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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

As someone from Australia, I actually take the opposite impression from that. These startups are faced to deal with being international by day one, making scaling out to more and more countries easier.

For US startups, on the other hand, the US is a large enough market that they might get ‘stuck’ there and need to build up more ‘inertia’ to scale out internationally

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Getting stuck in a market that is 23% of world GDP is not so bad.

The fact of the massive advantage that the US gives to companies and researchers in the form of essentially a single regulatory zone and, importantly, a single language, is reflected in the fact that almost all of the technology you are using was designed in the US. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. for companies, C, Python, Lisp, etc. just in programming languages...

You only have to write documentation once for more potential customers or research collaborators to be able to read it than if you wrote in both French and German.

This is well studied. Note that in terms of developed countries the US is the largest by far.

Pst, Python is Dutch. Not retracting from your point though, it was built in English and found adoption in SV.

Wow, you’re right! Thanks for that, learned somehow today.

Having to be international by day one puts a high barrier to entry, requiring lots of effort in a growth phase that's resource constrained, and kills potential ideas before they can get traction, as it's more expensive (and slower) for them to do so.

On the other hand, California by itself is a large enough market so you can get a profitable (because of sufficient scale) proof of product-market fit and tackle internationalization with much, much more resources. Which seems the proper way to go; good internationalization doesn't really scale.

Its certainly an advantage the European startups don't seem to take up on. For example Duolingo is headquartered in the US.

I would guess that the main reason Duolingo is based in the U.S. is that it originated at a U.S. university (Carnegie Mellon).

Duolingo is purely an example - but you could ask why the research occurred in an American University rather than an EU one. Google Translate is another.

In theory there should be many more people willing to pay to learn another language / translate in Europe. Yet the US is far ahead.

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