Well, I suspect a lot of the UK's startup stats are still connected to its universities. The page you linked shows London with a massive index lead over the EU. When you scroll down to the lists of notable companies, only ~10% of them are UK-based. The contrast of London to the rest of Britain is also much starker than for some other EU hubs.

It's questionable whether the "startup hub seed" would have germinated had the UK not been in the EU back when. It's also questionable whether the plant will wither now that it's out. All else held equal, the exits of UK startups are probably more acquisitional and trans-oceanic. This adds to risks and costs.

Either way, my argument was not startup-centric. It's pretty clear that an island company faces more market hurdles than a continental one. The difference will widen as the EU integrates further.

> the exits of UK startups are probably more acquisitional and trans-oceanic.

The US tends to purchase successful New Zealand startups oi reckon. Is it the same pattern in the UK?

I suspect there's a few major reasons:

(1) NZ startups seem to get acquired so that they can sell their products/services into the US market. NZ companies often struggle to market to the US. Similarly Rocket Lab moved to the US. However our local ebay competitor (TradeMe) was bought for a few billion by the UK based Apax Partners.

(2) NZ doesn't have the capital markets to buy successful businesses so we sell the family silver to overseas buyers.

(3) NZ government taxes owner's dividends (of the most successful businesses) at 39%. NZ's capital gain tax is 0% so owners usually have a financial incentive to sell their businesses.

For startups, our taxation system demotivates founders. Building or growing a business usually does not reward enough for the risks. A shame because NZ needs the foreign income.

Are they just a self-perpetuating reputation scam, or do they actually lead to real economic activity and growth? It can be both, but it can't be entirely the former if you think the startup edge is due to the universities.

I didn't see the list of notable startups. There's a section about "noteworthy growth and decline" but it's not got a list. For the other lists it's not clear how they're ordered.

> It's questionable whether the "startup hub seed" would have germinated had the UK not been in the EU

So why didn't it germinate everywhere else in the EU to the same extent?

This seems like wishful thinking. The startup capital of the world is the USA, notably not in the EU. The EU has done many things that are clearly startup and tech-hostile, but it's hard to think of policies that help. The EU is structurally designed to make it easier for France to sell agricultural products and Germany to sell manufactured products, but one of the reasons the UK didn't benefit economically from membership is because the EU doesn't make it easier to sell services (and the UK not benefiting is under-reported but unambiguously the case, see the recent Parliamentary report on trade ratios post leaving [1]). Yet many tech startups are software-as-a-service, so lack of a single market for services really makes the EU irrelevant to the tech ecosystem.

> It's pretty clear that an island company faces more market hurdles than a continental one

It's not that clear. The British Empire was a global trade based empire long before the internet existed. It's only got easier since then.

[1] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-... (read it carefully, civil service bias is apparent but the data is objective)

Note that the Scandinavian and Baltic countries do have an active tech startup scene.