Are there serious startups in London solving challenging technical problems? I live in London [0] and the companies that I've seen at meetups and tech events are either startups with non-technical founders pursuing weak ideas, or financial consultants. The tech scene in London seems to be centred around self-promotion.

Look at, e.g. the Barclays accelerator. [1] The program seems designed to accept & promote marginal startups, and takes a large amount of equity in doing so (I think it's somewhere around 8% for £10k, which is far less than, say, YC). I'm working on a side project that I hope to turn into a startup in the FinTech space, and I'm not even remotely considering aplying for the program, because I'm not wiing to give that much equity away for so little investment.

I hope I'm just a cynic. I also hope that HackCampus does something cool with the internships. It would be nice to have a thriving, technical tech scene.

[0] Grad student in econometrics, interested in machine learning. If anyone's interested in grabbing coffee, please shoot me an email.

[1] http://www.barclaysaccelerator.com/