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Comment by cmarschner | Hacker News Reader

Remarkably, as American, Russian, and Chinese Entrepreneurs amass these giant amounts of wealth, Europe is largely left out and remains more of a middle class society. Will this in the long run be beneficial or not?

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The question is, is the wealth that Europe's not concentrating in the hands of its 1% going to the masses instead, or simply not being created at all?

People in America, India and China are pushing technology forward. We've gotten GOOG/FB/Uber/Tesla from the US; WeChat/WePay/mobile stuff + Shenzen ecosystem from China; Infosys, Oyo (and hopefully smart cities) from India, etc.

Imagine what we might have gotten from Europe if they weren't held back by bureaucracy, fear of failure, egalitarianism, and whatever else prevents Europe from competing with the valley. (It's certainly not a lack of smart people - see all the Europeans who do well in the Valley.)

It's hard to see how holding Europe back could possibly be beneficial (of course I'm not a mercantilist).

Can you expand a bit on the bureaucracy in Europe? Do you think it's hard to create a limited responsibility company in Europe? Is it better in China?

Have you seen that law about taxes for ecommerce in Europe? In the US, the shop collects tax for the country the shop is based in. In Europe, the shop has to pay taxes related to the country the people buying the products are in. This significantly increases the complexity of running an ecommerce business in Europe.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-supplying-dig...

It was an idea with some logic behind it, but it basically cripples European internet businesses compared to US ones by making taxes that much complicated to calculate.

> In the US, the shop collects tax for the country the shop is based in.

Legally, Americans are obligated to pay sales tax for internet purchases in the state where we live. There's a form for it, every year.

The American move is to shift the burden of tax collection onto the customer, thus ensuring that the taxes are evaded rather than paid. I don't really see moving bureaucracy onto customers rather than businesses - thus increasing the total amount of records that must be kept and paperwork that must be filed to abide perfectly by the law and pay one's taxes - as a good thing.

Agree. But it's not too bad as long as the companies require invoice (in EU sense of the term) to include VAT/VIES/CIF. The cost or price of an outside accountant to deal with your tech is not too affordable for a startup... 20,000+ euro/year just to do the book keeping.

Creating a company, at least in the UK is extremely simple. The one stop VAT rules CM30 mentioned have been onerous enough to stop smaller ecommerce places going EU wide. There were a lot of blog posts about it not being worth the hassle around the time of it's introduction.

But it's not just the bureaucracy, at least in the UK. It's the perception and treatment after a failure. It almost damns you for life. The banks won't want to lend, VCs here seem to want more of a sure thing. There seems to be little of the US attitude of "OK you failed, what you going to try next?". OK that was a lot of sweeping generalisations, and there are exceptions to the rule, but you get the idea.

I've recently given up trying in the EU (for now). In the US, it's really easy (rocketlawyer.com/square.com), here it's a relative nightmare. From accounting and taxes to liability to contract and employment law to even relatively simple things like opening a bank account it's not startup friendly. IMO, most of the EU regulations and frameworks were developed within the confines of local low-risk capitalized companies, such as agriculture or hair salons. And as soon as you try to move money outside the EU, you might as well throw it in a bonfire.

It takes less than a week to set up a company in the UK

"Holding Europe back," as you put it allows millions of people to have some job security and not be treated by their employers like trash as they would be in the US or Russia. I'd say that's worth way more than anything silicon valley has ever put out, let alone a bunch of companies that are unlikely to be around in five to ten years that have contributed virtually nothing to society.

As a result Europe contributes very little innovation to the world and just piggybacks off what everyone else built. That's fine - USA and China will move things forward, and India is joining the party. But if everyone did this we wouldn't have all those things that make the modern world great.

(I do wish Europe could at least stop being counterproductive, and just not surrender to terrorists. http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/25/french-anti-uber-protest-tu... http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/uber-france-leaders-arreste... )

So Europe contributes every little innovation to the world... based on which numbers about European tech companies or start-ups? I mean, if you want some conflicting anecdata from a marketing department, here it is: http://www.eu-startups.com/.

The top story on the page is about an AirBnb clone raising money from NY rich people.

You've pretty much answered the question - "if everyone did this", we probably wouldn't even have that German company at the top of the eu-startups.com marketing page.

If you take patent rates Europe (or at least some of its member countries) are pretty competitive. However innovation happens a) in old companies, b) in SMEs which are not venture-backed, hence don't have the same leverage.

The US and EU markets are not as divided and insulated from each other as the US vs China vs Russia markets are. That means that for the most part US tech products find their way here as well as US money used to influence our politicians.

Soooo... Spotify and DeepMind don't exist?

DeepMind is owned by Google and Spotify may not exist in five years due to increased pressure from other streaming platforms like Apple. Spotify is in a make or break phase right now.

DeepMind is a European start-up purchased by Google. The fact that America allows successful firms to grow into economy-dominating megacorps isn't really an argument that Europe somehow prevents the creation of wealth and businesses when you account for the fact that Europe actually enforces competition laws.

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