Nobody makes money from the advice you actually need
Most advice about moving a business to the US is about the business. Entity structure, tax, the first hire. All of it matters, and all of it is easy to buy.
At an Austin Tech Week panel hosted by BABC Texas with Gecko Technology Partners, Oury Clark and In2America, Adrian Kinnersley, CEO of TwentyAI and co-founder of In2America, made the case that the bigger risk sits somewhere else. He was joined by Dan Larkman, founder and CEO of CTV performance platform Keynes Digital, and Kjirstin Breure, co-founder, president and CEO of graphene producer HydroGraph Clean Power. Gemma Hotta, a partner at Oury Clark, moderated and asked for the good, the bad and the ugly.
They delivered all three.
Start with one question: could this be your biggest market?
Asked how a founder knows they are ready, Adrian kept it simple. If the US should or could be your biggest market, that is the first signal.
His own move was part pull, part push. Clients in the US were already demanding his time. As he put it, "I'm a Brexit statistic." He saw "a much bigger opportunity and a cleaner decade ahead here than there was in Europe."
The other panelists had harder triggers. HydroGraph's primary market is defense, and Kjirstin was told plainly that federal support meant moving. With more than half its shareholders now American, the company is also moving its listing to Nasdaq and re-domiciling from Canada. Dan, who founded Keynes in the US after a decade in LA, called it simply "an entrepreneur's dream."
Why Austin and not New York
Adrian's business already had a New York office, set up in 2012, so it was the obvious choice. He turned it down. It felt too close to London in lifestyle, and it did not give the business reach across the breadth of the country. He also wanted a different life for his family.
His daughter settled it on a trip to New York: "It smells like the place that pigeons will thrive." Texas was different.
Dan made the commercial case. Central Time lets him talk to Europe and APAC in the same working day, and he can fly to New York for a morning meeting and be home by evening. Adrian added that for his clients in retail and manufacturing, Texas makes logistics to both coasts easy.
The first 90 days: "Carnage"
That was Adrian's one-word answer when asked what the first three months looked like.
On the personal side, the family had to sort housing, bank accounts and schools with very little help. Banking was strangely hard. The business account had been opened with Citibank because the first office was in New York. "I didn't realise that Citibank didn't have branches in Texas."
On the business side, he admits he "grossly underestimated the complexity of all the states having different employment laws, different tax laws." His business now operates in 35 states. In his words, that is "35 times the complexity" for his industry, and it pulled him away from leading the European business at exactly the wrong time.
Every state is its own rulebook. Plan for it before you land, not after.
Dan agreed. Setting up the company before you can open the bank account, fees on everything, and months waiting on a letter from the IRS "because I filled in one box wrong." Later he put it more bluntly: "America's really 50 countries, not one."
The advice gap nobody talks about
This was the heart of the session. You can find someone to tell you how to set up an entity, domicile the company and sort the accounts. What Adrian wished he had was someone to deal with him as a person.
His overseas bank accounts, his property and his UK pension all created complications he had not planned for. Then there was credit. "You start with zero." He asked for a personal credit card through his business bank and "they literally laughed in my face." His first tax return, covering half a year in each country, ended at a taxpayer assistance centre with him being escorted out by an armed guard.
His explanation for why this goes unsolved is simple:
"You can get help with everything on the business, but nobody makes money out of that advice, so you can't get it."
Unless, he added, you are at the level where a private bank is sorting it out for you. Everyone else needs someone who will sit them down and say: this is how you build a credit rating, this is how you open a bank account, this is what you need to do before you leave. It is a large part of what In2America now helps founders with.
Humility does not sell
Asked what worked in the UK and failed in the US, Adrian did not hesitate. "Well, humility doesn't work."
In the UK and much of Europe, you build rapport, find common ground, and once people like you, they buy. In the US, you make the case for why what you sell is worth buying. Liking you comes later and decides whether they buy again. "It took me a while to figure out why everyone was switching off as I was talking about the weather for the first 30 minutes."
Leadership flipped the other way. Talking to his UK team each morning, he was blunt and direct. His American team thought he was "really angry every morning." He had to adjust. "You've really gotta lean into trying to learn it quick, otherwise you end up just offending everyone."
Dan had his own version: in Britain, "quite good" means just about okay. In America, it means very good. He learned that one the hard way.
Charge more
On pricing, Adrian's view was clear. The expectation of service is high on both sides of the Atlantic, but Americans are comfortable paying for it. In the UK, "nobody wants to pay for it." Costs are higher in the US, so a business that does not adjust its price is leaving margin on the table. "By and large," he said, "you're gonna charge more here."
Your next client might be at the bus stop
An audience member who had moved three months earlier with In2America's help asked how to get plugged in. Adrian noted how BABC provides strong access into the British community. Then he got practical.
"I moved out here when I was 40, and I wasn't exactly in the habit of trying to make new friends." His advice is to go to events, put your phone down, look people in the eye and do the uncomfortable things. One of his biggest clients he met at the bar at Topgolf. Another he met at his kid's bus stop. The culture accepts you walking up to someone, building a relationship and turning it into business.
Politics will change. The opportunity will not
Asked how founders abroad should think about the geopolitical noise, Adrian's answer was that there is never a perfect time. What stays constant is "the size and the scale of opportunity, the availability of funding, the opportunity to scale."
"Politics are gonna change in the time that you're doing it. Economy's gonna change. You may as well just get on and do it."
He talks to founders considering the move every day, he said, and that is the advice he gives them all.
Over-prepare, then go
Adrian's one piece of advice for anyone in the room seriously considering the move came back to assumptions. Most of his early problems came from thinking he understood America because of TV, films, holidays and having worked there. Living there full time is different.
• Over-prepare. Understand the multi-state complexity before you commit.
• Sort your personal setup early. Banking, credit, property, pension. It removes "an awful lot of friction" from the first 90 days and the first year.
• Budget a little bit better. Dan agreed: "It's way more expensive than I thought it would be."
What he would not trade back
Someone in the UK once asked Adrian whether he gets fed up with the fake niceness. "First of all, I don't think it's fake," he told them, "but I'm enjoying it a lot more than the real negativity that I'm used to."
Building a business is hard anywhere. Some days you go home wanting the day to end. In Austin, he said, it feels different. Blue skies, a beer, the sunset with his family. "It's just a cool place to work hard."
He still runs a business in England and deals with people there every day. "I'm not going back."
Work with In2America
In2America helps international founders make their first US hires, employ their team compliantly in any state, and get the personal side of the move right as well as the business side. If the US could be your biggest market, talk to us before you make the jump.
