Germans absolutely do tech startups, in fact they’ve been on the forefront of building tech companies that mirror Silicon Valley, but in German.

There’s been a German eBay, PayPal and Facebook.

Europe doesn’t really do major companies though, and part of that is certainly a lack of demand to go global from capital investors, but there are other parts as well. Like language and regulation.

I went to harzen for holiday this summer, very retro I know, and almost no one spoke English. In fact I had bigger luck with Danish than I had with English because they see so many Danish tourists. I’m not sure Americans can really understand how big the language and cultural barriers are from creating global companies when you’re de-attached from the Anglo-Saxon world.

I think the reason that a lot of European startups that made it to the global scence came from Scandinavia, is exactly because we’re so attached to American culture that’s it’s almost second nature to us. Sure we don’t understand American individualism, not really, but we’re all brought up watching American tv-shows and movies, hell American politics and economics sometimes take up more news space than our own national news...

The rest of Europe isn’t like that, so while Germany had its own eBay, that made its founders billionaires, no one outside of Germany has ever heard about it. Except for maybe eBay who couldn’t enter the market.