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Comment by ry454 | Hacker News Reader

I believe Europe can create its own SV by following the USA's route: the Europe's equivalent of DoD (which has access to unlimited funds, tens of trillions of euros), needs to come up with a grand multi-decade project and invest into companies that are going to work on related sub-projects. For USA it was the worldwide surveillance system, but for Europe it may be something else, like ITER (but on a bigger scale) or micropayments system (I don't know if it would be big enough). That grand project needs to be useful and reachable, though. One thing I'm certain about is that VC-style micro investments into micro projects with micro objectives will bring only micro results.

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I think many/most people ignore this, that some of the mega defense projects spawned many companies that led to huge growth in tech industries. The VHSIC program was one of them. I saw dozens of people from the big defense tech company I was working at go on to found design software companies after their experience designing VHSIC chips, chips that are small by today's standards put pushed the limits of design tools at that time. Same thing was happening at the other VHSIC contractors.

Europe does not exist in the relevant sense. Germany does not exist in the relevant sense which is why this is so hard. Start up ecosystems are highly localized, like any other knowledge worker employer ecosystem. Silicon Valley managed to spill over as far as San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area. LA is as tightly coupled to that ecosystem as Boston, New York or Montreal. You can’t evenly divide an ecosystem. In the EU it looks like Berlin might have one, maybe. Europe won’t. The closest you could get would be a border spanning metro area, like Aachen or Strasbourg.

There are some science and technology investment projects like this in the EU.

For example:

> Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020) – in addition to the private investment that this money will attract. It promises more breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts by taking great ideas from the lab to the market.

Horizon is much bigger than ITER, and like the DoD it covers a wide range of R&D areas with industrial collaboration, and says what its main areas of interest are.

Horizon 2020? Yes, lots of paper was pushed and lots of fantastic reports written. It promised more breakthroughs and discoveries, but it only delivered tons of reports printed on dead trees.

Maybe so, and I'm not going to say Horizon 2020 is equivalent to Silicon Valley investment.

But it has funded lots of small companies doing R&D, which I thought was the subtopic here comparing with DoD funding, which also involves lots of paper and fantastic reports...

The issue with Europe is that it's all decentralized by nature. They can't expect a company in Prague or one in Madrid to move to Strasbourg, unless given strong incentives, which the EU is pretty loathe to give.

Those 80 billions are the micro investments I was talking about. EU needs a 100-trillion-dollar project for the next 50 years + change some laws to improve competition. With 80 billions EU can build a wooden airplane at best.

Yeah, but instead of technologists, we'll hire consultants from Big4 and MBB and SAP and ask them to do some magic with computers. In the end, we'll get potatoes to show for and billions of euros under water.

Honestly, if they want a solid challenge, here's one: get a unicorn tech company public over the next decade for each major EU nation.

A first step might be to expand the European University system to handle the influx of Graduate students that were previously headed to the US. Give funding, poach the frustrated non tenured profs from the US.

Essentially reverse what happened during and after WW2, when the anti semitism caused Germany and then mainland Europe to lose all the amazing talent to the US.

> A first step might be to expand the European University system to handle the influx of Graduate students that were previously headed to the US. Give funding, poach the frustrated non tenured profs from the US.

There is no European university system. There’s a French one, a German one etc. They all pay much, much worse than their US equivalent because they’re substantially poorer than the US. Remember, if Germany was a US state it would be poorer than every state but Mississippi. And this probably understates the difference. By average household consumption the US is $10,000 ahead of Switzerland, number 2 after Hong Kong. The money to massively increase research spending isn’t there.

I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers from. Assuming by “poorer” you mean nominal GDP, Germany would be the richest state in the US.

My numbers were out of date. Germany has a higher GDP per capita than South Carolina, Alabama, Idaho, West Virginia, Arkansas and Mississippi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany

Interesting. Why does Washington DC have almost triple the gdp/capita then California? What do they do that California don’t?

Much smaller area (DC is something like 65 square miles) and population, for one.

But beyond that, my thought is that although you probably have fewer super rich people in DC, you also have way fewer poor people. So the average is going to be higher than even SV.

Plus, the types of jobs in DC proper (so we’re not talking about the extended Maryland and Virginia suburbs) are almost entirely professional/government. It’s also a very expensive place to live.

DC has higher GDP per capita than California for the same reason NYC would have higher GDP per capita than NY state, or San Francisco than all of California. Cities are more economically productive than areas that also have lots of low value added activities like agriculture, mining or forestry.

Presumably they mean GDP per capita, which slots Germany[0] just under Alabama[1].

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DEU/germany/gdp-per-ca...

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

No, a first step would be increasing social mobility. It's pretty hard to attend school in large parts of Europe. If you are from Europe realize you might be in a bubble of people that speaks English very well -- in general, I've noticed such people are high performers relative to many.

Most EU countries have higher social mobility then the US.

I've read the opposite, or at least that they are very close, from an unbiased (as far as I can tell) source. Couple that with all the reports that investors in e.g. Germany are extremely conservative and it seems social mobility would be lower.

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