Norway as a destination for tech founders
forbes.com
forbes.com
it's a beautiful country, but for a start-up? I have my doubts.
i have also lived in the Bay Area; live here now in fact.
Norway is the most expensive country i have ever lived in or visited--more than SF, more than Manhattan, perhaps about the same as Tokyo, although i have only made brief visits there for work.
Taxes are insanely high: income tax is on the level as Switzerland; VAT is 24.5%. Petrol prices are the highest in any country i have ever driven in.
lastly, working start-up hours (or even normal hours) is not easy during the months of October through February when daylight's non-existent or negligible
The quality of life in Tokyo can be quite extraordinary, depending on your point of view.
As a westerner imitating the salaryman lifestyle? Absolutely terrible, primarily for work-related reasons.
As a westerner doing basically anything else that doesn't involve employment at a massive Japanese conglomerate? Excellent.
If you can deal with the lack of English and gain some modicum of comfort with Japanese culture, it's a fantastic place to live.
- Minimal honking for the amount of cars on the road
- Clean, timely trains, subways, and buses
- Clean streets and sidewalks (unless you go to the busy areas of Shibuya/Shinjuku, it can get nasty there)
- No tipping but you still receive excellent customer service
- Modern apartments with things like auto-filling baths, digital temperature control for hot water, delivery boxes at apartments for package delivery when you're not home, contactless IC cards to unlock your door/mailbox, door video monitors, Toto washlets
This isn't to say NYC doesn't have some of these, it's just less common and you'll be paying more. I do wish Tokyo had more NY pizza and bagels though.
Where I lived (in Osaka) there was a cap of 80,000 JPY* / month for hospital bills - no matter how much the procedure cost.
*80,000 JPY = 721 USD
In seriousness, there is a decent amount of racism but it’s really not that much worse than other places in Asia - that’s part of what I meant by adapting to Japanese culture. It also gets much better if you speak Japanese.
Quality of life could equally be great if you moved to any nation where the economy of your country of origin is relatively stronger to your current one... that, and you choose to ignore the quality of life of your surrounding community.
Taxes are high, but for entrepreneurs that's largely offset by: 1) no self-employment payroll taxes, and 2) your taxes cover your full health insurance costs. Once you add in the U.S.'s 15% payroll tax and health-insurance premiums you don't really save much in many scenarios.
That said, how much is an "average" salary?
Source: https://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/statistikker/lonnansatt...
I live in Tokyo, there is no way SF and Manhattan are cheaper. I've visited NYC and found this to be quite obvious. And although I haven't been to SF except for the airport, most people I've talked to who live there always mention the high cost of living.
- A centrally-located western-style apartment can easily run 2-3x what it would cost vs. compromising on one of those axes (live Japanese style or move farther out)
- Taking taxis or Uber instead of trains
- Going out partying / drinking often (especially to more western-style places if you can't speak Japanese)
Food is fairly cheap here and not having a tip system is a big cost saver in my opinion. Fruits and veggies are fairly expensive, unfortunately, but I still think I can confidently say it costs a lot less to live in Tokyo compared to NYC or SF. There are details of national insurance and city taxes and all that which can make individual cases cheaper or more expensive than the average but I don't feel like getting into all the details.
You got that right!
I visited Scandinavia (Bergen was one of my stops) a couple of summers back, and between the currency conversion and prices it was easily the most expensive place I have ever been. It's an amazingly beautiful area, but I doubt I'll ever go back because of the prices.
I remember sitting in a restaurant in Stockholm and commenting that maybe the prices would go down some in Norway, and a couple next to us started laughing. The other couple then explained not only were they not going down, but they are going up.
What's the employer payroll tax?
For comparison: in Sweden, the employer payroll tax is 31.42%, the income tax is ~30% (depending on where you live) and the VAT is 25% for most goods (food is 12% IIRC).
The employer payroll tax is a bit interesting. As an employee you never see that money, but you more or less pay it (lower wages).
I found that the tech scene is very much alive and you can find VC quite easily if you don't limit yourself to the country. The Nordic countries are well connected and it is easy to get funded by Swedish VC for example while being located in Denmark. It's also very easy to do business in the EU.
Has for the taxes, yes they are high, but you need to consider the high quality of life you get in return. It is better than even Canada where I am from. Stressed and unhappy employees are not going to perform well. I also felt there was a common goal in the company, that I wasn't just a necessary "resource" needed by the company. This is very different from the North American way.
I like the sound of that. But I wonder why aren't there more startups then?
I work at a startup in India and see how the founders are always busy and manage just 4-5 hrs of sleep at best and I've heard it was way worse in the beginning. So this doesn't paint a rosy picture. In fact I gave up on doing my own start up dream just because of this - I figured the stress and pressure isn't something I can handle or is worth the sacrifice for me. (By the way, my friend and colleague started the venture with two other people and it's doing "okay" - it's been just two years. PS - I don't regret it, from what I saw I knew I would not have been able to handle it; add the cash issue for almost 9 months - they literally lived on shoestring)
So if for someone (and I am not alone of course) who is from a country where work life conditions checks, rules that ensure a healthy work-life balance, or ensure work place safety[0] are non existent - and pretty much zero employee rights for all practical purposes, it would be even more unappealing to someone from a place like Norway where people take these things for granted. Now, what I am talking about is the general, I am sure there are exceptions everywhere.
[0] Yes, for e.g. pretty much every tech park building I have worked in in Bangalore if there was a fire either a lot of people would die in stampede, jumping from the windows, or actually in fire. Such safety checks were a joke 10 yrs ago and they still are.
Yeah, the dark side of startups is that many fail, people are laid off, funding dries out, etc. VCes swoop in and try another startup and so on. That helps grow unicorns as they say, but it also based on quite a bit of pain and uncertainty for workers.
> I see a lot of nordic fintech and fintech is a relatively recent phenomena.
Yes I have seen that too. Talked to someone in a fintech startup. They were even using Erlang to do all the math, which surprised me, but it totally made sense after they explained their use case.
So perhaps maybe there is a startup culture and but maybe the focus is on slightly different market and not necessarily on the same old social / messaging / uber for X problems that are common in SV startups.
> You can't just arrive and break what I would call the social contracts (like Uber is doing for example).
Unfortunately I think at lot of the conditions to make startup appealing are predicated on breaking social contracts. The concept of a "company" > "individual" basically. A startup can hire quickly, try something, fail and lay everyone off, within a year. Or playing in the gray area like Uber with regards to its markets. "Is it a taxi, is it a limousine service, etc."
However, for start-ups that aren't looking to have hundreds of millions of users/customers before breaking even, it is still worth a shot!
Sorry for telling the truth because I've lived there... :) Maybe you can find a way to delete this post and keep all the flowery ones.
English has been part of the mandatory elementary school curriculum since 1974, and I would say that pretty much everyone knows English quite well except for a minority of older people in rural areas.
Norway being a cold, wintery country is something of a fantasy. The climate is much milder than you might except from the latitude. It's not very different from New England, though summers are not quite as hot.
You pay a few cents to use bathrooms, but in return you get very clean and pleasant services. I wish I could pay for bathrooms in some other cities.
Startups that need to prove their value proposition before the money runs out should come to Poland. Very techy (Warsaw, Wroclaw in particular), and you have 2 years instead of 6 months (or 1) because of the extremely low cost of living. As a plus, really cheap beer and beautiful women.
Poland is certainly a great place as well. As I get older though it's nice being a 2 hour plane ride from my aging parents in Texas.
Pros:
- Significantly lower rent (~640 USD/mo for a one bedroom apartment in one of the safest neighbourhoods of Waterloo)
- Low crime rate and very safe
- Access to talent that has experience working for SV companies (facebook, google, amazon, apple, etc.)
- Active 24/7. Even at 4am in the morning, there are students walking home from the library.
- You don't have to learn a new language
Cons:
- Bad weather
- An hour drive to the international airport in Toronto
- Nothing else to do in the city other than working
- Public transit only runs until midnight
It doesn't fit the short flight criteria, but it's better than going Oslo to Dallas.
come to Poland.
As for the language, I'm Italian working with devs and I've yet to find any dev that doesn't speak English fluently. Not the same for regular people, but not sure about Norway, either.
They even speak English among themselves.
Putting in $100k into a Norwegian [1] and CA [2] tax calculator, for example, at that particular income they coincidentally come out almost identical: about $32k (~32% effective rate) in both cases. In Norway it's one central tax at the effective rate of 32%. In SF it's the sum of: 18% federal, 7.65% payroll, 6.3% state.
"Well, that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."
Thinking of keeping it as an option for my MS.
Can you get by with just English for the first year and the first 10 employees ?