Brexit threat weighs on UK tech startups | Policy

"We enable cultures to understand each other better," said Bernhard Niesner, co-founder and general manager of a language learning application called Busuu.

Its head office is near Old Street subway station on the outskirts of the Silicon Roundabout Roundabout. About 100 people work at Busuu and help users learn languages ​​such as French, English, Polish, Arabic and Chinese. Defying the usual technological stereotypes, 40% of the staff are women. A range of flags decorate the walls; there is a constant multilingual chat.

Busuu, which takes its name from an endangered language spoken in Cameroon, was founded in 2009 and focused on the smartphone boom. During its first three years, the company was based in Madrid, but Niesner, who is Austrian, then decided to move to London.

"We thought it was the best place in Europe for a growing startup," he said. But then he mentions Brexit and his expression darkens. "Great Britain still has huge advantages. But if we do not do it right, the future will change. "

The consequences of the referendum are already causing problems for Busuu. "At the present time, if you were, for example, a 25-year-old mobile developer living in Spain, I did not think you would go to the UK," Niesner said. "There is so much uncertainty; you do not really know what your future will look like The acquisition of talent from European countries is really dry. It's very difficult to bring people in. Half of our staff is non-British and some of them are thinking about their future, whether or not they want to go back home. They no longer feel welcome. "

A French staff member said, "When it all started, I felt like an immigrant for the first time."

Niesner himself was caught off guard by Brexit-related hostility: "In the street, I spoke in German on the phone and a very well dressed old lady came to see me and said: & # 39; Speak, bading English. was a little shocked, to be honest. "

The feeling of an international community suddenly adapting to unexpected realities applies to technology start-ups in London. The loudest sounds of more traditional businesses evoke the dangers of a scenario without agreement. However, a huge tangle of problems for this growing part of the economy is centered on the Brexit itself, the cultural signals it sends and the risk of brain drain. It is also questionable whether Britain's exit from the EU will affect crucial access to funding.

It's not just London, but technological clusters in cities like Cambridge, Manchester, Newcastle and Dundee. Insiders frequently mention European cities as rival hubs, especially Berlin. And many people mentioned aspects of Brexit that had been largely neglected, such as the Digital Single Market – a set of arrangements, launched in 2015, to cover areas such as data regulation, confidentiality and privacy. the author's right. The UK has had a great influence on its creation, but it is about to disappear, leaving many tech companies with a huge level of uncertainty.

Mike Butcher is one of the key voices of Tech For UK, a campaign group set up "to fight Brexit as a disaster for the UK" and for holding another referendum. "The world of technology is a sort of canary in a coal mine," he says. "The technology does not stop: people just take sticks, pack and go where they are welcome. And the focus of Brexit is not to welcome. It's about closing doors. "

Butcher is the co-founder of TechHub, a global company that provides workspaces to startups, and an editor of TechCrunch, a technology information website.

Before Christmas, he was one of the most visible faces of TechCrunch's Disrupt, an annual congress for startups and investors organized this year in Berlin, where Brexit was a recurring conversation topic.

Brynne Kennedy, Topia's US boss, is a very popular platform that helps individuals and businesses move from one country to another. She referred to a decisive decision made by her company after the referendum, when she transferred her engineering division – in other words, coders and programmers – from London to the United States. Estonia.

"The UK is very expensive and very dear to my heart," she told her audience. "But … we think that the possibility of recruiting people in the European Union, especially on the technical side, is much easier than in the UK." Before June 2016, she said , the Topia office in London was receiving job applications every day, but "that dried overnight with the Brexit vote". She praised Estonia as "a great economy in which you can recruit people from all over the world".

VenueScanner, a platform for users to book space for meetings and events in UK cities, employs 14 people at its London headquarters, including six in continental Europe. There are seven other employees in the Polish city of Gdańsk, a configuration facilitated by the single market and the fact that VenueScanner does not necessarily have to have an official base in Poland to use them.

Rebecca Kelly, her CEO and co-founder, said, "The talent there is incredibly good and the diversity is incredibly valuable. Poles are much more direct. They think differently. And the mix of that with the UK has been really good for us.

"According to the evolution of the laws, it is possible that we lose all or part of our Polish team. If we can not hire staff if we do not have an official office in Poland, the situation will become much more difficult. And the more people you lose, the less you become a business. "

In the United Kingdom, conversations with specialists in the technology sector tend to include mentions of people who suddenly left the country to go to continental Europe. Konstanty Sliwowksi, Polish director of Caissa Global, a recruitment company in the technology sector that he founded in London in 2009, is an example. He holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Oxford and a British pbadport.

Until the end of 2016, he lived and worked in London, where the company still has an office. Given the European dimension of his activities, he concluded that he might have to move with his family but that after the referendum, they quickly moved to Berlin.

"I am a naturalized British citizen; My wife is German, but was born and raised in Hong Kong, "he says. "We have always felt welcome in the UK. And the Brexit felt like a slap. What was emphasized is that at least a month after the referendum, two members of my staff were asked to return home. "

Four people work in Caissa Global's London office, but things may change soon. "As things stand, we are considering options for our London headquarters," he says. "If Brexit is tough, it's clear to my staff that London is going to get lost and we're heading to continental Europe."