Comment by lawlessone

Can start with the number of unicorns in USA vs Europe, especially when you take population in to account https://www.failory.com/unicorns

> Any concrete examples you are referring to?

Entity formation time; time and capital required to hire the first N employees; number, cost and time of licensing required before first sale can be made. Each are higher in Europe. Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation.

Which, I will note, is fine. It’s optimised for stability, not wealth. On the other hand, it naturally means having to choose between American and Chinese tech giants.

The bi annual push for chat control (key „escrow”)

That's probably not an EU thing, you should consider an EU country more suitable to your line of business. Or you know, just do your thing don't bother with the regulations and pay a fine if it becomes a problem some time in the future?

Apparently Spaniards like it this way, they live long healthy lives in the system they set up for themselves.

Define success. If it's high stock market cap calculated by multiplying the number of shares with the last trade price Europe doesn't have many of those.

I bet the hardware you're running on wants to have a word.

Wether if it's from Samsung, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA or AMD. And lately, Intel too.

ASML

Adyen

Revolut

GoCardless

Shift

Vinted

…

IMHO it has nothing to do with the governments, in Europe there's no that kind of money and the investor mentality is very different than the Americans and the European culture is much less accommodating to failure.

It's the European way to roll, the Brits are trying to be a bit more like the Americans but its worlds apart. The American spirit is something else, I wish we had it in Europe but maybe its not compatible at all with the European way of life. So, if you feel adventurous, motivated and ambitious you go to USA to make it big.

Obsession with pricing the stock is not healthy.

According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh...

Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc.

US is stil ahead in some stuff but the list is getting smaller as the market caps getting bigger and people "richer".

Europe is far from noble, just different mentality and expectations from life. VW keep saying that next year VW Golf robotaxis are coming and not delivering wouldn't fly, therefore we don't have crazy stock prices.

Airbus keeps making good quality planes that don't fall from the skies, selling those then flying around. It's alright, I don't know why the government should attack Airbus but maybe the US government should have kept Boeing in check.

Europeans have their ways and Americans have theirs. Let's keep it like that and not put all the eggs in the same basket, as it appears that Chinese came up with another hugely successful economy model.

The current conflict with China has the benefit that it dropped all of them masks off. You'd be labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggested otherwise to the narrative of the free trading liberal west.

Now that the emperor is fully naked; colonialism never ceased to exist, it just took a different form. The next decade is going to be very interesting, and not in a good way.

California's tech industry works because there is a long-established tradition of lawbreaking in California. We pass all these regulations, and then ignore them. Sometimes the more enlightened legislators put in explicit carve-outs for businesses of less than 50 employees or a $B in revenue, so that startups don't have to actually break the law, they can just ignore it. But they're going to ignore it anyway, so the carve outs really serve the law's benefit rather than the startup.

In practice, the way California tech startups work is

  1) Break *all* the laws.
  2) Get customers
  3) Raise capital
  4) Profit!
  5) Hire lawyers to bring the company into compliance with the laws.
  6) Hire lobbyists to bring the laws into compliance with the company.
  7) Try to prevent your employees from doing the same thing you did.

Steps #5-6 aren't limited to a particular state. At that point, you have buckets of money anyway, so you contort your company structure and product into a configuration that is legal in as many jurisdictions as possible, including internationally.

You’re discounting the fact that there’s plenty of internal movement in Europe - I worked with a French firm that had a bunch of Italians, some Swiss, an Englishman, two Spaniards and a bunch of Russians working there along with the French people, all living around and working in their Paris office.

It wouldn’t be that hard to find people to translate your app and provide support in the major languages in most large European cities.

Also since national markets in Europe are relatively big by themselves a lot of companies tend to be satisfied with comfort of a single market success.

This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.

That's exactly what I think when I read one of these "EU stifles innovation" comments. It sounds to me like the equivalent of not wanting socialized healthcare because "the poors" might get it, not caring about the fact that you're the one who will benefit.

This is the "everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" of consumer rights. Everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed capitalist overlord.

>What an utterly ridiculous response.

To be fair to them, i think it was sarcasm.

to also be fair, I just recently returned from Europe and I was shocked at how maddeningly frustrating it was to simply use the Web. Between shockingly obtrusive GDPR consent forms and outright blocks on Websites from EU consumers, it was a wild look at what Europeans have to go through under the guise of consumer protections.

Like, the pendulum swung WAY too far in the other direction.

Most people have no problem with the GDPR. It only seems otherwise on this forum and similar echo chambers / bubbles where lots of people made their fortunes with adtech.