Comment by freedomben

I think the situation is far more nuanced than what will be debateable here, but I've had friends that tried to do tech startups in Europe and ended up moving to the US and doing it here. This is surely not a representative sample so take with a grain of salt, but generally speaking this is their (paraphrased) analysis:

In Europe it just takes a lot more capital investment to get started. You can't do it as a side-gig with a hope/dream working nights and weekends like you can in the US. The process to MVP is just way more complicated because there's a ton of compliance/legal stuff that has to be there at launch. The actual product might take 60 hours of work to build, but then there's another 200 hours of compliance to do which doesn't add any product value at all. You also typically have to hire an expert to help at least consult, because trying to do it all yourself just requires you to have a ton of expertise that no single person ever has. Hiring is also a mixed bag. Market salaries in Europe are a lot less which helps, but firing a bad fit is also way harder so there's big risk. You also can't offer stock-based comp as much in Europe as you can in the US, which all serves to make it harder to get launched.

Once you reach a certain scale, Europe can be just as friendly or more-so than the US, but that scale acts as a great filter for people that don't already have the deep pockets to fund things on their own to get to that point, and most investors won't take that kind of risk without validating product-market fit. The European culture of more longevity also makes it easier in some ways to keep a young company stable because people aren't constantly leaving and you aren't constantly in bidding wars for talent. Overall it's just a mixed bag, but that early filter is why you don't see as many working-class people doing a tech startup in Europe and making it big. On the flip side, when companies make it through that filter, they tend to be a lot healthier and more viable, and quality tends to be higher. Again these are generalities.