SF-Maxxing London

SF-Maxxing London

It's time to Londonmaxx

Saran Davies

Apr 10, 2026

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I recently returned from a trip to San Francisco and upon returning, a friend asked: “Did you SF-maxx?”

Firstly, what on earth is maxxing? It’s a trend that celebrates the art of optimising and emphasising the positives. SFmaxxing, then, is the pursuit of squeezing every last drop out of what San Francisco has to offer.

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So yes, I did SF-maxx. I met incredible founders, hung out with Moonfire’s portfolio companies, chatted to investors, and spent time with some of the best YC companies in the W26 batch. There were countless community events and serendipitous meetings at cafés, all fuelled by gallons of Blue Bottle coffee. Within 3 days of arriving I’d even participated on a last minute panel at AngelList organised by the wonderful

Gargi Kand

. Lots of people, lots of spontaneity.

The brilliant female founders at

Gargi Kand

’s Entrepreneuher event at AngelList

There’s a reason everything gravitates back to SF

The Bay Area is where venture capital began, and a lot of the core ways we do venture capital today hail from these foundations. The investors who made money on one generation became the angels and backers for the next. SF didn’t just get lucky, it got lucky first, and then it built institutions around that luck that have been compounding ever since.

The numbers reflect that heritage. The Bay Area hosts around

17,300

startups and attracted

$178 billion

in venture capital in 2025, representing 52% of all US startup investment that year.

There are over

3000

VCs in the Bay Area

. These numbers tell you that this is a serious place for entrepreneurship.

But beyond capital, it’s the community that really sets SF apart. The hacker house is something I was particularly struck by. Obviously this isn’t a new concept but there are a fair few of these hacker houses now and I think it’s a real strength in SF.

These shared living and working spaces bring together founders and builders under one roof, creating a kind of accountability that is very hard to replicate elsewhere. Doing the hard things together earns genuine respect, and even if you fail, there’s no stigma: if you swung for something genuinely difficult and missed, you’re still someone who swung.

The Residency

embodies this and I met multiple brilliant Europeans there taking advantage of this model.

The amazing

Roxana Grunenwald

-

Co-Founder of the BioPunk Residency house

It's also well known that SF's broader ecosystem offers support at every stage of the founder journey; from South Park Commons at the idea phase and Neo's early-stage fellowship, through to YC's and a16z Speedrun’s rocket fuel for rapidly scaling ambitious ideas.

The weather and landscape is also a significant pull - you could surf a Pacific break in the morning and snowboard in the Sierra Nevada by the afternoon.

But it’s not all sunshine and daisies. With the niggling issue of SF's homelessness crisis, it's worth asking what it really means to be building the future when the present is this broken for so many people on the doorstep.

So when I landed back in London, I didn’t feel like I was returning from paradise. I felt like I was coming home to somewhere with its own compelling story to tell, and that story is just getting started.

Enter Londonmaxxing

Londonmaxxing is having its time in the sun. London’s startup ecosystem is strong and spans ~

11,500

companies, supported by over

500

active VC funds alongside a broader ecosystem of angel investors and growth equity firms. London-based startups raised over

$23 billion

in 2025. It’s a bustling ecosystem filled with its fair share of capital and investment.

There are a range of elements which further give us something to celebrate in London:

Talent.

The city is home to 7 of the world’s top 100 universities, sitting just an hour from Oxford and Cambridge, which both place consistently in the global top 5. Unlike many tech hubs that draw heavily from one discipline, London pulls from engineering, finance, life sciences, design, and policy, and that breadth of thinking feeds directly into the diversity of what gets built here.

Industry.

London’s financial heritage has produced some of the world’s most respected institutions and a thriving fintech ecosystem. Take Revolut for example, it started in London in 2015 and is now worth over

$75 billion

and services more than 65 million customers around the world. Beyond finance, Google DeepMind produced AlphaFold which is arguably one of the most consequential scientific achievements of the last decade.

Neighbours.

The broader UK ecosystem is generating real research and innovation, and our European neighbours are driving the charge forward in a way that only strengthens London’s gravitational pull. Initiatives like Project Europe, celebrating the ambition of European founders, further act as a strong signal.

Though of course, it’s not all straightforward. The pull for European founders to SF is undeniable. The

ratio of startups to VCs is 5:1 in SF vs 23:1 in London

, and this capital readiness is a very clear differentiator.

London also has genuine work to do in terms of its ecosystem. SF is compact in a way that generates constant, organic collision between founders, investors, and builders, whereas London grew from a patchwork of villages into a sprawling conglomeration and you can still feel that friction in how it clusters today.

To nerd out as a biologist for a second: SF doesn't just have density of capital and talent, it acts as a catalyst. It lowers the activation energy needed for successful collisions between founders, ideas, and funders. That kind of environment is hard to stumble into, but it can be built deliberately.

The real opportunity

We don’t need to recreate SF to make London relevant, but we can absolutely take inspiration from it. What I’m particularly excited about is the emergence of our own hacker houses, which have been around for a couple of years but are gaining real traction. The Residency is setting up their first London hacker house by joining forces with

London Founder House

, with more to follow, and what this signals is a better joining up of the ecosystem.

We need to foster more events such as Venture Café, which recently hosted over 400 people from the AI ecosystem. Magnifying this density will help drive the crossover, boost the spontaneity, and start closing the gap on what makes SF so magnetic. We have the hubs and infrastructure to create this - we just need to condense it.

Venture Café

’s recent event on AI for Science: From Pre-Seed to Breakthrough

As investors, we also have to do our bit to add to that flywheel, whether that means more in-person time with founders, more presence at community events, or honestly just bringing more optimism (and capital) to the table. The ecosystem is there, the talent is there, and the momentum is building. The question for London isn't whether the talent and capital exist, it's whether we're willing to build the catalyst.

It’s time to Londonmaxx.

Check out

Jack Cantillon’s brilliant piece

for yet more insight on how to build the right density networks in VC.

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