EUROPEAN STARTUPS CARRY ON IN THE CHAOS

LAST SUMMER, a colorful truck began driving slowly around the streets of London. The back of it carried an electric pink, blue, and yellow billboard that said, “Dear startups, keep calm and move to Berlin,” a play on the famous 1939 poster the British government used to raise morale when the Nazi bombing of London was imminent. Indeed, the truck represented a German invasion of sorts; it had been sent by the FDP, a free-market liberal political party in Germany. As it drove around London’s Silicon Roundabout, one Bloomberg reporter tweeted a photo of it. “The vultures are circling,” he wrote.

Neither London nor Europe is quite ready for vultures, but 2016 was a punishing year. The Brexit referendum threw the U.K. into chaos, unnerving London