A blog post about Munich is basically an excuse to post pictures of girls in dirindls
I’m in Munich, Germany at the moment, working on a new Internet company that is growing in leaps and bounds. We’re hiring lots and lots of people, both technical (developers) and non-technical. Something in particular about this interests me – Munich isn’t Germany’s first city, it isn’t even its second – in fact Munich is the 3rd largest city in Germany behind Hamburg and the capital, Berlin.
Why does this so fascinate me? Well, can you imagine setting up a brand new Internet company in the UK’s 3rd city? According to Wikipedia, Glasgow is the UK’s 3rd city. In fact, let’s forget Glasgae for a second, can you imagine anyone ever setting up a brand new super successful Internet company in Birmingham, the UK’s 2nd city? Nope, neither can I.
In the UK it seems that unless you’re in London, you’re nowhere. How does one city get to dominate a country so much, and is it good for the UK? According to George Zipf’s theory of rank-size for an ideal distribution of city size the 2nd city should be half the size of the largest city, and the 3rd city 1/3rd the size, and so on. Mark Jefferson described “primate cities” as those that so dominate the country that they capture most of the population and economic activity in a country. Classic Primate Cities include London and Paris, whilst the most extreme example is Bangkok, which is 40 times larger than the next city.
Compare that to Germany, where Berlin has a population of 3.3 Million, Hamburg is 1.6 Million, and Munich is about 800,000. They almost perfectly follow Zipf’s Law. So which ecomony is doing the best out of UK, France and Germany? Yeah I won’t bother answering that…
Although Berlin, where my direct employers are actually based, is itself considered a bit of a European startup hub, I never get the feeling that it dominates Germany in the same was that London dominates the UK. I don’t think many of my non-British friends in the UK would seriously consider living anywhere in the country other than London. In fact, do people even want to visit Birmingham or Glasgow? Not really. Other than a weekend trip to Edinburgh, for most people London is the UK.
Everyone had gone to Bradford for the weekend.
So for someone from a far-flung corner of the UK, that’s a bit depressing. What chance does Dundee have of becoming some kind of gaming hub, when as soon as a company gets successful it will probably up-sticks to Edinburgh, like Rockstar – developers of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto – did (yes – Grand Theft Auto was developed in Dundee!).
The UK Government acknowledges the London dominance by trying to force some taxpayer-funded organisations to move to provincial cities. Even the BBC is getting in on the act by moving its BBC breakfast programme to Manchester – a move which is proving rather unpopular with the staff.
I doubt London will ever lose its “Primate City” status in the UK. Nevertheless, I think government is obliged to keep trying to encourage companies to invest elsewhere in the country. Which is why you will get some pretty good incentives to start a company in places like Scotland. Here’s a story in which a founder of an Internet company got a £250k grant from Scottish Enterprise. I was also pleased when my MBA classmate, Xavier, told me that one of the reasons he set up the first Better World Books overseas subsidiaries in Scotland was because he was impressed with how helpful Scottish Enterprise was.
Maybe there is hope!
The wannabe VC 