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Comment by just_a_fella | Hacker News Reader

> "...Stockholm, has become Europe’s start-up capital, second only to California’s Silicon Valley for the number of unicorns (billion-dollar tech companies) that it produces per capita."

I can't find any evidence for this. According to wiki[1]: "Unicorns are concentrated in a few countries/regions: China (125), United States (121), India (27), South Korea (11), UK (10), Israel (7), Sweden (5), Indonesia (5), France, Hong Kong (3), Portugal (3), Switzerland (3), Australia (2),Estonia (2), Belgium (2), Canada (2), Germany (2), Singapore (4), Ukraine (2), and thirteen other countries (1 each)."

Smells like propaganda to help the stagnating innovation in europe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_startup_compan...

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Skype, Minecraft, Bambora, Spotify, DICE, Fingerint Cards, Zenuity, Recorded Future, Spotfire, SoundCloud, KRY, Voi. Just to name a few.

Skype ist Estonian, no?

Estonia is where the work was outsourced to initially.

Wiki says "Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark.[26] The Skype software was created by Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. The first public beta version was released on 29 August 2003."

Klarna

Yes, good one. Yubico is another HN folks should recognize. And then there are tons of game studios doing AAA games. Numerous network equipment vendors. And of course Erlang.

Most of those are no where near billion dollar companies, and aren't based in Sweden either.

All of them was or are based in Sweden. After being bought by other companies some of them are no longer based in Sweden

Soundcloud is based in Berlin and hasn't ever produced a profit, much less had a 1b evaluation.

And I love Soundcloud, but what are you talking about?

King, Starbreeze, Paradox, Avalanche

So this interested me - and am quite astonished by the outcome

If I use unicorns (parent post) per millions of population (figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio... - rounded up to nearest million .5 up - thus Estonia (1.3M has 1M in this calc, giving it 2 unicorns per Million people!))

Estonia 2.00

Israel 0.78

Singapore 0.67

Sweden 0.50

HK 0.43

USA 0.37

Portugal 0.30

SKorea 0.22

Belgium 0.17

UK 0.15

China 0.08

Australia 0.08

Canada 0.05

France 0.05

Ukraine 0.05

Germany 0.02

India 0.02

Indonesia 0.02

Sweden is forth in the list, with Estonia and Portugal as real surprises. Guess the effect of just one Unicorn / outlier is high but even so ... SV is clearly not the only way.

The keyword here is per capita.

And if it wasn´t per capita, they´d find some other way to slice the data. This is simply a PR campaign to attract foreign investment into a country that it latching onto a piece of stat in an ocean of bad indicators.

China has 1.5 billion people. Sweden has 10 millions. If China would have numerically less start up companies than Sweden than something would be serious wrong in both countries.

Sweden is also the largest per capita arms dealer in the world.

And where is the source for this per capita number?

Funny that you say that because it's precisely what I've noticed and been saying, having moved to Europe because of all the great stuff mentioned on the internet and realizing it's not as great as people would have you believe.

What's weird is every time I've brought it up, either my comment gets buried or a bunch of excuse makers jump in and say "it's not like that, it's just you..." Not until very recently have I noticed other people talking about the lovely EU propaganda and not getting buried.

The wiki list is outdated. Brazil for example has at least 9 https://techcrunch.com/unicorn-leaderboard/ (filter by country)

The list of counts you’re quoting has companies removed when they go public.

> Smells like propaganda to help the stagnating innovation in europe.

First time I see that perspective. Could you develop, and explain why you think the World Economic Forum would do something like this?

Sure, but can you afford my consulting fees?

The WEF is a kind of a 'personally politicized' entity I don't mean that in a bad way. It's not some official government thing working on economically secular issues. It was founded by a dude interested in economic advancement and wellbeing of 'the world'. But it's made of people with personalities, agendas - and I don't mean cynically or negative, it's just part of the NGO landscape. It's a very European centric and is naturally going to be supportive of developing and promoting 'innovation' in the broadest sense for its constituents and relations.

Someone in the group may have had a meeting with someone from the city of Stockholm either public or private, which gave them the impetus or idea to talk about how they've been successful.

The author of the post, 'Sean Fleming' is a journalist from the UK with a background in PR, more than likely he's hired to 'write stuff' that is favourable to the WEF, and so this seems like a neat thing to talk about.

Basically, it's PR. There's nothing wrong with it, but that's what it is.

I'm doubtful that anyone in such a position is paid remotely enough to go really in-depth and to discover the underlying correlational factors such as the effect of very high taxes, or the real productive measures of '6 months off'.

It's just a little note from the WEF on how Sweden might possibly have some interesting differentiating thing.

For sure the article feels like PR. I was asking especially about the part of the comment regarding “the WEF pushing for stagnation in Europe” (paraphrasing), that’s the part that sounds counter intuitive to me.

Germany has less unicorns than Portugal?! How come? I thought being Europe's strongest economy would help.

Strong but super conservative, highly taxed and with bad Internet infrastructure.

Germany's economy is characterised by decentralisation and small and middle-sized family business, the so called Mittelstand. Germany is home to a significant portion of the world's 'hidden champions'[1], which as the name suggests, largely fly under the radar of the consumer focussed start up sector.

Startups mostly profit from access to homogenous large consumer markets and extreme clusters. Neither has ever been the goal of German economic development, largely because it's incompatible with the sort of cultural values German's consider important.

[1] https://hbr.org/1992/03/lessons-from-germanys-midsize-giants

>I thought being Europe's strongest economy would help.

I don't think that reducing a country or an econonomy to a single metric (here: gdp, I guess?) is the right approach; we are looking at very complicated systems here. One thing that makes Germany unique is its Mittelstand-phenomena [0].

Historically, innovation isn't driven by wealth, but by pressure, see: times of war, or the US' "make it big or die"-mentality.

Germans are very well off: cabs in every village are high-end mercedes models (suggesting that the entire society is rich), and social security is simply unmatched globally (afaik, no other country pays you 400eur+rent until you find a job, no matter how many years it takes).

Growing up in this environment, I never felt incentivized to come up with ways to become super-rich (which is the idea behind being an entrepeneur, isn't it?). Theres just no point to that hustle if you can live a really decent life working a normal job.

Sure, there is some class struggle (and there always was), but generally speaking, people just don't need to "make it" on their own - opposed to the US, where status is everything)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand

> Historically, innovation isn't driven by wealth, but by pressure, see: times of war, or the US' "make it big or die"-mentality.

It's driven by both. New hypotheses get generated in times relative wealth, when people can afford not to default to the availability bias of ideas that exist already.

Pressure for success results in the selection of the more optimal hypotheses available to put into action. Much of the science and tinkering that led to wartime technology used in the world wars, for example, was done during non-war time.

If you place too much on the side of survival pressure, you will be over optimized for the short term, and likely generate fewer innovations.

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