much is some kind of moral failing rather than what's actually required at this stage of building something.

In SF nobody questions it. It's just what you do. And I'd be lying if I said that didn't feel like an enormous relief.

I'm not saying 24/7 grind is the secret to success. I'm not saying burnout is heroic. I'm not saying everyone should move to San Francisco.

I am saying we shouldn't be surprised when our businesses move slowly, when our cap tables stay small, when our companies stall at seed - if we're closing our laptops at 5pm and treating events as work.

Hustle culture has its costs. SF showed me those costs up close, and they're real. Loneliness, burnout, single-minded obsession, no relationships outside the work. I'm not blind to it.

But I haven't yet met a founder who built something genuinely meaningful without working hard. We just often don't see the work. It looks like luck from the outside. Luck is something we make ourselves.

So I'm coming back to London with a different lens. Less guilt about the hours. Fewer events. More shipping. And a much clearer sense that the gap between European and American founder outcomes isn't a mystery.

We work less. They work more. The results follow.

✅ Know a founder who keeps blaming the ecosystem for their slow progress? Forward this their way. The sooner they realise the gap is closeable - and that closing it costs them something - the better the company they'll build over the next twelve months.

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