Is Cambridge The UK's Startup Hub?

Tom Coates makes a very interesting post asking whether or not the UK could foster more startups, and where would it make sense for them to congregate. In it he draws up a shortlist of Oxford, Cambridge, York, Bristol and Brighton.

I don’t know much about the other locations, but living in Cambridge it seems to me that Tom has fallen into the London-centric, new media (he says, stereotyping wildly but it fits in with my story :-) trap of complete ignorance of anything going on outside the M25.

Things have cooled a little since the dot-com bubble and there’s less talk these days of the Silicon Fen, but there are still lots of startups in and around Cambridge. I think there are two reasons that Cambridge startups aren’t as well known:

• Lots of the companies produce products which are hidden behind the scenes - for example Cambridge Silicon Radio provide over 50% of Bluetooth chips, ARM's processors are in all sorts of things, and Zeus build web server software.
• And for some reason, there's a tendency for startups to sell out rather than go it alone and so the startup becomes just the Cambridge office of a bigger (usually American, sadly) company.

I don’t know if life in Cambridge is perfect for startups, but I’ve found it pretty good so far. The concentration of software companies in the area mean that I’ve been able to find bits of contracting to help fund MCQN Ltd. and also make it less risky for employees to join a startup - if it all goes wrong, it’s easy enough to find another to join. Plus there are plenty of opportunities for networking: Cambridge Network have the grander, more corporate/VC networking covered; CHASE is a friendlier group aimed at the smaller businesses; and there are groups like CETC and the Cambridge Women’s Lunch Club.

That said, maybe I’m not the best person to comment on why more people don’t start their own company. What would it take for you to start your own startup?