https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_technology_c...
That's the reason why there are fewer startups in Europe. Europe has plenty of large technology companies if one stops equating technology with "user facing smartphone application". They just happen to be export oriented, or pharmaceutical or manufacturing and transport companies.
Trying to copy the US or China in producing rapidly growing startup companies is in my opinion foolish and we shouldn't buy into the constant hype of just trying to emulate America, but rather aim to increase where European companies advantages lie, in integrating high technology into existing economic sectors that integrate with industrial production.
Not only is this much better suited to the economic and social European environment that simply isn't accepting of the "break the rules, worry about the problems later" mentality of internet statups, it's also arguably much more equitable and reaches a larger section of the labour market.
How much does that matter though? You could just release your app/site/whatever in English and instantly have access to the US market.
Even if you hire a UK or Éire citizen for their English skills, you have all the cultural reasons that means Tesco isn’t a supermarket brand in the USA and Walmart isn’t a supermarket brand in the UK even though both are English speaking nations. The language issues are also substantial, even though the cultural output of Hollywood has made it easier for many EU citizens to learn English than each other’s languages.
US companies get that baked in. Everyone else has to grow to become that.
- hey, we are startup, we can't pay you much, is that OK?
- well, we can't really compensate you with stock options, those are for founders
- oh no, your opinion doesn't matter, bosses are always right
- yes, you'll work crazy hours but we can only pay you for 40
In other words, EU startups have no mechanism in place to reward early employees that build the company from the scratch, it's all about making co-founders famous/wealthy. It's already bad in the US, imagine EU is 10x worse.
Having worked with a multitude of startups over the years I can say that none of them have behaved in this way in the Nordics.
“Nobody in Berlin earns over €65k” should be a dead meme by now. Salaries are continuing to rise
The Nordic countries, particularly Sweden and Denmark, are among the few that actually have a pretty healthy startup scene. Maybe there's a link?
The parent comment rings true (in essence, despite its touch of hyperbole) with respect to France.
At least that's my experience so far.
Being an excellent engineer, the backbone of all good tech companies, is rarely recognized, poorly compensated, and engenders much less social status than if you were on the US west coast. Ironically, even though there are many highly talented engineers in Europe, European executives and investors frequently hold American engineers working in Europe in much higher regard and treat them differently than engineers from their own countries. I've seen it many times.
This is not an environment that incentivizes the world-class native engineering talent that exists in Europe to perform up to their abilities in a high-risk startup. Good engineers correctly view themselves as being undervalued, so there is no point in taking the risk. Nothing will change until Europe places more value -- economic, social, and cultural -- on being an exceptional engineer instead of treating them as a modern day factory worker subservient to the managerial class. This is not something you can easily change with government initiatives.
Large companies (those that are not tech-centric, e.g. financial services, etc) still tend to see it as a back office function and often outsources majority of operations to India (or fly and settle temporary employees locally). Companies that places tech at the center of their business recruit and hire a lot of tech talent from outside of Western Europe. There are also local developers, but their pay, compared to jobs in, say, marketing, sales, and other rather fluffy business functions, is low, low, low. Someone mentioned Bookings before. Their pay is on-par with the market average here, which is 50-80K. And that is very low compared to how a similar position is valued in SV.
Startups here in general also underpay their tech workers compared to counterparts in the US, since they point to the large companies locally (which already underpay tech roles), and say, "well, we can't afford corporate pay, we are just a startup". So you are kind of double-underpaid, even though the job descriptions are usually copy and pasted SV-speak with rainbows and unicorns.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_com...
Regardless, the EU alone has 50% more population than the US, while the population is about as educated, yet it's only a small fraction of the US on this list.
that's why there are comparatively few steps, the entry cost are massive and discouraging, and that's on top of the internationalisation requirements of course.
These rules arent strictly enforced yet, but when you run into issues and it can be shown that you didn´t take steps to implement it, it has consequences.
A DPO should be assigned if:
>(a) the processing is carried out by a public authority or body, except for courts acting in their judicial capacity;
>(b) the core activities of the controller or the processor consist of processing operations which, by virtue of their nature, their scope and/or their purposes, require regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale; or
>(c) the core activities of the controller or the processor consist of processing on a large scale of special categories of data pursuant to Article 9 and personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences referred to in Article 10.
(Article 37)
And in any case a data protection officer is different from a representative, as the title of Article 27 indicates ("Representatives of controllers or processors not established in the Union").
Noone said that accounting needs not be done, just that you don't have to employ anyone you listed in a startup. You do as with any other non-essential work like cleaning, catering and so on: buy external services on the need to have basis.
This is also not something in any way unique to Europe. American start-ups also need to file taxes, incorporate and so on.
and Europe tax return are far more convoluted than the average Delaware company, especially because of bullshit like vatmoss schemes that are a specific result of the European market fragmentation, which was the main point to begin with
Keep believing that you'll find "huge numbers of highly talented people" here, you won't - unless perhaps you mean in the arts...
did anyone show up, and if they did in what aspects were they lacking? Genuinely curious.
)-,;