Europe does have a few issues that make it unnecessarily hard to build successful startups here. People do start companies here but more often than not success is followed by US investment and before you know it the company is headquartered in the US. There are many reasons for that but a big one has to be that raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard. Investors drag their heels, founders have to take on more risk, etc.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
That's much less of a thing in the US (though it is a bit of a thing there too between states). And that's before you consider language and cultural differences. Simply put, the same company in the EU will have a very hard time growing compared to doing that in the US. Being successful in the US market, means having the deep pockets to go international. Doing the same from a small country means you barely have enough to expand to another small country. Going international is hard work. Not something you do with your MVP. It's not very scalable either: you need to worry about cultural differences, bureaucracy, localization, understanding the local market, ramping up sales, marketing, etc. Especially with SAAS companies this is super expensive.
I would say that banking in Europe is much better developed than in the US. In the US, we still have checks and you need to pay for wire transfers (what???). Doing taxes in the US is 10 times more complicated than it is in Europe, and CPAs are only interested to doing them for you if you are a cookie cutter case and easy to make money off. Otherwise, good luck getting a call back. That doesn't happen in Europe. You hire an accountant, he does his job.
Entrepreneurship in the US is not easier than it is in Europe, IMHO. Raising money or scaling might be easier.
In my experience, I've been dealing with constant discrimination in the US. It is claimed that where you are from or what your social status is, doesn't matter, in silicon valley (or California in general). People are nice, they smile, but it's mostly fake. You remain a foreigner, who should still work for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy league school, even though you have the same credentials and graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy league degree on top of that).
Raising money in the US? No different than in Europe, at least in my experience. Again, no network = no raise. And you will need to overcome the above discrimination or at least the idea that you might "go back" any time, even if you are a permanent resident.
All this sounds brutal, and maybe hard to take, but I just say it like it is, and I prefer to be honest and straightforward and share my first hand experience.
Bingo. There's a set of something like ten schools from which Silicon Valley companies hire.
If you're not from one of those, you will be cordially invited to eat shit.
This.
I am European but live and work in US. Simply put, US wins hands down because they:
- have resources, read $$$$
- take risk
- have the right entrepreneurial mindset
Europe? let's just say they are not even close.
But the systems are built differently, usually turned specifically to succeed fast and loud at the cost of individual comfort. For instance, where I come from in France, you would keep a useless, even toxic, employee for months for fear of the firing trial, but where I am now we can all be dismissed arbitrarily with a month notice, and that makes the hiring very different: people have a strict behavior feedback loop, where they need to change to stay somewhere, companies have no pressure on lowering hiring because of legal issues, employees can always always find better.
This turns a population of mild puppies into a fastly rotating workforce cross pollinating at light speed and I admit I think Europe can never win against people who built such systems. It's just not the same game anymore.
Particularly, Atmel made the last 8-bit microprocessor which was just a bit more carefully thought out than everything else on the market and carefully positioned to give a lot of bang per buck.
Atmel got bought by Microchip (San Jose, USA)
Today when I think of Europe I think of those annoying popups which (I think) were a "normalization of deviance" for annoying and harassing UI elements on web sites... I mean, this one is required, virtuous, etc. so it is OK to nag people to get their email address, open a new window every time you click on a search result (Bing) so you'll accidentally click on an ad when handling way too many tabs
There was something anti-user about the GDPR popup that "broke the dam" for other bad practices, as well meaning as it is. It might pour sand into the wheels of the data economy, but it made it impossible to be an advocate of the user in most organizations. (e.g. if you can't reject that one, what can you reject?)
So maybe Israel is doing quite well, but I know from experience that it would also do massively better if it had the size of the USA.
1. The culture is risk taking, with failure an opportunity to try something else. There is no (or little) negative social or professional connotation with failure, unlike say Europe.
2. Thinking is global market first rather than local or regional market. The local market is tiny and there is no regional market.
3. Out-of-the box thinking is the norm and excellent. It’s in-the-box thinking that is problematic in Israel. In Europe the reverse is generally the case.
Also, Israel has a large jewish community in the US involved with the financial sector that wields quite a bit of political power. And Israel uses English as a second language inside Israel, and is culturally closely aligned with the US.
Perhaps not in developers, but it is where it matters: most upper and middle managers. There's an incredibly conservative, risk-averse attitude. If you're risk-averse, all you see are cost centres, not investment opportunities, pivots and new revenue sources. This has a knock-on effect on the requirements for SaaS vendors.
You have a point about a heterogeneous markets and legal systems. What you're possibly also missing is Europe has a huge public sector compared to the US. That sector doesn't tend to focus on innovation at all, unless it's part of the war machine.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
But that’s just a rephrasing of the same problem. If all of the top creative talent is leaving then Europe has a talent problem.
Europe needs to make it attractive to innovate there. It will let the locals stay and, if it’s working well, attract people from all over the world.
The language barriers are a lame excuse. It’s 100% all of the bureaucracy and anti-business experimenting mindset.
And if so, what priority should be given to "ease of rapid growth for startups" vs many other issues that determine economic growth and a population's well being?
Also, how much of the problem is due to the issues you raise vs other factors such amount of money spent in R&D? The US has a huge amount of "defense spending" but in fact a lot of that is dedicated to funding research in Universities and direct job creation. Maybe Europe just needs more research Universities, more labs and more state investment into technology. The recent Moderna breakthrough was in part due to a $25 million DARPA investment into the RNA vaccine idea.
As for the issues you mention; solving bureaucratic issues would make things more efficient, and it is definitely desirable. However, I would argue that a heterogeneous market (in terms of language and culture) is more of an advantage than a liability.
Having many cultures and languages could be akin to having biodiversity. Different outlooks in life, different ways of expressing ideas, different ways of thinking can contribute to the development of culture and technology. Look at the Galapago effect that languages had in early computing. The Japanese were able to develop their own vision of "computing" and came up with their own innovations due in part that early western computers couldn't handle Japanese.
Languages and cultures can serve as natural protectionist barriers that allow for each region to develop their own home industries, allowing them to catch up to the world while retaining significant chunks of new wealth creation for their own. Yes, wealth creation is good, but its also important to look at how wealth is distributed. Very unequal societies can break down and lose their cohesion. Cohesion and trust are important features of rich countries. Perhaps many of the issues the US dealing with is because of the huge level of inequalities it has.
Finally, is translation and localization really that hard? Is it that expensive to hire some sales & marketing staff in new markets where you could be making tons of money? I bet translation costs and such are less than a percentage of what Google spent expanding its search engine.
Generally, successful technology businesses have low marginal cost to serve new customers. You pay some amount X, to setup in a market and then can scale out relatively cheaply.
The US is great because you pay X once, and then scale quite a lot. Each European country requires that you pay X (or maybe X/4), but it essentially acts as a tax which reduces margins.
Languages/cultures are hard, yo.
Isn’t that the point? Europeans individually are creative but there’s not a reward system in place for them, thus they flee to the US.
Sort of like European basketballers coming to the US or the opposite with soccer players.
What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of hundred actually are successful. This kills business models which cannot show any profit whatsoever, and a large portion of the remainder are killed by data regulations forbidding "alternate paths of monetization" (to put it charitably.)
Rather, a problem is that once a European project becomes successful enough, it soon becomes an American project, either by acquisition or by moving to where the investment money is.
The thing that separate the internet economy with the traditional is the massive network effects that makes it a winner take all game. And at that game the USA has a massive home advantage with a huge cultural, legal and financially unified market. In Europe you start in a small country then face big barriers to expand out of it, which slows growth enough that you never get to get competitive by the time the much better funded American competitor comes to crush you.
And then it's game over, because you only get one shot at being the monopoly. Once you have a Facebook, you can't have a second one, even with all the VC cash, talent & creativity in the world. Notice that the USA did not succeed in building a competitor to Google, Youtube, Facebook, or Amazon, so how could Europe, or anybody else ?
Well the Chinese and the Russian could, by banning American monopolies from their own markets, which let them built monopolies on their own, & then attempt to conquer the rest of the world with them.
The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them.
And that's what Europe should do, ban American Monopolies. If we would ban facebook, instagram, youtube, etc, we'd have solid equivalents in a year, and from there enough cash flow to fund a next generation of startups.
That's not how it works, just look at MySpace. Even sites with a lot of market share are sometimes overtaken by a competitor.
The best alternative to Facebook in a fragmented market like Europe is federation across multiple social "hosting" sites with a regional focus, based on standards that are either in place already or being worked on. This can exploit even stronger platform effects than a conventional one-size-fits-all solution like Facebook.
Google and YT are in a different position since they're actually solving hard resource problems (Video streaming at scale is hard; building a usable crawl of the Web is also hard); much of their success comes from addressing these in a way that is compelling for users.
You're ignoring that all of this money initially came from massive investment by the Defense Advanced Projects Administration (DARPA) which funded the semiconductor industry in its infancy, which funded the creation of the Internet, which funded the creation of mainframes, which funded the creation of personal computers, and continues to provide massive funding to tech companies. Heck, their decision to choose Microsoft DOS over IBM OS/2 for the US DOD literally solidified its rise as the dominant operating system. It's requirement that all parts must be multi-source-able is why AMD and Via were created as additional manufacturers of x86 processors. But it also funded PowerPC and even provided significant funding to ARM.
Sure, we don't have much socialism here (USDA farm "subsidies" not included), but we do have very strong, protectionist-welfare capitalism.
So you had the combined might of the US government founding the creation of the computing industry. That let companies take massive risks which left tons of people making tons of money before private VC even really became interested. The IPOs of the original tech companies funded the creation of half of the current major VC funds.
Russia didn't ban American monopolies, they were outcompeted fair and square by the more focused local companies. For some time, at least. It took years for Google to catch up with Yandex in search quality in Russian language, and Facebook's clone is imo still better than Facebook itself in every way, no wonder it's still more popular there.
The appearance that Chinese companies have advantages over foreign companies comes from a combination of factors: local culture, understanding of the market, much much faster and fierce competition (If speed and competition in international market is 2, in China its 10. For example, Uber left China's market not because of regulatory, regulatory was equal to Didi and uber at the time, but Uber and Didi was locked into extremely heated competition at that time, both sides were pouring money down the drain. It was most likely a business decision. Alibaba's taobao vs Amazon.com, taobao was very competitive and played to the Chinese culture advantage very well. Taobao created 11/11 singles day in 2009 and hit a cord with Chinese people, even becoming a cultural phenomenon). But let say if Google/Facebook funded a team in China to create a targeted product for the Chinese market, they could have a a significant presence in the market.
The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them.
And this take is just hot garbage.
Might this be a flip side of regulations that combat economic inequality?
If so, the two should not be addressed as separate issues. But frontpage HN posts tend to be "Applauding Europes' long vacations and progressive taxes" and "Bemoaning Europe's lack of VCs with fuck you money".
For example free education improves a software company's hiring prospects as there are lots of employee candidates available with good education. In some countries social mobility is a real thing. As a practical counter example, Sweden has massive taxation and something like most billionaires per capita and a very vibrant software and startup scene.
One could actually do some kind of survey what happens to European software companies. Take for example this one started by three Danish guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland
I wonder if Sweden has higher funding than the rest of the continent?
This was at a time when the US was actually more egalitarian than Europe.
correct me if i'm wrong, Europe is dominated by legacy business/banks that normally won't take such risk. legacy business like BMW. European and Asian want to see you have some success or already making money before they invest. while American will throw money into something that just an idea.
" For one, we lack the imagination and vision to launch something without knowing how it might eventually make money. "
tells a different message, than just
"Europe lacks imagination."
That's not a problem, that's the solution. There's some other problems causing the need for this solution.
It also strikes me as really inaccurate. If anything, a lot of Europeans value creativity and cultural interests over raw productivity or money.
Or that people pay great % in tax and they cannot afford to save their own money to start a business. They need to apply for government grants instead (which people who decided about them can be corrupt) or share their business with someone from the start. That's a buzz killer.
Funnily big corporation are free to avoid tax as they please, because the high earners won't even turn to the streets to protest so they can be taxed through the nose.
Boy, you would make one offended American...
Why then did Airbus put their VC arm [1] right slap-bang in the middle of Silicon Valley?
Note. In this case, its Europe bringing/managing the capital - they are choosing - all by themselves - where to find the talent.
You'd have to ask them, but I'd posit that it's simply because SV is where all the meetings are.
It's extremely common to siphon the most promising projects or ideas to the HQ. Keep the golden egg hen close to home.
Once the project becomes successful people will ignore or quickly forget where the idea came from.
In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
A lot of third world countries are years ahead of the whole EU continent in that aspect. I say this because I live in Europe for the quality of life, come from a third world country, and I see how kids and adults are spoiled here. Much of what they have was just given to them. At least for the strong countries in west EU, lifestyle is very relaxed and any ambitious is frowned upon, it is extremely demotivating, not to mention bureaucracy. Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what.
I find for me more likely to save some money, move to my country and create my own business and sell in Europe. People here are too lazy to compete in the fast world we live in, there in my country there is so many skilled people, so little capital, here is the reverse. Good amount of capital and foreigners working in tech. For instance, I live in Berlin and almost all the "working people" from tech companies here are foreigners. Germans are generally the executives and/or management. It is quite rare to find a german software developer on Startups.
I personally think(my opinion, not the ultimate truth)... that Europe is definitely a very interesting market for companies to come here and sell their stuff, but not to make it.
Instead I think Europe should focus on its strengths, which is healthy market regulations, creating a good playing field for companies from above, rather on its weaknesses. It should also figure out a way to keep part of the profits inside the continent to benefits its inhabitants.
More important than competing is to know where and when to compete.
The US has those things and it's turning into a "third world country with a Gucci belt" (as someone put it) for everyone except the 1% and the indispensable knowledge worker class that can't be automated away or juiced dry for all the productivity they are capable of.
"Flexible working laws" and "less relaxing lifestyle" to me translates as "light a fire under their ass until they are forced to innovate", while "big growth mindset" and "ambitious people" translate as "hustle culture", which I consider toxic in its very nature.
As a European, I can only hope that our culture doesn't degrade itself to that degree.
I get the distinct impression that people who liken the US to a third world country are from one particular spot on the political spectrum. This seems like political rhetoric, not a summary of some level-headed analysis. Inequality, crime, etc in the US are certainly problems, but that seems like a low bar for the "third world country" label (with or without the 'gucci belt' modifier). At best it's unhelpful, but I think it's probably just inaccurate considering how many people from actual second and third world countries are risking their very lives to get in, not to mention divisive.
The question is whether Europe will be able to maintain its wealth - which is the main thing that makes possible the luxury of having a more relaxed lifestyle - in the long term while falling behind economically. Most of Europe's wealth is based around old world economy.
If there's one thing that consistently fosters innovation and progress it's competition. That's something that holds true everywhere. Software, industry, education, games, sports, you name it.
Ultimately, it still comes down to execution, laws, the state of a market and personal preferences. Both forms can be toxic.
The median American is much richer than the median European.
I am not a fan of unbridled capitalism a la the USA and fully agree that more countries should strive to reach European levels of worker and civil rights... however, there is validity to the statement that Europe is currently coasting along on the spoils of centuries of loot and plunder. A lavish, comfortable lifestyle was handed to the citizens of western europe and many of their older firms have struggled to innovate as technology has spread across the globe. There is a good reason why a fast moving industry like tech has taken root in the US while Europe as a whole is playing catch up.
The US will solve its problems, i have full faith in that country's ability to rise to the challenge as they have done numerous times in the past. Europe's problems with tech innovation run deep and go beyond simply vacation days and worker rights. Look no further than the current spree of tech regulation. I wish more countries did that but there is a fundamental problem - the EU is trying to legislate without having a good alternative.
My prediction - If the US resolves its immigration system and allows more talent to flow in without having to worry about a visa, European skilled immigration is toast.
It's been that way for 150 years at least (read the stories of relatively well paid American GI's in UK WW2), no signs of changing just yet.
I wonder if it's a culture problem or a scale problem or both.
My brother works long hours for a company that recently raised 20 millions, all of that in France. Europe is composed of many people, and many of them have a big growth mindset and ambitions. Ambition is not frowned upon, at least not in my circles. Bureaucracy is surprisingly easy to deal with.
The other thing is that people from Europe already know that if they want to work hard and earn lots of money, they can just go to the USA. But things are changing and now people build things in Europe. I think you have a very reductive vision of European people. I'll also add that "Europe" doesn't have a culture as a whole. I'm French, I'm surprised by how Italians do things, same with Germans. We are composed of different countries with rich histories and culture. Grouping everything as "European" is the same as saying "African", it hides most of the reality and complexity of the world.
False. Sweden is in the top 10 competitive nations in the world. And it is because it has a relaxing lifestyle, support for children and parents, etc.
If desperate people was more innovative or productive, the list of successful USA entrepreneurs would not be filled with upper-class or rich businessman.
Easy of mind, education and time creates opportunity. Desperation only leads to bad decisions.
Late years Sweden in going down because it is moving towards more neo-liberal policies, thou.
And I would say that going from the world's highest tax rates (% of GDP) to the world's fourth highest rate does not make Sweden neo-liberal. We have also had a Social Democrat prime minister since 2014 and a government that relies on support from the former Communist party, so we are not quite a neo-liberal utopia yet.
For a brilliant 20 year old German in 2005 becoming a primary school teacher or a pencil pusher in a random government office would have been a better option than working in tech. With "better option" I mean double salary, double pension, better healthcare, more holidays. So it shouldn't surprise anybody if foreigners are overrepresented in tech jobs in Germany, and it has nothing to do with European lazyness (had you said risk-aversion I could have agreed).
I think there is a cycle here where because working with software is considered low status, many good software people leave, and lots of smart people probably do not go into the field at all unless they truly love software. This would tend to drive the talent pool down, IMO, which keeps away good software jobs, keeping it low status.
In the US for example writing software is usually considered wholly different from “IT” whereas in Europe IT encompasses both. That’s probably another thing bringing its status down. You are grouping software engineers with people plugging in printers and solving Karen’s support ticket (no offense IT people).
> Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what
Has this happened to you?
Plenty of small business where I stand, and this lifestyle fits them perfectly, there is no desperation to survive. Not every business has to be about growth.
I think what you’re seeing is the result of policies that increase quality of life. So Germany has to import someone like you, from a third world country, that will accept the pay and have “ambition”. It goes both ways.
> I see how kids and adults are spoiled here
I think what you're seeing is how people are meant to be treated.
Maybe the German software developers don't want to work for a startup sweat shop?
And yet Silicon Valley lies in one of the states with the most employee friendly regulation in the US wrt worker protection, paid overtime etc.: https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Bes...
This keeps the companies competing.
They mention it's very hard to change careers in their country with a more 'hierarchical' and rigid culture and mobility is limited.
Totally different when they move and appreciate the mobility, freedom and opportunities.
You would be more to the point if we were talking about the industrial era which can automate even the experience into machinery.
But things like software are heavily based on knowledge retention.
Knowledge retention is about attracting talent, and make sure they evolve their knowledge and keep that knowledge there.
So you need a good quality of life, career and financial possibilities, good universities, a good culture with individual freedoms.
Its all about the "human gold". And the countries that will retain this sort of talents are cannot be optimized to also be industrial powerhouses, because the balances are different.
Anyway remote labor will change things a lot also, and we will see how things will turn out. But work and quality of life balance will become really important, and industrial sweat shops wont be as attractive in my opinion.
I hope that talent get more spread out instead of concentrated as is now, giving we are going more remote..
Anyway, i guess a lot of parts of EU will become more palatable as the physical place where you are at become less important.
I predict that small towns in Italy, Portugal or France with mostly old people will get more trendy giving the houses will be more affordable and people will be able to create their kids in a more healthy environment.
Pandemic will change faster the assumptions we had about how we should live our lives, and i think loneliness will hurt us more as the value of money compared to what is lost by pursuing it will become less appealing.
The industrial era wisdom will get reviewed and some things wont make any sense anymore. (For instance, packing too many people in gigantic towns, lowering the quality of life, country life will get more trendy with time in my opinion, people living in small communities of 20 families in rural areas)
One reason is that I can be paid three times more in the US, and with the extra disposable income, I can live a better life, even without the legal protections.
Second reason is that, why should the kids even bother studying computer science for 4-6 years to earn 3k per month? A plumber here can charge 100 per hour and does not require any formal educational training.
But to lift up the nation, you need regulations, competence at all levels.
'Google' is a tiny project relative to America. Most countries are 99% about the basic things: roads, bridges, hospitals, carpenters, governance, food etc..
There are enough groups of ambitious people to form networks of that. In Paris and London people move, it's the same in most countries.
Because they probably already left for Switzerland or North American, where they can get paid much better salaries.
poverty
>a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
all I see is `""hackers"" sitting 10h a day working while believing they're saving world`
There needs to be a source for this.
This doesn't really make sense to me. The EU is a clear leader in other industries compared to the US, just not in the tech industry. In terms of national security and stability, I'd say any of these companies are much more important than any tech company. If the market here for innovation is so bad, why are these companies leaders in their industry?
A few examples I can think of off the top of my head:
- automotive (Volkswagen, Daimler, Bosch)
- industrial equipment (Siemens, ABB)
- railroad (Siemens, Alstom)
- telecoms (Ericson, Nokia)
- chemicals (BSAF, Ineos)
- food and drink (anything from France, Italy or Spain :D)
The same argument could be made about the European film scene (check out how many Hollywood blockbusters are remakes of great European movies), the European music scene and the European literature scene to greater or lesser degree.
But you know what? It's fine. There is plenty of quality software in Europe, and as long as those companies don't get bought out by the handful of runaway American successes they can grow and do just fine. They tend to be better at customer service, they tend to be better at addressing multi-lingual markets at an earlier stage in their development than their American counterparts and they are active in important fields.
The thing that America excels at is advertising and simply making money. But there is more than that in this world.
I can’t help thinking of Qwant, the alternative privacy-aware European search engine. Their financial standing is so dire that this week they had to ask money from Huawei. [1]
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/french-search-engine-qwant-h...
It already does. Look at the very large number of open source projects (like Linux) that originated or received substantial contributions from continental European volunteers.
What Europe doesn't have is a strong VC infrastructure or a large density of software engineers in any given location to simplify growth scaling.
Some of these are changing. Whether they will change fast enough to compete in software is another story, but it's very likely that Europe will be better positioned to take advantage of the next tech revolution. You can already see this in biotech.
For all the disagreements here, look at where people move. Only around 5% of EU citizens live and work in an [edit: EU] country other than their own and a large slice of that is people from the east moving west. Only a sliver is highly skilled work and the majority is semi-skilled or low-skilled. The EU loves to boast about how freedom of movement of people is an important pillar but getting it to work over the long term is still a bureaucratic nightmare.
Meanwhile, the US continues to vacuum up talent from across the world despite an utterly broken immigration system. Heck, even Canada is a top destination for talent due to its proximity to the US.
Consider these data points:
1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you still see echoes of this "pioneering" culture and I think it's no accident that the peak of the frontier, the Wild West, and homesteading in general have been deeply mythologized.
But look at TV shows like Gold Rush or Deadliest Catch. Whatever creative license is taken here, you still have people who will take the risk of working a dangerous and dirty job for a share of the proceeds.
The average American just seems to have more of an appetite for risk than at least anywhere I've been in Europe.
2. The much-discussed "Protestant work ethic". As exploitative as it is (and it is exploitative), the willingness of Americans to work all the time has an effect that I don't think you can dismiss.
3. Being comfortable makes you more risk-averse, even lazy. We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent. These are all good things. The upside of not having those things, if there is one, is that (IMHO) people have a greater motivation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. It just... is.
4. 330M people most of whom speak one language (English obviously). You can't argue that this doesn't make things easier.
5. The barrier to education that is cost with a legacy admissions system led to the endowment system that created venture capital.
For the record, I'm Australian not American and the above isn't intended to extol the virtues of American culture. For example, the fact that a near-majority of the US thinks it's acceptable that a trip to the ER can bankrupt a significant portion of the population is cruel, even reprehensible.
EDIT: corrected less risk-averse to more risk-averse.
Do you mean more risk-averse? Anyway, to comment on this point. Non-Europeans, get quite a few things mixed up.
>We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent.
The bigger problem is two-fold and has to do with your second point:
1. Europeans have very set schedules, which has only started to erode with younger generations. Summer for vacation. Evening and weekend for relaxation. Weekdays for work. This encompasses almost every hour of a person's life, each year. If you have an idea you can execute alone and deviate from this pattern, great. If you don't and need someone else, good luck finding like-minded people, as you're already a very unique individual. If you can somehow accumulate enough wealth or get an investment, you could hire people instead. Yet, that's tough for younger people to do, and older people will slowly settle in their ways. Also, related to point 1, Europeans typically don't venture very far away from their childhood friends and family unlike Americans having no qualms uprooting their past lives.
2. Europeans don't universally have 6-8 weeks of vacation and 35 hour work weeks. Most of the younger middle class or upper middle class is likely to work 40h weeks and has 3-4 weeks of vacation, as well as some loose mandatory holidays. Loose mandatory holidays kinda suck to work with for bigger projects, at best you can weave them together with your PTO. Even working 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started doing, still leaves your head with the job 4 out of 7 days and mentally complex things require pretty big context shifts. The structure of this free time is more positioned as "regular bigger breaks from work" rather than "now I can take time off from my job for a long time and focus on my own stuff". Either way, nothing beats just taking a year off to work on yourself or your own ideas.
I do. Thanks. Corrected.
> Europeans have very set schedules
That's another way of describing conformity, in this case to cultural norms.
The best way I can describe it is like this: in the UK (and the US), the default position is that things are allowed unless they're specifically forbidden. In continental Europe, it's the reverse: everything is disallowed unless it's specifically permitted.
This was evident to me from the time that I lived in Germany and Switzerland at least.
Disruptive businesses aren't created by conformists.
those are like a few days per year
it's maybe relevant once or twice a year
>Even working 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started doing
? first time I hear about this in Eastern EU
The US as a country was founded on very high risk. It makes sense that this remains in the culture today.
I don't think that European policies (vacation, universal health care, etc) are the cause of Europe being more risk averse. I think it's the other way around. We have those policies because we have a more risk averse culture compared to the US.
This isn't a bad thing per se. The problem is that we live in an age where technological innovation is fueling the global economy, and there is no innovation without risk.
I know Australians have are able to easily get a work visa to go to America. The cultural shock must be pretty big once they're actually expected to work a full day, though I guess the salary increase makes up for it.
Are you implying that this is a bad thing? Having time to actually enjoy life seems to be very underappreciated here.
- Australians would complain that their American counter-parts were burning themselves out and ignoring structural issues impacting their productivity. Or outright accusations of "you working harder than us makes us look bad" - classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
- Americans would complain that the Australians were lazy and not pulling their weight.
Jeremy Howard (Fast AI) had a talk that hit home when discussing startups in AU vs US, why he left and why he came back:
Are EU countries not the same? Genuinely don't know how English is perceived in these countries.
Although this is probably much easier for India since it is one country.
So all the languages of EU members are officially recognized. This has become increasingly unwieldy as you need translators in the EU Parliament for every combination and there probably aren't that many people who can translate Portugese to Estonian, for example.
There have been proposals over time to instead translate into a particular language. This has been resisted heavily by the French in particular because everyone knows that intermediate language would be English.
English really is the lingua franca at this point.
Additionally the presidency of the EU rotates every 6 months (IIRC), which has created its own problems. For example, when potential new members were negotiating the then-French EU president wanted to negotiate in French but (IIRC) new members tend to default to English.
If you look at number of proficient speakers, English is by far the most spoken language followed distantly by German, French and Italian (in that order). And this is still true even after the UK has left the EU.
English, French and German are the procedural languages of the European Commission.
English has clearly won here but there is a lot of resistance to this linguistic hegemony (as many see it). The French have a ministry to find new words for things to stop English loan words seeping in. Many people in many EU member states don't want to lose their culture and language. And I can understand that.
But, going back to the original point: people need to communicate. English is the natural means for that. As a result many people spend a lot of time and effort trying to preserve the status quo. This is another facet of conformity, in this case conforming to historical traditions and languages.
People who obsess about preserving language and culture aren't the people who start massively disruptive businesses.
Do you mean 21 voices each with their own culture and chauvinism ?
I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest barrier for any person who wants to launch something is: paperwork around establishing a company. In some countries you have to pay every month some amount of money if you want to be a freelancer, in others you need to setup a sole proprietorship, in others the distinction is not that clear. In almost every country in Europe (perhaps with the exception of the UK) the whole process is cumbersome. Young people who are willing to launch some projects online don't want to mess up with taxes authorities nor lawyers nor the commerce chamber... and hence they decide not to launch anything at all. Besides, setting up a company costs money (perhaps not much).
I live in Europe. I don't want to setup a damn company for every little project I may think it can become big. I want to let my projects grow in the wild, and if any of them get traction then sure, I will setup a company without fear of losing money.
Also: being a software engineer/computer programmer in Europe is not as sexy as it is in USA. It's getting better, yes, but here the "engineer" is the last monkey. Managers and sales are the ones who get the credit. So, European mentality also plays a role here.
Seriously? Your plumber managed to establish a company. That kebab place across the street. The delivery guy subcontracting for courier service. And the company that wants to conquer the world can't?
And many more things.
> I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest barrier for any person who wants to launch something is: paperwork around establishing a company.
I don't think that is true for the type of company that is described by the line you're replying to. Starting a company is not that hard. Starting a company without even knowing what its eventual business model will be, purely banking on growth for growth's sake, that requires a vast amount of investment with very little guarantees of a return. And that is hard to get in Europe! Much harder than merely starting a company is. I have been part of one such startup for a short time years ago, and I thought it was a complete scam, so unused was I to that type of company. I've never seen any since.
> In some countries you have to pay every month some amount of money if you want to be a freelancer,
Yes, but freelancing isn't the topic.
However, I have a feeling that companies that just want to grow big and are unclear on what their business model will be when they are, are not exactly working on the most important problems. So maybe it's not all bad for Europe.
Like, it definitely is a barrier for trivial hobby projects, if you whip something up in a single day and don't want to spend any more time on it, then this becomes a problem, but it's not a meaningful barrier for any actual project on which you're working every week that brings you some revenue.
Eventually those manager and sales people will learn that they need developers to build stuff, or else they can't manage anyone because nothing has been built or sell products that don't exist.
The "bourgeoisie" never really figured out they needed workers to run the mines...
and it's structured in the form of useless middlemen `consulting` companies going by the names of (Atos, Alten, Accenture, ...)
finding a job in tech related industries means most probably going through them, and in practice they value business school people and management types way more than the lowly engineer.
Europe lacks on marketing, distribution and ability to acquire and lock-in users, fast. This has been the american recipe to success time and again, not the quality of consumer-facing products which has been going downhill for a decade now. We can't bet on EU as a whole to create an ecosystem, instead the best use of EU funds would be for states to run the most basic consumer services for free for their citizens (such as email or a mastodon instance). It will be sub-par but it will at least create an alternative due to the EU's large distribution mechanism.
(Slightly edited) copy-paste:
Economist ran an article on this: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora...
We're in the service economy now, and Europe has no real single market for services, due to all kinds of national regulations that differ throughout the block. Nor does it have well-developed financial and labor markets, partly also because they are currently partitioned by nationality. Its stock exchanges are too many and too small, etc. The list goes on.
For many big European companies, an astounding percentage of revenue comes from the US or China. But if you start a startup building for US/China from the start, why would you want the HQ to be somewhere in Europe?
This also means that the story is very very different for products that can be shipped in boxes. Europe does extremely well in cars, beverages, clothing, chemicals and that sort of thing. Also electrical utilities for some reason.
I am struggling to think of European success stories in the traditional desktop app space - apps that have international reach and name recognition. I can only think of a handful desktop apps:
- Sketch (Netherlands)
- Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher (UK)
- Cinema4D (Germany)
Who else enjoys international success for their desktop apps? What about SaaS?
The apps above specialise in a particluar field (design and 3D animation), but missing are any apps in the "office productivity" category which seem completely dominated by tech giants like Microsoft and Google.
Note: I purposely did not mention SAP because no-one looks to SAP as a source of inspiration. Their enterprise apps are expensive and clunky.
There is always talk about a european market, but it is more like 27 markets with one access ticket.
You have 27 languages, 27 cultures, 27 political systems, 27 markets, 27 levels of development and infrastructure. Although you have a market of 300 million consumers, they all have different spending habits, different spending power, different needs...
America is one market of 300 million people, with roughly the same culture, the same language, the same laws and political system and has been exporting it's language and power through out the last 100 years, so your market is probably double the size of your population.
There is also success stories of european players: Zalando, Delivery Hero. Sap has some very innovative departments, but their Reputation all in all is shite, yes.
Also most of souther europe doesn't have the get rich quick mentality. They live by "dolce vita" - the good life. Nobody is gonna be bending over backwards here to become a millionaire anytime soon. They happily live with 20k€ a year and their families and Relationships.
I still hate the shitty software we make here in europe/germany but we are working hard here to improve that. And if a european company tells you they offer a API or Service, they probably wont shut it down because it went out of falvour this month.
Sometimes it seems that Northern Europeans think that the southern European is the noble savage of the developed world.
I'll speak for Italy, not having direct experience of other southern European countries. Taxes are very high, bureaucracy is omnipresent and openly hostile. A friend of mine once won a price for an invention, ~5K euros. The money was barely enough to register the company (not to pay for an office, just to register a company, a procedure that in the UK would cost 20£). The process took months. Salaries are much lower than in other European countries and people work longer hours, people of my age have been employed at-will for almost their whole careers. Unpaid overtime is the norm. Companies are small, do not provide chances to grow professionally and do not invest, productivity is low and unpaid overtime is often a means to compensate. At least once in everybody's life, your boss would come to you saying that there isn't enough money to pay your salary this month. Working hard simply doesn't matter, many software developers and translators and designers and whatnot earn as much as janitors. I don't come from southern Italy, where I suspect the situation is even worse.
In this context, you don't "happily" live with 20K euros per annum, you just have to accept that. And you have to live with your family because you can't afford otherwise. If you are lucky enough to get a government job or to retire early (which since the 70s have been the government's favourite ways of tackling unemployment), you may get a chance of enjoying this "dolce vita" of yours.
i was thinking about that.
that's 27 smaller markets compare to one US or China market. you have to deal with 27 regulations and cultures. is that even worth the time and efforts?
If I look at most of my European sales they are in Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. The UK was in that list until Brexit.
I don't think you need to target all 27, at least not until you are well established.
- It is difficult to issue equity and get equity (tax)
- Each EU country has different taxes. You are taxed lower in Netherlands than in Germany.
- Each country has different regulation rules. If you do something exciting. Wow let's say a social network. You would be killed by regulation and data privacy rules. Autonomous driving the same. Blockchain forget it.
- Ideology driven investments. Maybe just a feeling. But nearly on each event green energy seems to be the hot topic. It is kind of political driven. Like everyone should jump on the green energy train. It is harder to get funding for more exotic topics...
There's plenty of both in the EU. And blockchain is more useful as a counter-example of innovation than anything.
Blockchain: IT is controversial about the usefulness. But it is far more easier to make (legal) money with it outside of EU or in some small crypto friendly EU countries.
"killed by regulation and data privacy rules"
Funny to see the same people that bemoan the privacy rules being now forced to follow them due to Apple and Google. Seems like they'll have to actually sit and think how to do instead of complaining.
Linux Skype Spotify Mojang (Minecraft) Rovio (Angry Birds) SoundCloud Klarna MySQL Opera Qt
Even Tidal, Rdio and Beats Music can trace their ancestry to this region.
Not to mention the only(?) remaining competition to Chinese telecom, Ericsson and Nokia, following the defeat of Lucent, Nortel, Siemens et al.
With this perspective, perhaps it can be argued that speaking of Europe as a whole in this sense is unproductive.
In the U.S., going into a tech career can be one of the best ways to make a high salary quickly -- especially without needing an advanced degree. Without this incentive, you'll have a lot less people pursuing education and careers in these areas.
A software engineer makes like 50% more salary (let alone all of the other stuff) in the Bay Area as they do in London. London is a really expensive city that pays certain industries a ton of money.
--> better engineers
--> more successful/innovative company
--> company generates more revenue
--> company can pay higher
--> better engineers
First-party can turn it into a cat-and-mouse game where they'll introduce some minor changes that require third-party apps to be updated over and over again. We've seen this happen with some education related app / system in Sweden where people built a better third-party app / client.
Finding a decent, enforceable solution this way is certainly not trivial.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
The article isn't about that at all?
Problem solved.
Europeans get their own tech stack. Can compete again with US companies, as the all the cost for building infrastructure is externalized.
Do you remember how one company promised people a free shirt for open source contributions, and how it resulted in an epic shitstorm of garbage patches? Just a few months ago. Now, imagine this, but with actual money instead of T-shirts.
And I fully agree that FOSS should be paid collectively like civil infrastructure.
But we need to be careful with the freeloaders. Big companies coopted FOSS into unpaid labor: anything released with permissive licenses can be proprietarized by SaaS/Cloud companies. Almost always US based.
This would turn European financial contributions to FOSS into a gift for FAANGs.
This is why the European Union Public Licence is copyleft and compatible with GPL. But it's not enough.
Even when we do build infrastructure, there is 0 government support; governments or tech companies don't make any effort to bring any attention to EU open source projects.
All other countries have protectionist structures but EU imports all its tech, even though there is more than enough in-house talent to build it - They'd rather give out contracts to US and Chinese companies and have their EU citizens working for these companies as employees instead of giving their citizens a chance to actually run the companies.
I agree with this from a commenter below. In US you have so many more customers that speak your language and have your culture. You can move around and find common issues. One government. One law. So different from the EU.
I do not see a fix until government, law and language becomes unified to a common government, common law and the common language.
For example, the recent battle in California over how "gig economy" workers are classified:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22
Or, the problem of figuring out where you can sell your micro-mobility vehicle:
"The classification of ebikes and other forms of transport is a complex matter in the US. There are federal rules and lots of different regulations at state and city level."
https://www.mypodride.com/faqs (see the "PodRide for USA and Canada" section)
The US may be better than in the EU in this regard, but it's also not that different.
To be honest, it would be nice for Europe to handle the platforms and for the United States to go back to radical innovation. The times of emacs, vi, Bell labs, Xerox and pushing the computing medium to the edge.
European businessmans are in general very cunning and old fashioned, they don't like sharing their profits with their employees or with othere people in general.
We get to life a relatively quiet and relaxed life, but for an employee or for a young tech enterpreneur is impossibile to make nearly as much as in the US, because the "hot jobs" here in europe are not in the tech space but in the "old space": attorneys, bureucreats, medics, church people, politics, and so on. Obviously a lot of tech workers make the switch for the US or other countries.
Source: i live in Italy where a senior top-level engineer makes 40k euros/year gross, a self-employed medical doctor specialized on foot diseases makes 100/200 euros/30 minutes, evading taxes 80% of the time.
If the goal is to have a thriving economy based on writing and hosting trustworthy software then it's going to need subsidies; it costs more to pay for high quality software written by engineers protected by strong labor laws than it does to pay Silicon Valley rates with RSUs complicit in large-scale data gathering and exploitation.
Ironically in economic terms Europe (the EU and Ireland specifically) already hosts a huge fraction of FAANG profits and IP ownership/licensing due to double-Irish arrangements. They just offshore the development to the U.S. So mission accomplished I guess?
Once it became clear that ads were a bit more profitable than that, the success of Google/FB led to a tidal wave of VC capital searching for opportunities that looked just like those. So suddenly everyone is trying to give their service away for free and make it up on {ads, volume}.
I guess I feel very mixed about this, being a European who is now starting his own software company (taking a break from coding for a few mins at the moment). I remember when I was in my early 20s, before YouTube was acquired, my mother pointed at it and said, "Why couldn't you have made that?". My response was to laugh and say, mum, look, you can't pay for video streaming using banner ads. Streaming is expensive and banner ads don't earn much money.
Was I right? Wrong? I still am not sure. YouTube may or may not be profitable. It was extremely ambiguous to what extent Google's businesses outside of web and content ads made money when I was working there, although that was years ago, so of course it may be very different now. Obviously the YouTube founders did very well out of it, but their business model was basically "sell the company to someone who can save us, or die trying". Whether it's European culture or parental expectations I don't know, but deep down I didn't and still don't feel like that is a truly honourable way to create and run a business. I would feel guilty and bad if I were hiring people to a company without having the foggiest idea of how to ever pay their salaries, nor would I feel comfortable pitching to investors a firm whose business model was clearly unworkable. Yet, this is the standard business strategy in the Valley.
Years later I found myself in the offices of a16z. I wasn't there to pitch, although the receptionist assumed I was. I'd been invited to discuss an app I'd written that had attracted their attention. I told them the app was open source and I wouldn't take their money because I had no idea what its business model could be.
A mistake? Maybe. European? Very.
I could now go raise funds for my new venture, and maybe at some point I will. Plenty of investors have expressed interest. But, fundamentally, I still don't want to. It feels somehow like "cheating" to create a business that doesn't really make money. Or if not cheating then at least somehow not quite something you can be proud of. Certainly, the American way of creating a startup that loses money for years would not at all impress my friends, family or fiancé. They would in fact see that as failure, not success.
And I'm OK with that. So I'm probably destined to create another small European software company that may or may not one day sell to a bigger US firm. Don't get me wrong. I dream big. But deep down I know that if I attract too much attention I'll always be at risk of being steamrollered by a "success is failure" US VC backed company that has no idea how to become sustainable, but might somehow stumble onto a plan anyway and if it doesn't, well the VCs will force one of their other investments to make an acquihire and somehow it'll work out so that everyone can save face. Bankruptcy is after all, basically unheard of in the Valley, and spending other people's money for a decade is lionized.
[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...
[1] https://itsfoss.com/french-city-toulouse-saved-1-million-eur...
NEVER in my 30+ years as a user of computer networks or communication programs I have seen the "better software" win. It has always been the most marketing, the most shady ethics, or anything else that lead to the strongest network effect.
And a far more controversial question: would it be allowed? Or would a successful European world-dominating quasi-monopoly on the FAANG scale get banned from the US market? We've seen twitches in that direction (remember the "Tiktok will be forced to sell to Oracle" nonsense?). Or in the aerospace market, things like https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/26/bombardier-... or https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32542140 ; Boeing vs Airbus shenanigans go back a long way.
I found out the other day that one of the UK's longstanding tech companies collapsed after accidentally buying a CIA front organization for illegal arms sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti#Collapse
Or ARM: are they an "EU" tech success any more? As their ownership is passed from Japanese Softbank to US NVIDIA.
Europe is at a permanent disadvantage with language. You either target your local market in your local language, or you do English first. If you do English first, your market isn't even in your home country. Even culturally England and the USA (and AUS/NZ) are a bit different to France, Germany, Sweden and so on.
Only one "European" success I can think of whilst typing this: Spotify (anglo-swedish).
America on the other hand has access to a literally flood of venture capital money.
After it was basically the winner it brought in marketing, shady ethics and everything else to keep growing.
Google was significantly better than anything else at the time, and in spite of the problems with Google, its search result are still quite a bit better than most others I've tried.
GitHub was a huge improvement over anything that came before it, and after a review of alternatives some months ago it still clearly is the best product IMO.
Internet Explorer was a lot better than Netscape. Yes, it was a mess, but Netscape was an even bigger mess.
There are probably other examples.
Something is out of whack about the priorities here. Yes America has FANGS and is at the cutting edge of slinging ads and casino style VC culture. But have you seen the state of US banking and payments infrastructure? Plaid is pretty much cutting edge for god's sake. The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful technology it's quite funny.
Things like GDPR and OpenBanking point to an alternative way of doing technology, that to my value set is better than the ability to inflate ridiculous Uber/WeWork/etc. valuations with no correlation to real world value.
I see this said, and it was true two decades ago, but I’m not aware of any way it’s true now. What banking can you do in Europe that you can’t do in the US?
In France (Paris) its impossible to rent without earning 3 times your rent in after tax salary.
Lots of decent programmers - but if you hire them its very hard (impossible) to lay them off on a employment contract.
If you don't give them an employment contract they can't rent an apartment.
As a Director you can be held personally responsible (no corporate protection) from non salary payment or other debts.
It is very complex to give shares or options to your employees without large tax implications.
result? StationF is mostly large companies. When you hire people you really need the help of a lawyer to protect yourself.
Yes, we definitively need to overcome our software problem but we have unique assets, that if accessible only in combination europe can overcome that problem. Example: High end hardware equipment, chemicals etc. we failed to have the customer facing software platform but we‘ll get there and instead of selling ads we will create combination products. Think IKEA or VW etc
http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html
He actually has several essays on how to try to create a Silicon Valley in other geographic areas, but this seemed the most relevant.
tldr:
1. The US Allows Immigration.
2. The US Is a Rich Country.
3. The US Is Not (Yet) a Police State.
4. American Universities Are Better.
5. You Can Fire People in America.
6. In America Work Is Less Identified with Employment.
7. America Is Not Too Fussy. (If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can assume larval startups will break most of them, because they don't know what the laws are and don't have time to find out.)
8. America Has a Large Domestic Market.
9. America Has Venture Funding.
10. America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers. (Compared to other industrialized countries the US is disorganized about routing people into careers. For example, in America people often don't decide to go to medical school till they've finished college. In Europe they generally decide in high school.)
11. Attitude (There's one item conspicuously missing from this list: American attitudes. Americans are said to be more entrepreneurial, and less afraid of risk. But America has no monopoly on this. Indians and Chinese seem plenty entrepreneurial, perhaps more than Americans. Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don't believe it. I think the problem with Europe is not that they lack balls, but that they lack examples.)
(Also, I think point 4 is very field-specific. While the US may have a few institutions that are universally recognized as excellent, there are also many European ones that are phenomenal within a given field. Having a truly exceptional group within field X does not give your a university the name recognition of Stanford, but it serves the same purpose when it comes to training people in field X.)
I had an engineer tell me- in America people don't care about your title, they care about how much money you have. In Europe it's all about titles. In Japan it's about seniority.
I've had no problem picking the job that pays the highest and it changed me from chem engineer to programmer.
My peers that are obsessed with a title have fallen behind, making 80k a year as a 30 year old. I think these people have a significantly harder time finding a new job, where as being a programmer and engineer, I'm able to work in any industry.
There seems, from my experience mostly in the UK but also talking to people from round Europe, to be a big regulatory and mental impediment in most places to setting up your own business. Being an employee is safe, you get a lot of rights, your paycheck arrives the same day every month and it's actually really hard to lose that, if you are going to lose it that's a huge tragedy, and you've probably had several months notice anyway.
A lot of the middle classes in the UK would never consider trying to start a business, even though the social safety net would catch them to some extent on failure, in reality it may save you from the street but it's not likely to be much better than that. Best stick to that safe £50k a year. Which, incidentally, is considered pretty decent pay but won't leave you much to put aside to actually kick off that business idea later. Starting a business is for high flyers, finance types, other people.
You might be right about it not being lack of energy, but I think the entrepreneurial spirit in the UK is pretty suppressed. And in the EU from what I can tell it's similar, with an added side of "and the state is going to make this very difficult too".
One that stood out was that in Silicon Valley having your company go under was not really much of a setback, if at all.
In many other places in the US that looked like they had the ingredients to be a Silicon Valley if you led your company to bankruptcy, that was what did them in. The money folks would not be interested in financing you again, and you'd stop getting invited to the social and business events that the successful people get invited to so your ability to network would take a huge hit.
Startups in those places tended to be focused on safe things like trying to do something slightly better in an already well established area.
Europe should fund them heavily and by doing so give them the advertising power to compete with for-profit ones.
Otherwise they will end up squandering a lot of money, Covid apps are not a good example.[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/henwet/the_uk_...
This is not a trivial challenge though. It's basically about creating a business climate that would allow startups grow fast and capture dominating positions on both European and worldwide markets.
Funding, with all its importance (look at what DARPA funding has enabled) can only give a first impulse, help a team create a prototype of something innovative. The rest is on legislation, investing culture, taxation etc.
Or maybe it should just be called «the US Social Media problem»…
(There’s also the tax issue, but that’s mostly on countries like Ireland and The Netherlands being tax havens (UK too, but they left, kinda…))
Signal can be a perfect replacement for Whatsapp. If the EU want to spend money on maintaining, improving and deploying Signal, that'd be great.
People still won't use it, though.
It's too late. If Europe wants a slice of the market they need to make business as frictionless as possible like the USA did in the past - that will bring capital, eventually.
I think Europe has bigger problems to care about though.
We are left with US survivors in these particular cases.
Actually, most of the U.S. lack it as well, but having one Silicon Valley is much better than having zero of them.
European startups struggle to raise any money at all. (And I mean on the order of 100,000 eur, much less millions.) Our banks are extremely risk-averse and if they spend money at all, it is on projects that the political sphere supports. These tend to be duds.
For software companies, there are hardly any barriers. Gdpr and labor laws depending on country if you contract people. For both, you get someone else to do it. There are companies who do this for a monthly fee.
I have never seen a government or any regulation deliver anything "good and compelling", or take any other action to "make sure" someone else delivers it.
* US Digital Service
* 18F
* Pubmed
What?
Can you give us one example of a stellar open source UI you use daily?
You can't have everything.
Everything works perfectly already in Europe, so why let anyone rock the boat?
> In addition, with the GDPR, NIS (2) Directive & other regulations, data in Europe is definitely more “the new toxic waste”. It is in any case not a business plan.
> So not only do we lack the imagination to launch free platforms, the path to one day making money with them is blocked by regulation.
So protecting your citizens' rights and their privacy is "lack of imagination"? This is such a horrible argument. As if the only way to provide a service were to spy on your users.
I don't really think it's the argument the author is making, or if they are, they mean it sarcastically.
The frustration is with the state of affairs where American companies can destroy the entire market for software products with free services built on data mining, much like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, etc. have upended the market by completely ignoring profitability in search of marketshare.
And data mining pretty much is the only way to provide a free service and still make money.
The whole gdpr is a big mess.
In terms of investors, there is barely any seed capital. There is series A/B, but the amounts are smaller than a typical seed round. They need to see profits from day one
The only thing better than data is big data. Yet gdpr etc is basically the opposite
Worse yet the same applies to the US. Think US will lose against the Chinese model too. Not as badly as Europe given the sketchy shit US big players are allowed to do but that’s still a far cry from the collect everything model the US is up against