Daniel Ek commits to investing €1B in European ”moonshots”
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You have the horizon 2020 and horizon Europe programs for example. It's not perfect of course but it works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_Programmes_for_Res...
Show material examples of this.
Also, the EU needs 'big companies' that employ a lot of people, pay high salaries, can afford to sustain complicated projects with know-how, to acquire and integrate other projects.
A nice batch of 'open source' projects that some people might use will not move the needle.
Why? Funding open source projects seems just as useful to me.
It's nice to have some support for it, but it doesn't even lend well to that: it's very hard to know which projects to support until after the fact, of course we know that 99% of it is never even used. The kinds of people involved don't do it generally for money, and also have their own ambitions. What happens when you have a 'great piece of open source' that AirBus and Daimler really want to integrate, but the 'maintainer' just doesn't care to make the necessary changes? Or is against it? Or is only working 'now and then ? Or doesn't feel 'large corps should benefit' or whatever? It's a tricky space. Worth supporting, but it would take a very specialized team and frankly, not that much money.
Europe needs large industrial organizations because they are the lifeblood of the economy, in fact, the hallmark of advanced civilizations. You want to know the 'difference' between 'rich' and 'poor' Europe? In 'rich Europe' a far grater portion of the population works in corporations with >1K employees.
Only at a certain scale can a lot of activities be addressed: you can't make an airliner with all it's supply chain, IP, R&D, systems integration, training, support and the myriad of operational activities with 'open source' or even with 'small shops' or 'vc money'. A lot of know-how is embedded within these groups that given them competitive advantage, and of course, scale is necessary to be competitive at an international level especially in 'winner takes all' type markets.
EU investment in open source is nice, but it's a side-show. What EU needs is Googles & Salesforces etc..
Best example is that big blue brain project in Switzerland that got billions even when the science was not there.
Universities are currently filled with bureaucrats that know how to win grants and produce no results.
It's the Human Brain Project, and it's 1 billion over 10 years. It is currently in year 7, and at the end, it will provide the AWS of neuroscience in Europe.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ten-year...
Or will build, if they are granted the additional money they ask for past 2023: “The development of high-quality brain simulators requires a long-term commitment of resources”. We shall call it Deep Thought: the sunk-cost brain.
I'm involved with HBP and other non-European and European national neuroscience projects (though I am neutral here, just a university-employed engineer), and the science in the recent phase (starting in April this year) is a complete break with preceding funding phase and on-par with other projects. The people leading the science subproject are actually leading PIs on the topics. For comparison, let's name Allen Institute, though Allen is more a monolith, whereas HBP is more like micro-services, with a high cost in coordination, but now a focus on "FAIR" aspects like open-ness and reusability.
The infrastructure side is also coming along, and will provide an AWS of neuroscience (6 national HPC sites, multi-zone OpenStack/OpenShift, 2 neuro-morphic platforms, neuro-robotics platform, federated IAM, metadata and object storage stack, dedicated clinical infrastructure, etc) , but the failure or success will depend a lot more on the larger community getting convinced to engage their workflows on the platform. If people collectively agree that it isn't worth using, then the infrastructure teams never get to justify the whole thing, and it will flop. In that sense, the marketing aspect is not a facade, but a necessary condition for HBP to become a EU RI.
Of course I have no chickens in the fight; if it flops I can keep writing my shitty works-on-my-computer codes for one off unreproducible research projects.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090904071908.h...
To make that claim in 2009 was complete and utter bullshit, if you've sold your project on grandiose claims like that then I don't think you are into science.
Maybe my problem is that I don’t see myself as “believing” in the project or not: it’s easier to learn from failure in fact. If the whole thing fails, it will make the EU a little more cautious about the next potential flagship project. Which is presumably what all the FUD surrounding HBP is about.
The EU should have insisted on believable deliverables. At the time I was highly critical about the claim, it being 11 years ago doesn't really matter to me, it was obvious that you could not extrapolate from the state of the art+a relatively limited amount of time to such a game changing deliverable (essentially: general AI).
I sincerely hope that you will be able to come up with enough results worth applying somewhere in real-life projects and products that in the end it will all be worth it. Best of luck to you.
I'm not qualified to speak of the science behind the HBP but I know that a few labs in China and in the US (like the Allen institute) see some value in it. It's a big engineering project and maybe the end goal and result isn't what's important here. Pretty much like CERN.
It's most pronounced in new EU countries that get flooded with these funds.
That's wrong. There are four real reasons:
1) our pension systems are mostly government run and on a rolling scheme (i.e. payments from current workers fund current pensioners, in exchange for future-redeemable points). That means that there is a lot less of "dumb cash" lying around in pension funds that screams to be invested for decades... historically that cash used to be put into "safe bets" such as government bonds but their returns are at below-inflation rates, and the only thing that is "profitable" is spreading out the cash over either the big tech companies or small startups.
2) networking. Just look who's in the "angel investor" rounds: people, both founders and early employees who got lots of money in the dotcom era or in the IPOs of the last years - they are all concentrated in the SV area, and enjoy the benefits of close personal contact, and then of course there is YC and a couple of less known clones which come in later. We simply do not have such networks in Europe.
3) risk aversity. Europeans do not like risk, the most obvious example being us Germans who are notorious for being risk averse, so risk averse that our car companies, 12 years after Tesla hit the market, still believe they can make "clean ICE" cars (by investing in synth-fuel tech). A side effect of that is the infamous Wirecard scandal - they were hyped so hard by everyone including our Chancellor who went lobbying in China simply because they were the only company other than dinosaur SAP who were German, were in digital business, and had (on the paper...) good business numbers.
4) "rags to riches" mentality: us Europeans have generally decent social security networks, stable government funded education - basically, you don't have that mentality, starting with young people, to "always hustle" to survive. We live mostly generally comfortable lives, but we're not driven to exploit whatever and wherever we can, simply because we don't need to.
The end result: we don't have venture capital simply because there has been no need for it for decades, it's only a recent trend here.
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/investments/asset-classes/pr...
I don’t know where you’re located, but at least here in The Netherlands we seem to have a fairly healthy startup ecosystem, where grants seem to be more of an afterthought because there’s a fair amount of VC money or bootstrapped startups.
Again, I’m not claiming that our startup climate is anything like what your see in SV, but it’s definitely a fairly healthy scene, and it would be an insult to characterize these as grant chasers.
Mollie & Adyen have had success because of the walled garden iDeal payment system of the Dutch banks. Eindhoven was a very innovative region until Philips decided to move HQ.
Even Sweden produced more unicorns with a population size a 1/3 of the Netherlands.
Maybe you have had more luck with raising money but I experienced a lot of stupidity from private investors.
So I'd wonder how many funds are truly private. And for those that aren't I'd like to see if any bureaucracy gets pushed onto to the startups they fund.
Say EU-funded VCs, due to the special obligations they're under will often make startups comply with many of the same stuff. So even though a startup might not be a grant recipient themselves they will ultimately have to submit to that regime too.
https://venturebeat.com/2014/02/11/gameon-teams-with-dutch-g...
https://business.gov.nl/financing-your-business/funding-and-....
https://business.gov.nl/starting-your-business/launching-an-...
https://nlfunding.co/ provides a list of all VCs active in The Netherlands, and while a few obvious ones are working with EU grants, I have no reason to believe most of them do.
Regardless, my response was mostly to the “EU startups are grant chasers” comment, which I still believe is an unfair depiction.
Potato potato. Most "startups" in the US are nothing but VC money chasers and often lose billions of infinite investor money (looking at you, Uber) for indefinite periods of time. How is this different from grants other than it's "free" government money in one case and "free" VC money in the other?
When you get a grant you're subject to many rules. You usually have to submit a budget and money will only get disbursed in accordance with that plan. And there may be many limitations as to what the budget can contain in the first place. Say only X percent can go towards Y class of spending.
Your startup is doing poorly and you want to downsize? Well you can't because you budgeted for X people. Want to cut or increase salaries? You can't. I mean you could fire these people but you'd be forfeiting the funds. So people don't.
Then there's pressure. [Private] VC is an honor system. There are very few legal obligations but you're expected to perform. Your continued access to funds will mostly depend on how you're perceived by the VCs.
With grants you only need to follow legal requirements. No pressure to perform. The agencies only care about you following the rules. When applying for more money, again, you need to fulfill a bunch of requirements. There's not much of a reputation system. If you get denied but meet all the formal requirements you can often sue and win.
And since there's no dilution there's no limit to how many different grants you can take.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/finance-funding/gettin...
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/finance-funding/gettin...
https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/erdf/
https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/cohesion-fun...
https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/social-fund/
Besides these EU projects there are also national projects within EU member states. Like for example the NIC-SE foundation that manage the .se ccTLD tend to grant money to small startups.
Most recent unicorns will simply not thrive in this environment, it's more catered to the professional grant seekers or already successful companies, that can absorb a financing round of 500k-2.5 mil €
It's clear that there has to be some bureaucracy. If anything because you might want to do some auditing in the future.
PG and friends mostly spend their own money and they're free to do as they please, follow instinct or whatever.
You can't do that (thank god) with public money.
Grants are bureaucracy, sure, but if you understand how you navigate it - and every entrepreneurial person shoud - then it's really free money with a bit of strings attached. But it's primarily used for seed purposes (vs. series A, B...) in new companies or as a suplement in existing companies.
EU also does investment matching (one of our VCs had half of his fund matched by the EU). Based on my experience, this is an even better model, since it derisks investmens for local VCs - the biggest problem in investing here is not the lack of funds, but insane risk aversion. It really feels like everybody is looking for stable and good performing businesses and not for investment opportunities that would be moon shots.
From the 1st link there is https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/news/deep-tech-europe-report-k... which claims that companies that received EIC funding have attracted 5Bi in private funding (the program is new so this is apparently a couple of years, maybe more)
By comparison: Total money raised by all YC companies: >$7 billion https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats/
I think companies would apply for EIC later than on YC hence it might be apples to oranges but it's an interesting metric nonetheless
Deadline every 2 months, next one in four days. Support for improving existing FOSS projects as well as endeavoring new ones. Past recipients worked on Wireguard, Jitsi, NextCloud, LibreOffice, EteSync, Guix and many more: https://nlnet.nl/project/
Also many new innovations on the way. Like "green graphene" composite, made from biomass, by Brightday Graphene in Sweden.
It's really a common thing.
As far as innovation in the EU goes, the governments (yes, plural, another problem) need to get out of the way. I'm usually positive when it comes to the functioning of European governments, but this is one of the major exceptions.
I argue for European federalism, but also realize that's unrealistic. One possible step in the right direction would be to have an EU wide company structure with a single set of rules that makes investment between different European countries less complicated for companies and investors. I've also thought that a high profile EU investor could force some change by making it a requrement for their portfolio companies to immediately invert ownership to a Delaware Corp. That would open them up to US capital while simultaneously pissing of a lot of the innovation people in the government.
Also I noticed there is too much focus on agile, scrum, DDD, etc.
And the pay is too low compared to living expenses. There are a lot of software engineering jobs that pay higher even in India.
Only good thing is you get to live in Europe and travel.
By number of tech companies or tech jobs.
US-based companies face the same challenges when trying to reach European customers, so this is an equal playing field as far as I can tell.
US laws leave a lot less to the imagination, they are hyper-constrained in general, and there's a large body of work on how to bypass them. Like, Romania may use GDPR to hunt down journalists and company bosses but you know California won't use CCPA that way, so you're cool.
It isn't too hard (thankfully) to get finance for a moderately viable idea.
People are also much more risk averse in terms of business model. For instance, the idea of loss-leading to gain market-share will play much better in the US than Germany, where it seems people would rather settle for modest revenue but stay in the black the whole time.
Another factor is the concept of work and work-life balance. In Germany holidays are sacred, and you won't generally find people putting in tons of overtime to get a product off the ground. That's great when you're a worker, but it does mean a slower pace than I saw in the US.
Hmh. That’s only 10% slower if you assume Americans never take holidays (which is probably not true at all).
I don’t really believe startupers work as much as they claim to however, because you are usually useless at 16 hours a day for a month.
How much did it take Elon Musk to go callig people pedos of working heavy hours and sleeping in the office?
Don't get me wrong, I think the German way of working is way healthier and more sustainable, but everything has a trade-off, and the leave-it-all-on-the-table mentality of American startups seems more conducive to getting an innovative project with difficult technical problems off the ground in my experience.
In Germany at least it’s conservatism and a failure of imagination.
The average German Engineering student doesn’t dream of flying to Mars, he dreams of buying an expensive BMW.
The German economy doesn't run on individuals going to Mars, it runs on process innovation, optimisation, and decentralised development between research facilities, a good university system, and companies.
On average the German worker productivity is very high. That's a measure of good allocation of resources, not software unicorns or Mars rockets. If German engineers would just be dreaming about holidays and luxury watches that wouldn't be the case.
If you look at the increase in total factor productivity (comparing how much aggregate outputs you get out of aggregate inputs, basically measuring technological efficiency), the last decade has been anaemic. SV venture capital software culture is good at capturing markets and shifting economic rent from markets towards centralised platforms, it's not driving innovation and we don't really need to emulate it.
Then don't emulate it and the US will continue to own nearly everything in tech that isn't inside of China.
I've been reading sentiment like that out of Europe for over two decades now, with predictable results that just keep going around in a circle and getting the Europeans nowhere.
SV and the US tech industry are great at creating markets as well, which you entirely ignore. What did the global cloud services market look like before AWS built it (even Alibaba's cloud offering is a mere intentional clone of AWS)? In terms of sales it barely existed. Every major tech market has been established by SV money and US tech companies, not European companies.
There's no evidence that Europe has been more innovative with their approach. It's quite the opposite given the vast majority of major technologies have come out of the US dating back to the 1950s. Europe's contributions pale by comparison, and that's why their companies pale by comparison.
Even ARM - one of Europe's few innovators in tech - had to be started by two US companies, with one of the partner companies being European. It's only fitting the US own that company again considering.
The leader in AI and quantum computing is the US, with China a close second, and Europe a distant third. And if you narrow that down to the EU, it's even worse now that Britain has left.
And when it comes to scaling, you get things like vast numbers of lucrative jobs, high paying engineering salaries from creating global giants. You get an immense virtuous cycle from it, including for seed funding start-ups and larger VC activities. Microsoft will grow its revenue more in the next two years than the total size of SAP (which is Europe's largest softare company and most valuable tech company). The revenue gap between them used to be more like 3 to 1 (circa 2001), now it's over 5 to 1 and persistently expanding.
AWS is on its way to being an $80-$100 billion sales global juggernaut, while SAP runs in slow motion. There's no reason Europe couldn't have done that, in theory; in practice, it has been two decades and Europe hasn't been able to do it.
"Innovation" is a gloriously worthless word (you can tell because Bill Gates was so very fond of throwing it around while he was at Microsoft, it's a dodge word). If something can't be supported with actual results, people jump to proclaiming things about innovation or the lack of it.
Besides, where is the supposed innovation in Europe's tech scene over the last four or five decades? What innovation? Where are the hundreds of amazing, innovative, successful European tech companies that are supposed to stand as a counter to Silicon Valley & Co.? They don't exist. Europeans will claim that's because they're all being acquired by richer US tech companies, which is false; that certainly happens occasionally, and it's happening at a small scale, because there aren't very many of those companies to purchase.
Virtually every industrial machine on this planet has made something in it build in Europe. France builds high speed rail at a third of the cost of the US. Europe has countless of pharmaceutical giants.
Again, I put it simply. The per capita income and productivity in Western Europe is roughly as high, maybe 10% lower than in the US. If Europe had 'no tech', how is Europe rich?
You have a myopic view of technology that excludes the majority of the economy, which is everything outside the world of bits as Thiel puts it, which constitutes 90% of the actual national GDP, including in the US by the way.
'AI' or 'Quantum computing' isn't some sort of economic super weapon. The German economy is 4 trillion dollars large, what is the market for quantum computing, or even 'AI'? By the way we have heard this accusation for decades. In the 70s and 80s we were accused of living in the industrial stone-age, while Britain becomes rich on being a leader in the sector of the future, finance. Where is Britain now? At a national productivity level 30% below France and Germany, turns out in the long-run finance wasn't as hip as people thought, particularly not for anyone living outside of the city of London.
I'll start to get worried about lacking in tech when software is delivering historical economic growth, rather than becoming a tool for social engineering and reshuffling money from the bottom 80% to the top 20%.
That's not to say by the way that there's not genuinely innovative aspects to software, cloud computing actually is something that Europe could catch up on if only for security and geopolitical reasons but the overwhelming majority of software giants in the US contributes nothing to innovation. Facebook and Twitter destroy democracies and heat the planet up with datacenters, nothing more. If there was a word for de-innovation, that's what I'd label those companies.
Where you got that number? UK has higher GDP per capita than France and it's lower than Germany but not by 30%. Also the UK is just coming out of a messy divorce. I'll give it 5-10 years to figure stuff out.
because you're not looking at output per hour worked. The Brits work about ~1670 hours per year. The French about ~1470, and the Germans ~1360. If you look at the output per hour, The UK comes in below Euro average, roughly on a level with Italy and Spain.
Expensive BMWs are equally silly. The company generally produces nice vehicles, but they also make hideous atrocities like the X4 and X6. What's worse is that Daimler followed suit and that every car company is producing SUVs now, that aren't any good off road and have lots of aerodynamic drag on road.
German Engineering students work on interesting projects like swarm drones playing team games. I suspect these are quite obviously projects with military applications or space exploration.
He described French risk aversion as such “In Europe, if you took investor money and your idea failed, you would be seen as a failure. It’s amazing that in the US you could raise $1M, lose it all and then go out and raise money again for another idea.”
As always, depends on where. Sweden has (or used to, at least before) basically a website where you can create a company, and it's mostly free to start the company as an individual (at least the basic form) so you can't really complain that it's hard.
In Spain, it's also relatively easy, just have to go sign some papers (and depending on company type, invest some money into it), but it's hardly "really hard".
Not sure about the rest of Europe, but can't imagine it's a lot harder than these two examples (counter examples incoming surely).
Although, if you with "it's really hard to start a company" mean "it's really hard as a unknown startup to raise funds from VCs", then yes, European investors do way more due diligence and are more risk averse, compared to US investors. But there are more things than startups :)
It's like that. I don't know what sort of laws you guys have there but just the paperwork is going to kill me, probably. And then any time you want to do anything, the paperwork will kill you, the regulators will be on your case, and all that. And that's the way Europeans like it. It's culturally normal there to be like "Oh, well why do you think you should be allowed to do that".
For instance, they would say "Maybe it isn't right that a company can just target ads to people without a comprehensive affirmative opt-in" and that would be the dominant view. "Maybe some guy in a garage shouldn't be allowed to hold a million people's personal data". There's a trade-off there: you don't get tracked but you don't get Google. And that's fair, but it means no business models that rely on things like that which count on low transaction costs can't happen, and lots of unicorns count on that.
Come on, really? It's hardly that much paperwork. Sure, it sucks, but compared to building a business, filling out paperwork doesn't come close to being the hardest thing.
Sounds like what you describe here is that it's more paperwork in the US than in the European countries I'm familiar with, so kind of goes against what you're arguing here.
> And that's the way Europeans like it. It's culturally normal there to be like "Oh, well why do you think you should be allowed to do that".
I'm not sure where you are from, but I hardly get the feeling you're "European". Throwing blanket statements like "that's the way Europeans like it" is impossible, it's a huge and diverse area, so you can't generalize like that. Plenty of people here wants things to improve/change and depending on the location, you're right or wrong. Rules in Sweden are seen as "must follow" while rules in Spain is mostly seen as "advised to follow but if you must, do what you want, as long as you don't harm others".
You don't need something to be harder than building the business. You just need it to be hard enough to interfere with the process.
It's easier in e.g. Finland, Sweden, Estonia (which actually have produced some nice startups like Spotify, Skype, etc.). IMHO given the relatively small populations, places like that are actually remarkably successful when it comes to startups and technology companies. Finland has a mere 5 million people. I mean, Nokia for whom I used to work came from that tiny country and dominated the smart phone market for a while.
However, the real issues are more related to securing investments and funding and the inevitable process of having to shut down a company in case it fails. Which with a startup is more likely to happen than not. Failing fast is hard in a legal system that is purposely designed to make this hard.
It's also risky. You take a personal risk when you start a company and when a company can't pay its bills, it's the managing directors who are on the line with their personal capital. Limited liability is not so limited in Germany and it prevents companies from taking risks. There are all sorts of tricks to prevent that from escalating of course but they all involve the use of accountants, lawyers, and other middle men that are costly. And given that it is hard to raise seed capital in Germany, very little gets off the ground here.
Berlin where I live is a bit unusual in the sense that despite all this, there are loads of startups here and a density of capital and talent that is hard to find elsewhere in Europe. I always joke that this is despite the German government rather than because of their policies. It's basically a weird side-effect of the place being pretty much bankrupt. Local government here is basically just moving paper around and tends to be very hands-off because they have no budget for basically anything; including going after pesky startups taking liberties with the rules and regulations. Everything in this country is regulated to death but Berlin seems to be reasonably relaxed and informal.
For better or worse, people just showed up here from all over the world and started doing stuff after the wall came down. Lately, big German corporations that are trying to look hip are opening startup accelerators all over Berlin. Like all of them: Bosch, Siemens, VW/Porsche, etc. all are present here. Silicon Valley also moved in: MS, Apple, Tesla, Google, etc. all have offices here. And of course Tesla is building a Giga factory.
Thats not true. Many companies are in Europe, much more than in the US: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micr...
In Europe we have more companies of all sizes instead of accumulating into few mega-companies. But that has nothing to do with risk tolerance.
TLDR SV pay is likely too high and unsustainable in the long term. Equity moonshots are already lottery tickets, and you can't set public policy based on lottery tickets.
I think we would move in the direction of US tech companies if we managed to create five world-class tech behemoths, but I don't see that happening. Taxation will necessarily affect things; some places have an employer tax that approaches 100%. (Half the salary to the employee and half to the state, then tax the employee's share again afterwards).
Can't think of a single country having that. This money which you count as tax goes into retirement, healthcare and stuff like that. Would you consider US packages including healthcare to be taxed ?
This tax could of course consist of social security or retirement benefit contribution, if so I got an incomplete picture. Are you by chance familiar with this system?
I am familiar with Norway's system. Employer pays 14% of employee's gross salary as tax and required to pay at least 2% as retirement contributions. Employee normally pays in somewhere between 30-40% tax on what's left, 8 percentage points of these being the state retirement contribution. Socialized healthcare. Company taxed 22% on all profits and owners taxed 31% on all dividends and capital gains. Most of the particularly rough parts of the tax system are in form of VAT, taxation of capital and special-purpose taxes on various sectors and activities, mostly transportation. With the 70%-ish oil producer tax being a welcome special case of this.
In this case, our modest salaries for globally in-demand skills are mostly due to a lack of very profitable companies, plus probably a degree of cultural bias against high performers.
Marginal tax rate tops out at ~46% after $110,000/year, so one isn't incentivized to work hard for salary increases.
The lion's share of what the employer pays is not taxes. It is, indeed, mandatoty, but it is not a tax collected by the state, as it opens individual rights to jobless claims, health insurance and retirement schemes.
Revenue tax is also directly taken from salary since a couple years ago, but that means most people don't pay any tax besides what's on their salary.
If it’s a state mandated by the state that you can go to prison for not paying economically it’s a tax. It functions exactly like a tax in every way. That it’s legally something else is irrelevant to economic impact.
These payments are made to a mechanism that, in return, opens rights for workers, such as pensions to retire, full health insurance, or work insurance. These are very much individual benefits, not some kind of tax scheme that goes to fund roads or the army.
If you want a comparison, car insurance is mandatory in the US, but it is not considered a tax.
So x% has already 'come off your paycheck' before you see it, and then an extra 15% on everything that you buy. Which is also hidden.
That is offset by extra services, esp. healthcare, but in tech, healthcare is usually a benefit on top of salary anyhow.
The US may not average $120K for devs, it's probably lower across the board. Then you actually do have apparent inequality problems in the US and if that were taken care if, it would be even less.
It's not as wide as indicated by salaries, but it's still a gap.
Europeans don't really need to save much money. Because the government takes care of health, education and all the essential things. Why do you need a lot of money if you have everything taken care of.
On the other hand when you are living in US or anywhere else you need to have a shit ton of money in bank just to make sure that you don't go bankrupt.
For example education for your kids would be ridiculously expensive in US. And if you don't have an insurance you might get bankrupt if you have to hospital for emergency.
If I have a choice to be born again in a random country, I would be opting for Germany or some scanadanvian country for sure. US is too risky to be born randomly.
Europeans still need money.
Also, remember, that taxes pay for that, so with less incentive to work, there's equally less incentive for taxes to pay for all of that stuff.
The degree to which it is an incentive is really complicated, but it is real to some extent.
The reason is that you’re competing in a much more varied market with less silly money splashing about. Cost of living in London is high, but you’re competing for jobs with competent teams in Eastern Europe. That coupled with fewer VCs funding “Uber for cats” ideas, there’s just not the appetite for paying devs US level salaries.
That’s not why the salaries are so much lower. European companies are less profitable so they don’t bid up the wages of developers as much. The more money a company makes the more a productive member of staff is worth to them, so they are more willing to pay it. That drags up the market rate because everyone has to compete with the highest payers for the best devs.
The seemingly only place that’s replicable is in Switzerland at a handful of companies (Google and some small other companies) and that’s not even in the EU.
You literally don't, since companies provide this. Unless of course you're accounting for the better healthcare you'd receive in the US?
> cost of living
Where most IT jobs are based in europe it isn't cheap to live at all..
He's made his billions on the backs of builders, the musicians who can record music all day long but will be lucky to receive pennies for a million listens. The 98.6% of artists outside of Spotify's top tier are making an average of $12 per month (https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-million-ar...).
Why can't Ek share his largesse with the builders who make it possible for his service to exist?
I see spotify more like as an audio-based customer acquisition channel, like the radio.
Maybe it could build in some kind of "donate" patreon-like feature into the app. I wish Soundcloud had this.
In the early 1990s I worked for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label, back when they were dominating the UK and European pop charts as The KLF (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/20/537708922/...).
They never made a pound touring. Their success and much of their impact was tied to European club playlists, the sales of singles, album sales, and the media.
You can talk to many other artists from that era who did depend on touring and merch, but also used distribution and sales of singles and albums (and advances on record deals) to establish themselves.
While plastic media was doomed long before Spotify, this "audio-based customer acquisition channel" is, by design, set up to benefit Spotify, record labels, and top artists, in that order.
Everyone else in the 98.6% tier gets the scraps.
yeah because they're getting 1.4% of the listens.
It's not because Spotify is a meritocracy for music.
Yup, so why start now, right? That would go against tradition.
> That would go against tradition.
a tradition of it being unprofitable, perhaps. It just goes against the numbers. Small artists just don't get enough listens.
Everybody complains, but you aren't entitled to success. Once you're popular, there's plenty of ways to monetize.
The only solution is basic income, because you probably aren't gonna live off your music otherwise.
I have created something similar with SoundRat (https://soundrat.com) that connects more with the patreon-like features and makes listening of music free but gives fans an option to donate to artists and get some perks for doing so.
Each location could have their share of top talent to perform for the region.
I don't even agree that they deserve it. The aggregate musical output is valuable, sure, but individually it's commoditized and worthless for all but the top musicians.
Ah, you surely mean recording companies and copyright holders that take up to 70% of Spotify's revenue and pay out pennies to artists. Why don't you ask those companies where all the money is going?
> Why can't he share his largesse with the builders who make it possible for his service to exist?
Well, he is sharing it. At IPO Spotify disclosed that had paid "$9.7 billion in royalties to artists, music labels and publishers since it launched in 2006." [1] The thing is, Spotify doesn't have direct contracts with artists (and can't afford to for fear that the Big Four[2] will pull their content). So the question is: where did those billions go?
Let's read the article you're commenting on (emphasis mine):
--- start quote ---
Spotify pays the major record companies a 52% share of all net receipts attributable to streams of their artists. This was a figure the parties agreed to during negotiations in 2017, and it’s believed to have remained unchanged since.
According to Spotify’s Q2 results, the firm generated €1.89 billion ($2.05 billion) in the three months to end of June. We can therefore broadly assume that 52% of this money, or $1.07 billion, is being paid in recorded music royalties to labels and distributors, who will carry a portion of that over to their artists.
--- end quote ---
The article then continues being disingenuous pretending that 100% of the money that Spotify pays out goes to artists and that Spotify is solely responsible for that money.
So what is that "portion that labels and distributors carry over to their artists"?
Oh, look, only 12% of music revenue goes to artists [3] But obviously, it's the sole responsibility of Spotify (and Amazon, and Apple), and not of the Big Four that hold the music world hostage.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/28/how-spotify-licenses-and-pay...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180819/00051140461/only-...
The guys who always get paid are the majors, and the majors are the one who ensure the top artists (who are signed to thos labels) are always given the majority of the share.
Ah, Spotify, famously a win-win for all its stakeholders, including the musicians who can no longer make a living by recording music.
Europe also produces 20% of world's research in the field [1]
The big question though is: do we measure success correctly? The vast majority of "great American companies" are either vaporware with inflated valuations, or produce zero innovations [2]
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/european-rd-review-f...
You might be tempted to include WeChat and games that Tencent brought, but if we lower the bar to that then the list of EU companies would grow a lot as well, such as SoundCloud, Shazam, last.fm, Viber, King, Mojang, Rovio, Supercell, Kiloo, Dailymotion, Criteo, SAP, ASOS, Skyscanner, Wix, GoCardless, Adyen, Kaspersky Labs, Yandex, Transferwise, Badoo, etc.
"Ek mentioned machine learning, biotechnology, materials sciences and energy as some of these areas."
Material science in particular has endless promise. With the new XFEL infrastructure there is lots of potential too. Some examples of what we could do is replace plastics with bulk metallic glass, save energy in transport with low density steel, and more broadly with eutectic systems.
China dominates what in the global software industry? Desktop OS? Smartphone OS? Office Suite? Database? Web server?
But I agree that we do need more competition.
I'm a little amazed at how little the Y Combinator model has been copied in Europe.
Now, obviously any new incubator wouldn't come even close to being able to offer what YC does right now with the extensive network etc. But hell, just offering 10-15 startups €120k every six months for ten years would be worth a shot. Maybe fly those companies to Berlin or London or Stockholm. Help them out with whatever you can, but mostly let them figure it out themselves. Maybe focus on startups from the EMEA region.
The costs would consist of the fund (€36M) plus the cost of operating the program (perhaps a €1M/year). That would still amount to below €50M.
Idk. There are probably plenty of reasons why this would be a bad idea, but if I'd ever have 50 million to spend, this is what I'd try.
I seriously suggest those people to look at the society they have created, and do some soul searching.
The issues are many and they are often at odds with other things, like 'quality of life'. From lack of large centres of innovation, not quite the right immigration system and attitudes towards migrants, a lack of hyper competitive attitude towards business (easy to see how this could be corrosive from another perspective), taxation and payroll taxes / inability to let people go (i.e. France), really closed business systems all over Europe, smaller markets, lack of risk taking everywhere from buyers, to investors, lack of big, cash-flush acquirers like Oracle, MS, etc. that eat up a lot of startups, a lack of 'flexible 1->n workforce' - ie the kinds of staffers that know how to go with a growing company and help it get established (this is a big ingredient of 'secondary domain knowledge' missing everywhere outside the Valley), to more sophisticated kinds of financing, and finally even just the right cooperative kind of attitude. Despite the competitiveness, there is definitely a 'goodwill' in the Valley that doesn't exist in most parts of the world.
Elk would be much better in trying to help Europe understand and overcome structural limitations because they already have the money.
This is good news, but we need investment two orders of magnitude higher before we think about fixing this situation.
If you are an American or Australian thinking of moving to southern Europe, consider moving to a developing country somewhere else instead. The job market will be similar and life will be much cheaper.
Whether it's innovation grants or QE-driven VC, this is just supply-side bullshit making Frankenstein unprofitable hypeups.
If materially content Europeans don't wanna buy more money, that's great! Just keep on reducing working ours until it's clear what needed to be automated, and send the engineers to work on that.
FAANG envy is depressing and pathetic.