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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Where is Europe's Silicon Valley?

There is only one Silicon Valley: the one in California. Nowhere else in the United States - or the world - has quite the unique mix of red-blooded capitalism, concentrated wealth, and a culture of innovation.

"Silicon Alley" (New York), "silicon roundabout" (London), and so on are simply natural, technologically focused extensions of the existing economies in those areas.

If you want to create a Silicon Valley in Europe, it will take decades until it can compare to Northern California.

> Nowhere else in the United States - or the world - has quite the unique mix of red-blooded capitalism, concentrated wealth, and a culture of innovation.

Now that you put it into a sentence, I find it less surprising that Switzerland is starting to brand itself as "Europe's Silicon Valley".

Until the 2014 referendum that might have happened but as it is it's off the table.

I think it could be done faster if the various countries could all agree on where they'd like it to be. And that won't happen. Germany would want it in Berlin, France in Paris, The UK (assuming they 'remain') would want it to be in London and so on. So no country would be willing to contribute the capital to help establish this on some other countries soil.

And then there is taxation, mentality, fragmented language environment and so on. I don't see it happening.

I think they could do it, each country will just need to have its own "SV" and the appropriate expectations. They will be smaller, but there could be ways to connect them.

Then it wouldn't be equivalent. SV has economies of scale working for it in many ways.

Israel is the closest. You have massive R&D centers for Intel (4 R&D sites, two fabs), Microsoft (2x R&D), Apple (2x R&D), Google (2x R&D), Facebook, Amazon (and even American startups like Magic Leap) all closer to each other than the distance between SF and Palo Alto.

VC presence in Israel is probably second only to SV and the rate of startups per capita by far exceeds any other country.

What Israel loses to SV is primarily cultural; no one gets the US consumer better than SV, that's why Israel is more focused on enterprise, security, semiconductor etc.

France attempted to do it, even putting it in an area with nice weather ;) After 40 years it's only about 20k-30k jobs there and nobody from outside ever heard about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Antipolis

Btw, the reason why they failed is a banking system that hates bankruptcies. If your startup fails, you won't get any credit (yup, better get a mortgage before starting a company) for at least 10 years (I think it was 20, but am too tired to search for references now).

That and labor laws that make it just about impossible to let someone go, financing with 'strings attached' (see 'dailymotion') and a whole raft of other differences.

"Nowhere else in the United States - or the world - has quite the unique mix of red-blooded capitalism, concentrated wealth, and a culture of innovation."

China is a serious contender to SV.

France has a lot of things that Silicon Valley will likely never have, no matter what the size of its economy, not everything can be measured in money.

Europe doesn't have a Silicon Valley because every nation would want it to be in their backyard. But even if the concentration isn't there and the number of exits > $1B isn't as large (or the number of $1B and up companies isn't as large) we have plenty of solid performers.

Stockholm and Zurich would be my two contenders for a European SV.

Northwest England. It created industry itself but has been relatively quiet recently.

Ha yes, it is sometimes useful to have a bit longer historical view of things.

There is nothing in Europe that can compete with Silicon Valley, but the closest ones would be London and Berlin. London feels a bit more corporate, while Berlin seems younger and wilder.

Let's wait a week to see if London is still in Europe.

Eurozone != Europe.

It's not going anywhere geography-wise.

Eurozone != European Union != Europe

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