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Comment by 0xfaded | Hacker News Reader

The US has google, Russia has yandex, China has baidu. Europe is the only major economic area that has failed to create a tech giant, and I tell people here in Europe that if this plan to create a common data market "works", instead of wasting €10b, I'll stop complaining about the European innovation environment.

While regulation is a problem, I think the European public innovation funding system through government grants is a bigger problem. Almost any R&D is partially funded by grants, which means any innovation idea also has to be sold to a board of bureaucrats. There will also be rules affecting things like the maximum salary they will reimburse per employee, which means businesses won't pay for top level talent. Finally, the whole process is a huge waste of human resources on both the companies' and government's side, to the extent that it has spawned a cottage industry of professional proposal writers who take sizeable commission.

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> Europe is the only major economic area that has failed to create a tech giant

Skype? Spotify? Supercell? ($10bn valuation!)

And that's leaving out all the "old" tech companies like Siemens, BASF, Philips, Ericsson, ABB, the fallen giant Nokia, and the telcos, and the financial services companies ...

(And I've left out UK tech companies because of Brexit!)

I would say they're late to the game, but I wouldn't entirely discount the EU tech scene.

The EU is doing very well in Fintech, for instance: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/european-unicorns-break-out...

Also keep in mind that a lot of European startups migrate over to the states or split offices for financing & legal reasons, so there are several American companies that are, for all intents and purposes, based in the EU.

Given that successful companies will need to travel to the US for funding anyway, I wonder how long before the standard vehicle for a EU startup becomes a Delaware LLC.

Regarding FinTech, you have a strong point there.

I think they're part of the way there, at least for companies looking to do a series a or more.

That said I also think they're becoming less reliant on American funding, since it seems like the EU (or at least the German/central european) investment scene is starting to mature.

There is still a long way to go before things are at all equal, though. Just look at the difference in salaries for technical roles between the SV giants and European businesses. There are kids right out of university with negligible skill and experience whose starting salaries in the US tech hubs are several times what a position at the top of the scale with a relatively good employer would pay here in the UK, and even taking into account cost of living, it's clearly a different world. The US giants can afford to do that partly because of the huge amounts of VC funding that set them up a few years ago.

Europe is the only major economic area that has failed to create a tech giant

I'm not sure that's entirely true. After all, the likes of ARM are European originally.

However, yes, in terms of the sort of high-tech firms we talk about a lot on HN, Europe is sadly lacking.

I think this is partly because European governments at both national and international level don't really understand how to deal with the rapidly evolving tech sector. The list of measures that successive governments here in the UK have mentioned when saying how much they want to support our businesses bears little resemblance to the list of significant problems any of my businesses actually have.

In addition to getting the grants, they also like to see that you are cooperating with a company or entity from another member state. I mean I get the approach is trying to build a cohesion between member states, but as you say, it adds to another layer of bureaucracy.

That said, I would really like to see EU build up more of its own home grown tech industry. Although for me being in the UK and now in a limbo with Brexit, I am not sure how that's all gonna affect us here.

There are good and bad elements of this. As someone who has worked with academic EU grants in the past, the collaboration part is good for transmitting know-how/tacit knowledge to newer member states.

There's a cost to this of course, but I understand why they do it given that integration is probably the largest challenge facing the EU at the moment.

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