Europe's Software Problem
berthub.eu
berthub.eu
Europe does have a few issues that make it unnecessarily hard to build successful startups here. People do start companies here but more often than not success is followed by US investment and before you know it the company is headquartered in the US. There are many reasons for that but a big one has to be that raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard. Investors drag their heels, founders have to take on more risk, etc.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
That's much less of a thing in the US (though it is a bit of a thing there too between states). And that's before you consider language and cultural differences. Simply put, the same company in the EU will have a very hard time growing compared to doing that in the US. Being successful in the US market, means having the deep pockets to go international. Doing the same from a small country means you barely have enough to expand to another small country. Going international is hard work. Not something you do with your MVP. It's not very scalable either: you need to worry about cultural differences, bureaucracy, localization, understanding the local market, ramping up sales, marketing, etc. Especially with SAAS companies this is super expensive.
So maybe Israel is doing quite well, but I know from experience that it would also do massively better if it had the size of the USA.
1. The culture is risk taking, with failure an opportunity to try something else. There is no (or little) negative social or professional connotation with failure, unlike say Europe.
2. Thinking is global market first rather than local or regional market. The local market is tiny and there is no regional market.
3. Out-of-the box thinking is the norm and excellent. It’s in-the-box thinking that is problematic in Israel. In Europe the reverse is generally the case.
Also, Israel has a large jewish community in the US involved with the financial sector that wields quite a bit of political power. And Israel uses English as a second language inside Israel, and is culturally closely aligned with the US.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
There are people who specialize in sales between EU states, but for a small team without capital it was hard. That said most of the 100+ tech companies I know of have offices around EU to get talent from other countries.
Bank payments are easy yes, but credit cards are not ubiquitous, online payments are different in all countries, direct debit is not always supported across countries.
So for businesses expanding into new EU countries it's not as onerous as needing a local presence would be.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an accountant and may be wrong. I'll take it on the chin if so. This is just my understanding, having needed to look this stuff up occasionally.)
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-bor...
[2] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-bor...
[3] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-digit...
[4] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-bor...
Alza (CZ) is slightly bigger than a medium sized online shop and they are using CZ VAT ID intentionally for intracomunitary B2B sales, even though they do have physical presence in other countries.
No you don't need that. You can have your German speaking people move to Italy and work from there. That's the whole point of the EU.
The same for VAT, you can register in one country and have that sent to multiple countries according to your sales. No presence needed
(though it's good to have them study a bit before. But with Youtube, Duolingo, etc it's not that hard)
That's just rude and why would you want to socialise with such people. I had some great experiences and even when I was the only person not speaking the local language, everyone spoke English in my presence. There is plenty of people that have standards and if you cannot find them at a given time, just focus on something else.
It could be rude but not necessarily. Context matters
Well, tough luck. Welcome to Germany. Living and working in Germany? Learn German. This is the treatment I’ve got and frankly, that’s okay!
That's kinda rude if non-English speaking people join the conversation.
We couldn't just set up a PO box and get an org. number, apparently that wasn't enough.
So far one of our customers have been kind enough to lend us their credentials for testing, but yeah would have been nice to have our own.
In Sweden we spent almost two years after being done getting our software released there, as the officials required that the main UI was approved by them and it involved a ton of back-and-forth.
Not just that, but each major version change that altered the main UI would also have to be approved...
The Finnish are quite decent at spending money on their government IT systems it seems, so they're more up to date. However not all documentation is in English and while your average Norwegian can read Danish and Swedish just fine, Finnish is something else entirely.
And of course all the Scandinavian governments have completely different systems for this, even though the forms are essentially the same across the countries, so zero code sharing there. Heck the Danish even have two completely different systems depending on which form you send.
We're just dealing with the Scandinavian countries, I'm sure it's similar in the other EU countries.
It's a combination of requirements specific to markets (EU mandates like GDPR are easier train a support team on and build an escalation process), cultural expectations around handholding, not wanting to hear no for an answer unless it is delivered by an exec (and EU support teams inconsistently delivering the same message that a US would because they fear the response), and general language barriers.
In some ways, it is better to deliver arguably lower-quality support via the US with special treatment for a few key customers just to avoid having to setup support in Europe. Once you invest, you have to go all-in.
> It's a combination of requirements specific to markets (EU mandates like GDPR are easier train a support team on and build an escalation process), cultural expectations around handholding, not wanting to hear no for an answer unless it is delivered by an exec.
in my opinion, very little european teams (mostly italian, czech and german teams) care about hearing the answer from an executive. Also, what do you mean about handholding?
This.
I am European but live and work in US. Simply put, US wins hands down because they:
- have resources, read $$$$
- take risk
- have the right entrepreneurial mindset
Europe? let's just say they are not even close.
After the Bay Area, NYC and Beijing, London has the most startup funding of any city in the world, and the UK as a whole has the 3rd highest number of unicorns, after the US and China.
Parts of Europe are doing badly, others are doing ok (but could do better!).
In Sweden it is the opposite because
1) more responsibilities
2) salary increase too small (and taxes too high, you can end up in the wrong bracket)
3) flat hierarchy (Du reform)And previous year 2020 was the first tax year without värnskatt, an extra 5%, ie 25% total, for everything above 703 000 SEK. It was abolished 2019.
For each 2£ you earn above 100K, your income tax allowance is reduced by 1£. At 125K, your allowance reaches 0. The result is that between 100K and 125K your marginal tax rate is 60%. At 125K it goes back to 40%.
Generally speaking, in Europe, the technical career track simply don't exist. You are eventually forced to take the management career path. Eng are seen as the ones scrapping the floors.
In US, at big tech companies, you can stay on the tech career path and get to Principal, Architect, Distinguished Eng etc. At these levels, your voice is heard as much, if not more, as managers.
IC contributors and managers job titles are mapped to an internal company level. For instance, a Principal Eng usually map to a Director. You can easily tell where you are in the career ladder, regardless on the specific track you are on.
Particularly, Atmel made the last 8-bit microprocessor which was just a bit more carefully thought out than everything else on the market and carefully positioned to give a lot of bang per buck.
Atmel got bought by Microchip (San Jose, USA)
Today when I think of Europe I think of those annoying popups which (I think) were a "normalization of deviance" for annoying and harassing UI elements on web sites... I mean, this one is required, virtuous, etc. so it is OK to nag people to get their email address, open a new window every time you click on a search result (Bing) so you'll accidentally click on an ad when handling way too many tabs
There was something anti-user about the GDPR popup that "broke the dam" for other bad practices, as well meaning as it is. It might pour sand into the wheels of the data economy, but it made it impossible to be an advocate of the user in most organizations. (e.g. if you can't reject that one, what can you reject?)
> In 1996, Atmel formed a design team in Trondheim, Norway to develop the Atmel AVR line of RISC microcontrollers. This team combined technology of former students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with Atmel's expertise in flash memory. ..The AVR chip is the basis of most Arduino open-source development boards.
*sigh, this is the the magic of Branding...
Unfortunately, law enforcement has been asleep at the wheel.
Then again, I am not running shady websites and selling user data
It is enforceable, and there have already been fines.
> A law that requires some agency in Europe to police all of the websites
No, they are not going to police every website in the world.
Once again, if it 6 years later you still couldn't read and understand a rather reasonably written law with multiple explanations and examples, you are a part of the problem.
The problem is the law. It's a crappy law.
Because Google is in the business of dark patterns and wholesale data collection. They couldn't care less about user privacy.
Besides, their entire system is built on the premise of wholesale data collection. Their own engineers admit that they don't know how and where the data is collected and de-google their phones. [1]
> The problem is the law. It's a crappy law.
As I'm saying, you are a part of the problem.
[1] https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1398353211220807682
Are they gonna sue every single website who had to put up a cookie popup just because they run analytics?
For over a decade there have been laws in each country protecting people's private data. Companies kept on ignoring those laws. The countries came together and created a single law for the entirety of the EU.
The essence of the law:
- if you need some data for the functionality of your service, you can collect it
- if you don't need some data for the functionality of your service, you can't collect it unless you explicitly ask the person. And "opt out" has to be the default option, and cannot stop the person from using the service
How is that a problem?
Those popups? Yes, they are annoying, but they also show how every single website sells the data they don't need to hundreds of companies without your consent. And they keep trying to trick you into providing that data. Now this is a problem.
However, you think that it's all fine, everyone should just hoover up all the data they can possibly get their hands on.
> Are they gonna sue every single website who had to put up a cookie popup just because they run analytics?
Yes, theoretically they have the authority to do that. However, no, they are not going to do that. And no, that doesn't mean that the law is bad.
Look at the bottom of the page. It's a cookie banner. It was their law. They had 6 years to implement it on their own website. This is the result. The law is broken.
Sorry, but I don't agree. I consider them a scourge on today's Internet. And I find them a horribly steep price for the "privacy" (really just a lousy IP address obfuscation) you gain in their stead.
The choice can be perfectly well saved in a cookie because it's a cookie necessary for site operations. They don't even need approval. Only unnecessary ones do.
It’s not reasonable if it’s written in a way that’s so easy to misinterpret.
People still don’t understand - shit law.
OR
People do understand and implement bad pop-ups and EU doesn’t enforce - shit law.
A law that is not enforced or has been written in a way that isn’t reasonable to enforce is absolutely a shitty law. Pie in the sky laws that have no teeth are worse than no law at all. It just gives room for lots of selective enforcement which is a great way to encourage corruption and shakedown schemes.
The GDPR spells out when you're allowed to collect data; asking for consent is basically its emergency escape hatch. You only need to do that if there is absolutely no (functional) reason to get that data, but you want it anyway.
6 years later there is no consensus on simple questions like website analytics which is probably the most common usage scenario for the kind of data GDPR covers.
This law is beyond bad.
There are both definitions and guidelines. You just didn't even care to read it.
For example, cookies: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
Popups: https://gdpr.eu/recital-32-conditions-for-consent/
=== start quote ===
Consent should be given by a clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s agreement to the processing of personal data
...
Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent.
=== end quote ===
> there is no consensus on simple questions like website analytics which is probably the most common usage scenario for the kind of data GDPR covers.
The consensus is there. And it's spelled clearly in the law.
Please tell me the consensus and guideline on how to store the rejection for using cookies so I don't ask the website visitor every time he visits.
Please tell me the consensus and guideline on what "legitimate purposes" are. With examples per industry please.
And most of all, please tell me the consensus and guideline for cookie banners and popups, considering they are used on the EU's websites themselves.
Literally described in one of the links.
> Please tell me the consensus and guideline on how to store the rejection for using cookies
You can use a cookie for that. If it's for a logged-in user, you can store that in the user profile.
> Please tell me the consensus and guideline on what "legitimate purposes" are.
Text in one of the links literally contains a link to further reading on legitimate interest.
> And most of all, please tell me the consensus and guideline for cookie banners and popups
Literally described in both links.
Once again. It's painfully clear that you never bothered to read and understand anything about the law in the past 6 years. Your clueless questions about "why does gdpr and europa sites have cookie banners" only serve as further proof.
The https://gdpr.eu/ website is not official. Its description of "analytics cookies" cannot be found anywhere in the actual GDPR & Co regulations.
> You can use a cookie for that.
Use a cookie to store the literal "No cookies" preference? Great example of the contradictory and irrational text of the GDPR.
> Text in one of the links literally contains a link to further reading on legitimate interest.
More vague and contradictory BS.
> Literally described in both links.
Too bad that description is not actually valid and if you'll actually check the GDPR text (not the non-official gdpr.eu website) you'll find no such descriptions.
Moreover, the cookie banner on both websites is actually illegal under GDPR. Check out https://ico.org.uk/ for a correct (but horrifying) implementation.
You are correct, I am not an every-day GDPR expert. I only encounter it when implementing on various websites and there only for analytics - no ads or anything more.
But its requirements were always for the worse. Because of its vague and contradictory definitions everybody (including me) adopted the safest implementation and thus the current web of cookie banners and popups was born. I hope you are happy with it, it solves nothing but it makes everybody's life worse.
There are explainers, compliance checklists, whatever you want to implement it. It was three years before it went in effect, and it's been 3 years since it went into effect. If you don't understand it by now, you definitely don't deserve to be handling personal data.
The cost of implementing it was in the billions. The human time cost paid for all those damn cookie popups we keep having to click on is probably already in the thousands of life-times wasted, and it keeps on growing.
Cry me a river. If you was careless with users' data, who cares?
> The human time cost paid for all those damn cookie popups we keep having to click on is probably already in the thousands of life-times wasted, and it keeps on growing.
Ah yes, and the problem is the law that protects users' data, and not the companies who couldn't care less about privacy.
When everybody breaks a law, including its creators, it's the law that is broken.
The one on https://gdpr.eu/ is very well done. It does not break the law.
It's an example of excellence others should follow. Unintrusive. As easy to opt out as to opt in. Clear buttons, simple language. Clear text. If you prefer to ignore the banner that's fine too. On desktop it's unintrusive and you can just ignore it. I tried scrolling, it just stays out of the way. Each button is clear: "Ok", "No", "Privacy policy". Perfect. (It could be better on mobile for size, but it's still easy to click away.)
No dark patterns, dirty tricks, misleading controls, no "yes means no" controls, no "visit our 1000 partner sites to opt out" insanity, no other dirty tricks. You will not "accidentally" end up tracked when you didn't want to be. You will not be misled into believing a 70% screen size, deliberately slow panel is required.
Panels on other sites are deliberately slow and harder to opt out of. They want you to be annoyed. That's because they want you to believe the GDPR requires stupid, slow, large, intrusive, complicated banners. So that you will tell everyone how bad the GDPR is. But the GDPR doesn't require those things. In fact, when you see a banner that says "due to the GDPR we must..." it is often a straight up lie, and parts of the banner are against the law, not required by it.
https://gdpr.eu/ - thanks for highlighting that great example. I will take that as inspiration next time I need a good quality, sleek, fast, easy, compliant and user-friendly banner.
Such banners are not required, though. My sites don't have cookie banners and that's fine. They don't track users against the expectations of the users. My sites do have optional logins, user identification, and use cookies for those things, but logins don't require cookie banners because people expect their identity to be tracked by the act of logging in. And, importantly, their identity used only for what users would expect. My sites do have basic request logging and monitoring too, as you would expect for security and ops, but again those don't require cookie banners if they are done respectfully.
Check out https://ico.org.uk/ for a correct implementation. And cry...
Cookie banners ARE required for something as simple as logs analytics. That is the spirit of the GDPR and it is what makes it a broken law.
There are multiple guides and explanations for the law. You complain that those are not official.
One thing is definitely clear: 6 years later it's not a problem with the law. It's the problem with you and other people like you who diss GDPR without taking a single step to understand it.
I would say that banking in Europe is much better developed than in the US. In the US, we still have checks and you need to pay for wire transfers (what???). Doing taxes in the US is 10 times more complicated than it is in Europe, and CPAs are only interested to doing them for you if you are a cookie cutter case and easy to make money off. Otherwise, good luck getting a call back. That doesn't happen in Europe. You hire an accountant, he does his job.
Entrepreneurship in the US is not easier than it is in Europe, IMHO. Raising money or scaling might be easier.
In my experience, I've been dealing with constant discrimination in the US. It is claimed that where you are from or what your social status is, doesn't matter, in silicon valley (or California in general). People are nice, they smile, but it's mostly fake. You remain a foreigner, who should still work for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy league school, even though you have the same credentials and graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy league degree on top of that).
Raising money in the US? No different than in Europe, at least in my experience. Again, no network = no raise. And you will need to overcome the above discrimination or at least the idea that you might "go back" any time, even if you are a permanent resident.
All this sounds brutal, and maybe hard to take, but I just say it like it is, and I prefer to be honest and straightforward and share my first hand experience.
Bingo. There's a set of something like ten schools from which Silicon Valley companies hire.
If you're not from one of those, you will be cordially invited to eat shit.
I responded to GP's comment about hiring. Ivy-like pedigree surely helps for any career path, but that's no different for SV or anywhere else.
If there's any lesson to learn from this thread I guess it's that no amount or level of credentials can overcome cultural biases, racism, and discrimination.
To be fair, we aren't a SV startup, but we've always had an equal engineering presence there (probably 120 engineers there now vs maybe 30 in 2018).
It completely blew my mind, to be honest (and I do see similar weirdnesses in the way US colleagues review CV's, so I don't think it's only a FAANG thing).
And if so, what priority should be given to "ease of rapid growth for startups" vs many other issues that determine economic growth and a population's well being?
Also, how much of the problem is due to the issues you raise vs other factors such amount of money spent in R&D? The US has a huge amount of "defense spending" but in fact a lot of that is dedicated to funding research in Universities and direct job creation. Maybe Europe just needs more research Universities, more labs and more state investment into technology. The recent Moderna breakthrough was in part due to a $25 million DARPA investment into the RNA vaccine idea.
As for the issues you mention; solving bureaucratic issues would make things more efficient, and it is definitely desirable. However, I would argue that a heterogeneous market (in terms of language and culture) is more of an advantage than a liability.
Having many cultures and languages could be akin to having biodiversity. Different outlooks in life, different ways of expressing ideas, different ways of thinking can contribute to the development of culture and technology. Look at the Galapago effect that languages had in early computing. The Japanese were able to develop their own vision of "computing" and came up with their own innovations due in part that early western computers couldn't handle Japanese.
Languages and cultures can serve as natural protectionist barriers that allow for each region to develop their own home industries, allowing them to catch up to the world while retaining significant chunks of new wealth creation for their own. Yes, wealth creation is good, but its also important to look at how wealth is distributed. Very unequal societies can break down and lose their cohesion. Cohesion and trust are important features of rich countries. Perhaps many of the issues the US dealing with is because of the huge level of inequalities it has.
Finally, is translation and localization really that hard? Is it that expensive to hire some sales & marketing staff in new markets where you could be making tons of money? I bet translation costs and such are less than a percentage of what Google spent expanding its search engine.
Generally, successful technology businesses have low marginal cost to serve new customers. You pay some amount X, to setup in a market and then can scale out relatively cheaply.
The US is great because you pay X once, and then scale quite a lot. Each European country requires that you pay X (or maybe X/4), but it essentially acts as a tax which reduces margins.
Languages/cultures are hard, yo.
But the systems are built differently, usually turned specifically to succeed fast and loud at the cost of individual comfort. For instance, where I come from in France, you would keep a useless, even toxic, employee for months for fear of the firing trial, but where I am now we can all be dismissed arbitrarily with a month notice, and that makes the hiring very different: people have a strict behavior feedback loop, where they need to change to stay somewhere, companies have no pressure on lowering hiring because of legal issues, employees can always always find better.
This turns a population of mild puppies into a fastly rotating workforce cross pollinating at light speed and I admit I think Europe can never win against people who built such systems. It's just not the same game anymore.
But that’s just a rephrasing of the same problem. If all of the top creative talent is leaving then Europe has a talent problem.
Europe needs to make it attractive to innovate there. It will let the locals stay and, if it’s working well, attract people from all over the world.
The language barriers are a lame excuse. It’s 100% all of the bureaucracy and anti-business experimenting mindset.
Perhaps not in developers, but it is where it matters: most upper and middle managers. There's an incredibly conservative, risk-averse attitude. If you're risk-averse, all you see are cost centres, not investment opportunities, pivots and new revenue sources. This has a knock-on effect on the requirements for SaaS vendors.
You have a point about a heterogeneous markets and legal systems. What you're possibly also missing is Europe has a huge public sector compared to the US. That sector doesn't tend to focus on innovation at all, unless it's part of the war machine.
Isn’t that the point? Europeans individually are creative but there’s not a reward system in place for them, thus they flee to the US.
Sort of like European basketballers coming to the US or the opposite with soccer players.
What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of hundred actually are successful. This kills business models which cannot show any profit whatsoever, and a large portion of the remainder are killed by data regulations forbidding "alternate paths of monetization" (to put it charitably.)
Rather, a problem is that once a European project becomes successful enough, it soon becomes an American project, either by acquisition or by moving to where the investment money is.
correct me if i'm wrong, Europe is dominated by legacy business/banks that normally won't take such risk. legacy business like BMW. European and Asian want to see you have some success or already making money before they invest. while American will throw money into something that just an idea.
Why then did Airbus put their VC arm [1] right slap-bang in the middle of Silicon Valley?
Note. In this case, its Europe bringing/managing the capital - they are choosing - all by themselves - where to find the talent.
You'd have to ask them, but I'd posit that it's simply because SV is where all the meetings are.
Might this be a flip side of regulations that combat economic inequality?
If so, the two should not be addressed as separate issues. But frontpage HN posts tend to be "Applauding Europes' long vacations and progressive taxes" and "Bemoaning Europe's lack of VCs with fuck you money".
However, the mechanism seems simple:
1. Regulation is designed to combat inequality
2. Lower inequality is achieved thanks to this regulation
3. As inequality is lower, fewer people have spare capital for risky investments
Meanwhile, if this mechanism doesn’t work as above, that might imply we don’t (yet) have an effective way to regulate inequality down.
I wonder if Sweden has higher funding than the rest of the continent?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071105/value-of-investm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_billionaires_b...
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-agenda/guest-post-tino-sa...
60% of all wealth in the United States is inherited.
We're talking about how billionaires make their wealth as a proxy for entrepreneurship. It makes no sense to talk about how many billionaires Sweden has as a measure for their entrepreneurship if most of them inherited their wealth.
> Not particularly relevant. A significant chunk of that inherited wealth comes in the form of housing. The US has a total wealth of $105t, $36.2t of that is housing, which then ends up getting inherited by homeowners' children.
Feels utterly relevant; what's irrelevant is your fact that much of US wealth is bound up in housing: The top 5% wealthiest families are hardly likely to live in 50% of all housing.
This was at a time when the US was actually more egalitarian than Europe.
That is why I'm somewhat skeptical against the article's proposition, offer it for free and then later come up with a scheme to extort users. I think there are other steps that can be taken first.
For example free education improves a software company's hiring prospects as there are lots of employee candidates available with good education. In some countries social mobility is a real thing. As a practical counter example, Sweden has massive taxation and something like most billionaires per capita and a very vibrant software and startup scene.
One could actually do some kind of survey what happens to European software companies. Take for example this one started by three Danish guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland
Is Borland actually a European company? It looks like it was started in California and has a headquarters in Texas. It is now owned by a company in the UK, but it doesnt really seem European to me.
> Borland Ltd. was founded in August 1981 by three Danish citizens, Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad, to develop [...] However, response to the company's products at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco showed that a U.S. company would be needed to reach the American market. They met Philippe Kahn, who had just moved to Silicon Valley...
So yes, Borland is a US company, but founded by 3 Danish folks. That might indicate that Europe doesn't lack innovation or talent, but a large unified market with high purchasing power.
I'd say it would have been hard to sell anything that specific even elsewhere in the US at the time.
Simplified, many great old successes (old money, i.e the billionaires) and many new promising, but few in-between.
Boy, you would make one offended American...
It's extremely common to siphon the most promising projects or ideas to the HQ. Keep the golden egg hen close to home.
Once the project becomes successful people will ignore or quickly forget where the idea came from.
It's pretty wild that founders would need to pay back this money. That would have a massive drag on any risk taking or innovation.
The entire point of venture capital and similar funding mechanisms is that in exchange for a potential massive return on investment, funders are willing to lose everything.
Bank strategy is to avoid risk, while VC strategy is to take risks.
The thing that separate the internet economy with the traditional is the massive network effects that makes it a winner take all game. And at that game the USA has a massive home advantage with a huge cultural, legal and financially unified market. In Europe you start in a small country then face big barriers to expand out of it, which slows growth enough that you never get to get competitive by the time the much better funded American competitor comes to crush you.
And then it's game over, because you only get one shot at being the monopoly. Once you have a Facebook, you can't have a second one, even with all the VC cash, talent & creativity in the world. Notice that the USA did not succeed in building a competitor to Google, Youtube, Facebook, or Amazon, so how could Europe, or anybody else ?
Well the Chinese and the Russian could, by banning American monopolies from their own markets, which let them built monopolies on their own, & then attempt to conquer the rest of the world with them.
The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them.
And that's what Europe should do, ban American Monopolies. If we would ban facebook, instagram, youtube, etc, we'd have solid equivalents in a year, and from there enough cash flow to fund a next generation of startups.
The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them.
And this take is just hot garbage.
Israel should be lauded for managing to be an intensely vibrant and high-tech country, and European countries should try to learn from that, but even that is apparently not quite sufficient. So I think GP has a point.
It’s also too bad that it excludes public companies or large exits (e.g., Wix and Waze) since those are even better retorts to the “can’t build companies” claim.
That's not how it works, just look at MySpace. Even sites with a lot of market share are sometimes overtaken by a competitor.
The best alternative to Facebook in a fragmented market like Europe is federation across multiple social "hosting" sites with a regional focus, based on standards that are either in place already or being worked on. This can exploit even stronger platform effects than a conventional one-size-fits-all solution like Facebook.
Google and YT are in a different position since they're actually solving hard resource problems (Video streaming at scale is hard; building a usable crawl of the Web is also hard); much of their success comes from addressing these in a way that is compelling for users.
It recently blew my mind to learn just how small MySpace was. Peak user count was ~75.9 million, total. Facebook has ~2.85 billion active users.
The appearance that Chinese companies have advantages over foreign companies comes from a combination of factors: local culture, understanding of the market, much much faster and fierce competition (If speed and competition in international market is 2, in China its 10. For example, Uber left China's market not because of regulatory, regulatory was equal to Didi and uber at the time, but Uber and Didi was locked into extremely heated competition at that time, both sides were pouring money down the drain. It was most likely a business decision. Alibaba's taobao vs Amazon.com, taobao was very competitive and played to the Chinese culture advantage very well. Taobao created 11/11 singles day in 2009 and hit a cord with Chinese people, even becoming a cultural phenomenon). But let say if Google/Facebook funded a team in China to create a targeted product for the Chinese market, they could have a a significant presence in the market.
You're ignoring that all of this money initially came from massive investment by the Defense Advanced Projects Administration (DARPA) which funded the semiconductor industry in its infancy, which funded the creation of the Internet, which funded the creation of mainframes, which funded the creation of personal computers, and continues to provide massive funding to tech companies. Heck, their decision to choose Microsoft DOS over IBM OS/2 for the US DOD literally solidified its rise as the dominant operating system. It's requirement that all parts must be multi-source-able is why AMD and Via were created as additional manufacturers of x86 processors. But it also funded PowerPC and even provided significant funding to ARM.
Sure, we don't have much socialism here (USDA farm "subsidies" not included), but we do have very strong, protectionist-welfare capitalism.
So you had the combined might of the US government founding the creation of the computing industry. That let companies take massive risks which left tons of people making tons of money before private VC even really became interested. The IPOs of the original tech companies funded the creation of half of the current major VC funds.
Perhaps the ending of the cold war ended this policy, thus a boom of new companies never took place.
For example, AMD was founded within a year of Intel - years before either manufactured a CPU. You're blurring lines with antitrust lawsuits in the 90s.
Now if you want to talk about the Federal government single handedly propping up the market for semiconductors until the end of the Apollo program, that's a different story and includes more players than DARPA.
Russia didn't ban American monopolies, they were outcompeted fair and square by the more focused local companies. For some time, at least. It took years for Google to catch up with Yandex in search quality in Russian language, and Facebook's clone is imo still better than Facebook itself in every way, no wonder it's still more popular there.
" For one, we lack the imagination and vision to launch something without knowing how it might eventually make money. "
tells a different message, than just
"Europe lacks imagination."
That's not a problem, that's the solution. There's some other problems causing the need for this solution.
It also strikes me as really inaccurate. If anything, a lot of Europeans value creativity and cultural interests over raw productivity or money.
Or that people pay great % in tax and they cannot afford to save their own money to start a business. They need to apply for government grants instead (which people who decided about them can be corrupt) or share their business with someone from the start. That's a buzz killer.
Funnily big corporation are free to avoid tax as they please, because the high earners won't even turn to the streets to protest so they can be taxed through the nose.
In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
A lot of third world countries are years ahead of the whole EU continent in that aspect. I say this because I live in Europe for the quality of life, come from a third world country, and I see how kids and adults are spoiled here. Much of what they have was just given to them. At least for the strong countries in west EU, lifestyle is very relaxed and any ambitious is frowned upon, it is extremely demotivating, not to mention bureaucracy. Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what.
I find for me more likely to save some money, move to my country and create my own business and sell in Europe. People here are too lazy to compete in the fast world we live in, there in my country there is so many skilled people, so little capital, here is the reverse. Good amount of capital and foreigners working in tech. For instance, I live in Berlin and almost all the "working people" from tech companies here are foreigners. Germans are generally the executives and/or management. It is quite rare to find a german software developer on Startups.
I personally think(my opinion, not the ultimate truth)... that Europe is definitely a very interesting market for companies to come here and sell their stuff, but not to make it.
Instead I think Europe should focus on its strengths, which is healthy market regulations, creating a good playing field for companies from above, rather on its weaknesses. It should also figure out a way to keep part of the profits inside the continent to benefits its inhabitants.
More important than competing is to know where and when to compete.
One reason is that I can be paid three times more in the US, and with the extra disposable income, I can live a better life, even without the legal protections.
Second reason is that, why should the kids even bother studying computer science for 4-6 years to earn 3k per month? A plumber here can charge 100 per hour and does not require any formal educational training.
Also, 100 an hour sounds great. That is without taken taxes, social security, operational costs, fix costs an so into account. Those plumbers getting wealthy are running their own shops, small legit enterprises.
Final note: Any decent developer job I know of pays at least 3k, net, after taxes, social and medical insurance,... Enough to live a comfortable live. One without student debt, I might add.
These are tax deductible.
Here's Europe's problem.
The same way you don't need 5+ years university education to put together whatever piece of hardware / software together, the same way I don't need studying hydraulic to put together hydraulic implements.
Germany (and many other european countries) has the idea of a trade school, in which one learns a trade. Usually these are combined with working experience in the form of apprenticeships. In my experience, continental europe has far more emphasis on early work experience compared to ango-saxon countries. An internship usually lasts a couple of years, people get payed a wage for the work they do and it is combined with schooling.
A plumber would be a prime example of the vocation which is using this kind of system.
people finish secondary education at an earlier age then in the US (16 or even 15 in some cases), then they transfer into tertiary education in a fachschule.
Who the fuck know what they want to do for the rest of their lives at 15 or 16, most likely without having the possibility to re-invest 3+ years to change branch ?
And that is a problem. Want to be a plumber? 3 years education. Want to open a bakery? 3 years education. Want to work at a bank? 3 years education. Want to be a hairdresser? You guessed it right - 3 years education. Handwerker? No luck, 3 years education. Car mechanic? Forget it. It’s ridiculous.
There needs to be a source for this.
And yet Silicon Valley lies in one of the states with the most employee friendly regulation in the US wrt worker protection, paid overtime etc.: https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Bes...
This keeps the companies competing.
Where do you live in Europe, and what do you mean exactly?
> I see how kids and adults are spoiled here
I think what you're seeing is how people are meant to be treated.
Maybe the German software developers don't want to work for a startup sweat shop?
The US has those things and it's turning into a "third world country with a Gucci belt" (as someone put it) for everyone except the 1% and the indispensable knowledge worker class that can't be automated away or juiced dry for all the productivity they are capable of.
"Flexible working laws" and "less relaxing lifestyle" to me translates as "light a fire under their ass until they are forced to innovate", while "big growth mindset" and "ambitious people" translate as "hustle culture", which I consider toxic in its very nature.
As a European, I can only hope that our culture doesn't degrade itself to that degree.
I am not a fan of unbridled capitalism a la the USA and fully agree that more countries should strive to reach European levels of worker and civil rights... however, there is validity to the statement that Europe is currently coasting along on the spoils of centuries of loot and plunder. A lavish, comfortable lifestyle was handed to the citizens of western europe and many of their older firms have struggled to innovate as technology has spread across the globe. There is a good reason why a fast moving industry like tech has taken root in the US while Europe as a whole is playing catch up.
The US will solve its problems, i have full faith in that country's ability to rise to the challenge as they have done numerous times in the past. Europe's problems with tech innovation run deep and go beyond simply vacation days and worker rights. Look no further than the current spree of tech regulation. I wish more countries did that but there is a fundamental problem - the EU is trying to legislate without having a good alternative.
My prediction - If the US resolves its immigration system and allows more talent to flow in without having to worry about a visa, European skilled immigration is toast.
I'd need to be a great philosopher and writer, to write a boring book with the same opinion that wouldn't hurt them. Unfortunately, I am none of those two. Those who want to take it in the wrong way will and I'm ok with that.
oh boy.
Time for you to crack the spine of a history book covering the 20th century, me thinks.
Well, apart from the whole WW2 business.
This is the trouble with generalisations across the continent, the closer you look the less well they fit. And if you look across a continent and back in time, the situation varies even further. Germany used to be "the sick man of Europe": https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.28.1.167
The overhang of colonial benefit is present in Britain; I'm not really sure about France (the disasters of trying to hold on to Vietnam and Algeria?). It's not present in Germany or Italy which had it taken off them. It may well be an issue to Portugal and Spain, which were dictatorships well after the war.
Let's be clear. By the time the last bullet was fired in WW2, Europe was basically destroyed, rumble, from the North Sea cross to Moscow. Brittan, although not occupied, was also hopelessly broke after the war. This weakness in Europe was one of the prime reasons why the colonies could break away from their European overlords. Europe was in no condition to do much about it either. They had more important things to worry about like food, and hoping that the Americans would come through with their Marshall Plan.
That's just counting the western half of Europe which wasn't under new (communist) management.
The loot and plunder was truly gone.
for instance: Belarus lost a quarter of it's population many villages and cities where utterly destroyed. also, don't forget world war 1 (and the other conflicts sparked after, like Russian civil war, breakup of Austria Hungary, Greco Turkish war etc) was only 25 years prior..
* Influx of funding and loans from the US to rebuild
* Able to rebuild legacy systems that were destroyed in the world (roads, buildings, new code standards, etc)
* Reduced population means each individual is more valuable (See rising wages after plagues in the middle ages)
* Increased interdependency to combat Russian and US pressures
* The UN, NATO, etc
- taught a huge number of people enough electronics to do field maintenance of radio and radar
- had a further more theoretical education for radar operators
- at the end of the war, sold off a huge amount of kit cheaply; some of this is still kicking around the ham community in California. See e.g. https://mightyohm.com/wiki/resources:surplus and the geographic distribution
The US picked up a lot of refugees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) , Intel founder Andy Grove etc).
There's all sorts of odd little path dependencies. Shockley and Fairchild semiconductors were in California because Shockley himself wanted to live near his mother and managed to recruit people to move across the country.
To your point, same goes for Germany indeed… Have you guys seen the pics of what cities like Berlin, Nuremberg or Frankfurt looked like after the war?
There is a lot of old money in Europe, as some families managed to shield it from these crises, then compound interest did the rest, but I’d really like to see some proof about the sentiment being repeated ITT that Europe’s current wealth is inherited or handed down, because the idea sounds contrary to everything I know about the continent’s history.
To some extent I think the social structures produced by inherited wealth are anti-conduicive to innovation. Where's the innovation in the US? Most would say it's concentrated out west, in a state that didn't exist until 1850. The social structures of concentrated wealth in the South from the slavery era make it less innovative. And the northeast centers on money-making-money and property ownership.
The real sweet spot, of course, is cashing out: finding how to get the old money and oil money to invest in your new innovation. The success of WeWork, for example.
I wouldn't say that Spain was "razed to the ground" compared to Germany.
People eating cats and rats off the streets is not an exaggeration however - there is abundant oral testimony to support that.
The point is that the damage hardly justifies talking about economies who live off inherited wealth, in either case.
If there's one thing that consistently fosters innovation and progress it's competition. That's something that holds true everywhere. Software, industry, education, games, sports, you name it.
Also, competition skews innovation towards solving problems that arrive from competition. You might just be hiring lawyers to bully a competitor instead of fostering sustainable progress. Or if your market is unregulated you can decide to use more severe methods.
People who are intrinsically motivated are going to do their thing regardless of the boundary conditions. There's no way to give someone intrinsic motivation and there's no way to take it away from them. You would have had to physically handicap Michelangelo to prevent him from sculpting or Maradona from kicking balls and so on.
Incentives definitely aren't everything, but they do work, and when you talk about systemic problems you have to think statistically.
> You might just be hiring lawyers to bully a competitor instead of fostering sustainable progress. Or if your market is unregulated you can decide to use more severe methods.
I'm talking about competition, not laissez-faire. If you're saying that competitive markets have to be fostered and don't just magically happen, then we are just vehemently agreeing.
And competition is not the only thing that breeds innovation. Just think back to all the HN articles about needing to make time for curious people to innovate.
You are so wrong it's not even funny.
That statement is a bit of a truism, isn't it? If you squint hard enough, you can call most things a competition. If all else fails, in the sexual marketplace because financial success is an indicator of romantic success for males, who happen to have driven a lot of the innovation up to this point.
It also ignores the nuance to be found in whether and where to focus on public investment versus private investment, for one. I don't think you can really sensibly frame all public investment as competition, unless you're stretching it to the amorphous "international competition", in which case the principle is dangerously close to being unfalsifiable.
I'm not saying competition has no role to play, but where are inspiration, the joy of creation, altruism and wanting to abolish frustration and greater problems? We don't just have selfish genes.
Ultimately, it still comes down to execution, laws, the state of a market and personal preferences. Both forms can be toxic.
The question is whether Europe will be able to maintain its wealth - which is the main thing that makes possible the luxury of having a more relaxed lifestyle - in the long term while falling behind economically. Most of Europe's wealth is based around old world economy.
Europes wealth is based, to a large extent, on hardware and a huge number of wealthy citizens. As long as hardware is a thing (not talking electronics but stuff like cars and so on), and we manage to not cut of the poorer 20-30% of society, Europe should do fine.
This has always existed; or at least has in modern history. It's hardly a new development, although the EU and Euro has brought this more to the forefront.
These kind of things ebb and flow anyway; if you look at the last few hundred years then concentrations of wealth have shifted all over the place. Some locations have gone from very wealthy to very poor and back to very wealthy again.
I get the distinct impression that people who liken the US to a third world country are from one particular spot on the political spectrum. This seems like political rhetoric, not a summary of some level-headed analysis. Inequality, crime, etc in the US are certainly problems, but that seems like a low bar for the "third world country" label (with or without the 'gucci belt' modifier). At best it's unhelpful, but I think it's probably just inaccurate considering how many people from actual second and third world countries are risking their very lives to get in, not to mention divisive.
Maybe. Or maybe the media is just peddling negativity such that we are overexposed. I moved to Europe a decade ago and have since returned, and plan to go back occasionally. When I went, I definitely had the impression that Europeans had it together and that Europe was some kind of liberal Utopia. And it was neat and European countries have political ideas worth borrowing, but it turns out that Europeans are also just people with their own distinct problems. They aren't more enlightened as American liberal media would have you believe. Europe has some really cool cultures, but they aren't "better" than American culture(s). IMO what Europe does have that America lacks is a deep, vibrant history (pre-Columbian American history is relatively impoverished for a variety of reasons).
Also, a few years back some Indian extraction friends of mine were complaining about casual racism in the Western European country they were living in.
So, it's probably not as great as some US media portrays, but it's definitely not as bad as the other US media portrays.
Which one of those does the US not have?
Every country is going to have inequality, corruption, antiquated infrastructure, and persecution of journalists, so those are meaningless unless you provide some sort of comparison point.
"High" incarceration is at least attempting to articulate a comparison but only because I actually know the numbers there.
About the infrastructure, the one in the US is comparable to that of most rich countries. If you cherry-pick, sure you are going to find something.
Health care in the US is problematic but I think the best indicator of quality is life expectancy, and the US is high tier.
And you think journalists are persecuted? The US is one of the most free country in that regard, more than Europe and much more than in Asia. In "real" 3rd world countries, they get killed, tortured, and all sorts of fun things if they disagree with the local ruler.
Climbing the social ladder is far from impossible in the US. It is hard, but it is hard everywhere, the ones on top of the ladder never want to let go, but at least, in the US, there is no rule officially preventing it like castes in India.
Worker protection could be better but it is no nonexistent either. At least, there are contracts that mean something, safety standards, etc...
Incarceration rate is not necessarily the sign of a third world country. In the worst places, there are no prisons to keep criminals locked in, and they are out to get you.
People that say US is a third world country are mostly illinformed, my guess is due to political affiliation as you said, but also the city dynamics, arm chair media consumption (NYT exclusively reports vocal minority issues day in day out) and uninformed about what actual third-world countries are like.
The amount of responses is skewed largely to 2-3 countries and the self-report guide is unreliable.
On top of that, by their own admission here: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/how-s-life_97892641...
their empirical data does not account for factors like wealth distribution, and a lot of the subjective indicators do not correlate strongly with the "objective" measures, with the exception of housing satisfaction.
Data and science doesn't make something objective. For something that claims to measure the quality of life of entire countries and compare them, I'd expect at least 70% of the world to be sampled in a thorough way.
Also, I don't think I've ever met anybody that genuinely believed the US was a third world country. They usually bring up its flaws in response to claims of "USA #1" or something along those lines which are slogans they grew up around their whole life. Now that they are looking into things, traveling, and experiencing more of life, they realize that that blanket statement holds no truth. The arm chair media consumption is definitely an issue but in the same way, I remember only reading good things about the US for almost the entirety of the 90s (consuming news from the BBC, Reuters, and local Japanese/Indian news orgs).
Well the “US is a third world country” take is based on no evidence whatsoever and defies all common sense, experience, etc, so I guess I’ll take the significant but imperfect evidence.
Some people are intending it as a caricature and others are intending it literally (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520754). The literal case is obviously factually incorrect and the caricature case is unhelpful and divisive. Take your pick.
The median American is much richer than the median European.
USA has famously cheaper life than EU (especially gas and food). Not that I would trade places.
Also, from experience i have found vegetables to be ludicrously expensive in the USA, the same goes for beer and wine.
That said, now that I've moved into a job that pays at least $225K per year, you know, life in the USA is amazing for me. And everything everywhere else in the world is so cheap! Why can't my fellow country men just pull themselves up their bootstraps and get a high income earner job? It's so easy! You just go to the job tree and get one /s.
But more seriously, we need to completely restructure our society in the USA before the poor and middle class violently rise up against the government and make us into what Mexico was 120 years ago.
> we need to completely restructure our society in the USA
The specific primary reason the USA is rich is that we’ve resisted the temptation to do harebrained projects like this.
Also access to free education, free healthcare and so on.
Over 90% of Americans have health insurance.
I did a comparison between Finland and the US some time ago. My conclusion was that the median households were about as wealthy in both countries, but the average household was 3x wealthier in the US. The biggest caveat was that household wealth includes retirement savings but not pensions, making the median Finn wealthier than the median American. I estimated that the crossover point for the standard of living was somewhere around the 80th percentile, depending on things such as local costs of living and whether you have kids or not.
After a few years in America, nominal salaries seem low in Finland. On the other hand, Finns have fewer major expenses. Their out-of-pocket costs for education, childcare, and healthcare are much lower. The concept of an emergency fund does not really exist in Finland, largely thanks to income-dependent benefits. Pension contributions are mostly paid by the employer on top of the nominal salary, making saving for retirement much less important.
I would love to only need to keep a few thousand bucks in the case that my car breaks, and even then, that's likely overkill for the actual repair costs relative to the value of the car.
I don't own a house, I don't have any debt. I'm 8 years into my career and I've just now getting to building a positive net worth. I've put off so much medical/dental maintenance because of the cost and now it'll take half of my savings to fix all of it.
I know I'm doing a lot better than many folks my age. Top 10% for my age, but it sucks knowing that elsewhere in the world, they're doing some things so much better. It's one "benefit" of the internet connected world; we can see what everyone else is doing and how others solve hard social problems. Fixing those social problems in the US though, is continuing to be extremely difficult and we're still likely decades away from catching up to parts of Europe, and by then, we'll still be decades behind what they'd be doing then.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would feel better if I didn't know the term egalitarianism.
On a continent,-wide level it is, and US incomes are significantly higher. But US wealth levels are below most of Western Europe, including France, the UK, Ireland, even Italy and Spain. Plus Canada/Australia/New Zealand for good measure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
That said, I thoroughly disagree with the characterisation of the US as "a third world country with a Gucci belt".
It's been that way for 150 years at least (read the stories of relatively well paid American GI's in UK WW2), no signs of changing just yet.
I wonder if it's a culture problem or a scale problem or both.
False. Sweden is in the top 10 competitive nations in the world. And it is because it has a relaxing lifestyle, support for children and parents, etc.
If desperate people was more innovative or productive, the list of successful USA entrepreneurs would not be filled with upper-class or rich businessman.
Easy of mind, education and time creates opportunity. Desperation only leads to bad decisions.
Late years Sweden in going down because it is moving towards more neo-liberal policies, thou.
And I would say that going from the world's highest tax rates (% of GDP) to the world's fourth highest rate does not make Sweden neo-liberal. We have also had a Social Democrat prime minister since 2014 and a government that relies on support from the former Communist party, so we are not quite a neo-liberal utopia yet.
> Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what
Has this happened to you?
Plenty of small business where I stand, and this lifestyle fits them perfectly, there is no desperation to survive. Not every business has to be about growth.
I think what you’re seeing is the result of policies that increase quality of life. So Germany has to import someone like you, from a third world country, that will accept the pay and have “ambition”. It goes both ways.
For instance, there is a company in germany which is able to produce very high quality lead sheeting to a unusual size, which allowed mythbusters to create a lead balloon.
No company in the US was able to achieve this thickness.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h70kbIzPgig
My brother works long hours for a company that recently raised 20 millions, all of that in France. Europe is composed of many people, and many of them have a big growth mindset and ambitions. Ambition is not frowned upon, at least not in my circles. Bureaucracy is surprisingly easy to deal with.
The other thing is that people from Europe already know that if they want to work hard and earn lots of money, they can just go to the USA. But things are changing and now people build things in Europe. I think you have a very reductive vision of European people. I'll also add that "Europe" doesn't have a culture as a whole. I'm French, I'm surprised by how Italians do things, same with Germans. We are composed of different countries with rich histories and culture. Grouping everything as "European" is the same as saying "African", it hides most of the reality and complexity of the world.
For a brilliant 20 year old German in 2005 becoming a primary school teacher or a pencil pusher in a random government office would have been a better option than working in tech. With "better option" I mean double salary, double pension, better healthcare, more holidays. So it shouldn't surprise anybody if foreigners are overrepresented in tech jobs in Germany, and it has nothing to do with European lazyness (had you said risk-aversion I could have agreed).
I think there is a cycle here where because working with software is considered low status, many good software people leave, and lots of smart people probably do not go into the field at all unless they truly love software. This would tend to drive the talent pool down, IMO, which keeps away good software jobs, keeping it low status.
In the US for example writing software is usually considered wholly different from “IT” whereas in Europe IT encompasses both. That’s probably another thing bringing its status down. You are grouping software engineers with people plugging in printers and solving Karen’s support ticket (no offense IT people).
oh boy, if you think IT is just pluggin in printers and fixing easy support tickets you are easily mistaken.
What about network and system engineers? Those who keep the cloud and global internet running? Those are considered IT (atleast in europe) and are definitely not low quality, easy to learn jobs.
They mention it's very hard to change careers in their country with a more 'hierarchical' and rigid culture and mobility is limited.
Totally different when they move and appreciate the mobility, freedom and opportunities.
Because they probably already left for Switzerland or North American, where they can get paid much better salaries.
But to lift up the nation, you need regulations, competence at all levels.
'Google' is a tiny project relative to America. Most countries are 99% about the basic things: roads, bridges, hospitals, carpenters, governance, food etc..
There are enough groups of ambitious people to form networks of that. In Paris and London people move, it's the same in most countries.
poverty
>a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
all I see is `""hackers"" sitting 10h a day working while believing they're saving world`
This doesn't really make sense to me. The EU is a clear leader in other industries compared to the US, just not in the tech industry. In terms of national security and stability, I'd say any of these companies are much more important than any tech company. If the market here for innovation is so bad, why are these companies leaders in their industry?
A few examples I can think of off the top of my head:
- automotive (Volkswagen, Daimler, Bosch)
- industrial equipment (Siemens, ABB)
- railroad (Siemens, Alstom)
- telecoms (Ericson, Nokia)
- chemicals (BSAF, Ineos)
- food and drink (anything from France, Italy or Spain :D)
You would be more to the point if we were talking about the industrial era which can automate even the experience into machinery.
But things like software are heavily based on knowledge retention.
Knowledge retention is about attracting talent, and make sure they evolve their knowledge and keep that knowledge there.
So you need a good quality of life, career and financial possibilities, good universities, a good culture with individual freedoms.
Its all about the "human gold". And the countries that will retain this sort of talents are cannot be optimized to also be industrial powerhouses, because the balances are different.
Anyway remote labor will change things a lot also, and we will see how things will turn out. But work and quality of life balance will become really important, and industrial sweat shops wont be as attractive in my opinion.
I hope that talent get more spread out instead of concentrated as is now, giving we are going more remote..
Anyway, i guess a lot of parts of EU will become more palatable as the physical place where you are at become less important.
I predict that small towns in Italy, Portugal or France with mostly old people will get more trendy giving the houses will be more affordable and people will be able to create their kids in a more healthy environment.
Pandemic will change faster the assumptions we had about how we should live our lives, and i think loneliness will hurt us more as the value of money compared to what is lost by pursuing it will become less appealing.
The industrial era wisdom will get reviewed and some things wont make any sense anymore. (For instance, packing too many people in gigantic towns, lowering the quality of life, country life will get more trendy with time in my opinion, people living in small communities of 20 families in rural areas)
The same argument could be made about the European film scene (check out how many Hollywood blockbusters are remakes of great European movies), the European music scene and the European literature scene to greater or lesser degree.
But you know what? It's fine. There is plenty of quality software in Europe, and as long as those companies don't get bought out by the handful of runaway American successes they can grow and do just fine. They tend to be better at customer service, they tend to be better at addressing multi-lingual markets at an earlier stage in their development than their American counterparts and they are active in important fields.
The thing that America excels at is advertising and simply making money. But there is more than that in this world.
I can’t help thinking of Qwant, the alternative privacy-aware European search engine. Their financial standing is so dire that this week they had to ask money from Huawei. [1]
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/french-search-engine-qwant-h...
It already does. Look at the very large number of open source projects (like Linux) that originated or received substantial contributions from continental European volunteers.
What Europe doesn't have is a strong VC infrastructure or a large density of software engineers in any given location to simplify growth scaling.
Some of these are changing. Whether they will change fast enough to compete in software is another story, but it's very likely that Europe will be better positioned to take advantage of the next tech revolution. You can already see this in biotech.
For all the disagreements here, look at where people move. Only around 5% of EU citizens live and work in an [edit: EU] country other than their own and a large slice of that is people from the east moving west. Only a sliver is highly skilled work and the majority is semi-skilled or low-skilled. The EU loves to boast about how freedom of movement of people is an important pillar but getting it to work over the long term is still a bureaucratic nightmare.
Meanwhile, the US continues to vacuum up talent from across the world despite an utterly broken immigration system. Heck, even Canada is a top destination for talent due to its proximity to the US.
Even with EU making travel easier, the language barriers, etc are really strong reasons why people prefer not to move far away.
When I lived in SF, people were from all over the US / world. There were very few native SF'ers to be found anywhere in tech.
Consider these data points:
1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you still see echoes of this "pioneering" culture and I think it's no accident that the peak of the frontier, the Wild West, and homesteading in general have been deeply mythologized.
But look at TV shows like Gold Rush or Deadliest Catch. Whatever creative license is taken here, you still have people who will take the risk of working a dangerous and dirty job for a share of the proceeds.
The average American just seems to have more of an appetite for risk than at least anywhere I've been in Europe.
2. The much-discussed "Protestant work ethic". As exploitative as it is (and it is exploitative), the willingness of Americans to work all the time has an effect that I don't think you can dismiss.
3. Being comfortable makes you more risk-averse, even lazy. We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent. These are all good things. The upside of not having those things, if there is one, is that (IMHO) people have a greater motivation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. It just... is.
4. 330M people most of whom speak one language (English obviously). You can't argue that this doesn't make things easier.
5. The barrier to education that is cost with a legacy admissions system led to the endowment system that created venture capital.
For the record, I'm Australian not American and the above isn't intended to extol the virtues of American culture. For example, the fact that a near-majority of the US thinks it's acceptable that a trip to the ER can bankrupt a significant portion of the population is cruel, even reprehensible.
EDIT: corrected less risk-averse to more risk-averse.
Do you mean more risk-averse? Anyway, to comment on this point. Non-Europeans, get quite a few things mixed up.
>We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent.
The bigger problem is two-fold and has to do with your second point:
1. Europeans have very set schedules, which has only started to erode with younger generations. Summer for vacation. Evening and weekend for relaxation. Weekdays for work. This encompasses almost every hour of a person's life, each year. If you have an idea you can execute alone and deviate from this pattern, great. If you don't and need someone else, good luck finding like-minded people, as you're already a very unique individual. If you can somehow accumulate enough wealth or get an investment, you could hire people instead. Yet, that's tough for younger people to do, and older people will slowly settle in their ways. Also, related to point 1, Europeans typically don't venture very far away from their childhood friends and family unlike Americans having no qualms uprooting their past lives.
2. Europeans don't universally have 6-8 weeks of vacation and 35 hour work weeks. Most of the younger middle class or upper middle class is likely to work 40h weeks and has 3-4 weeks of vacation, as well as some loose mandatory holidays. Loose mandatory holidays kinda suck to work with for bigger projects, at best you can weave them together with your PTO. Even working 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started doing, still leaves your head with the job 4 out of 7 days and mentally complex things require pretty big context shifts. The structure of this free time is more positioned as "regular bigger breaks from work" rather than "now I can take time off from my job for a long time and focus on my own stuff". Either way, nothing beats just taking a year off to work on yourself or your own ideas.
I do. Thanks. Corrected.
> Europeans have very set schedules
That's another way of describing conformity, in this case to cultural norms.
The best way I can describe it is like this: in the UK (and the US), the default position is that things are allowed unless they're specifically forbidden. In continental Europe, it's the reverse: everything is disallowed unless it's specifically permitted.
This was evident to me from the time that I lived in Germany and Switzerland at least.
Disruptive businesses aren't created by conformists.
Then you have stuff like workplace pensions which are an administrative mine field.
Only in rural North America, otherwise, everybody has the mentality as the Europeans. Otherwise, I wholeheartedly agree. Europeans don't know the meaning of the word "Freedom".
The only difference with the Uber and such is that people have no fear to break the Law.
those are like a few days per year
it's maybe relevant once or twice a year
>Even working 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started doing
? first time I hear about this in Eastern EU
The US as a country was founded on very high risk. It makes sense that this remains in the culture today.
I don't think that European policies (vacation, universal health care, etc) are the cause of Europe being more risk averse. I think it's the other way around. We have those policies because we have a more risk averse culture compared to the US.
This isn't a bad thing per se. The problem is that we live in an age where technological innovation is fueling the global economy, and there is no innovation without risk.
Are EU countries not the same? Genuinely don't know how English is perceived in these countries.
Although this is probably much easier for India since it is one country.
So all the languages of EU members are officially recognized. This has become increasingly unwieldy as you need translators in the EU Parliament for every combination and there probably aren't that many people who can translate Portugese to Estonian, for example.
There have been proposals over time to instead translate into a particular language. This has been resisted heavily by the French in particular because everyone knows that intermediate language would be English.
English really is the lingua franca at this point.
Additionally the presidency of the EU rotates every 6 months (IIRC), which has created its own problems. For example, when potential new members were negotiating the then-French EU president wanted to negotiate in French but (IIRC) new members tend to default to English.
If you look at number of proficient speakers, English is by far the most spoken language followed distantly by German, French and Italian (in that order). And this is still true even after the UK has left the EU.
English, French and German are the procedural languages of the European Commission.
English has clearly won here but there is a lot of resistance to this linguistic hegemony (as many see it). The French have a ministry to find new words for things to stop English loan words seeping in. Many people in many EU member states don't want to lose their culture and language. And I can understand that.
But, going back to the original point: people need to communicate. English is the natural means for that. As a result many people spend a lot of time and effort trying to preserve the status quo. This is another facet of conformity, in this case conforming to historical traditions and languages.
People who obsess about preserving language and culture aren't the people who start massively disruptive businesses.
a good thing to point out is that Continental Europeans seem to talk a slightly different english compared to americans and the british.
Usually more direct, with less complex vocabulary etc.
I wonder how long it will take for this to become somewhat standardized. especially now that britain has left the EU.
Do you mean 21 voices each with their own culture and chauvinism ?
I know Australians have are able to easily get a work visa to go to America. The cultural shock must be pretty big once they're actually expected to work a full day, though I guess the salary increase makes up for it.
- Australians would complain that their American counter-parts were burning themselves out and ignoring structural issues impacting their productivity. Or outright accusations of "you working harder than us makes us look bad" - classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
- Americans would complain that the Australians were lazy and not pulling their weight.
Are you implying that this is a bad thing? Having time to actually enjoy life seems to be very underappreciated here.
Jeremy Howard (Fast AI) had a talk that hit home when discussing startups in AU vs US, why he left and why he came back:
I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest barrier for any person who wants to launch something is: paperwork around establishing a company. In some countries you have to pay every month some amount of money if you want to be a freelancer, in others you need to setup a sole proprietorship, in others the distinction is not that clear. In almost every country in Europe (perhaps with the exception of the UK) the whole process is cumbersome. Young people who are willing to launch some projects online don't want to mess up with taxes authorities nor lawyers nor the commerce chamber... and hence they decide not to launch anything at all. Besides, setting up a company costs money (perhaps not much).
I live in Europe. I don't want to setup a damn company for every little project I may think it can become big. I want to let my projects grow in the wild, and if any of them get traction then sure, I will setup a company without fear of losing money.
Also: being a software engineer/computer programmer in Europe is not as sexy as it is in USA. It's getting better, yes, but here the "engineer" is the last monkey. Managers and sales are the ones who get the credit. So, European mentality also plays a role here.
> I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest barrier for any person who wants to launch something is: paperwork around establishing a company.
I don't think that is true for the type of company that is described by the line you're replying to. Starting a company is not that hard. Starting a company without even knowing what its eventual business model will be, purely banking on growth for growth's sake, that requires a vast amount of investment with very little guarantees of a return. And that is hard to get in Europe! Much harder than merely starting a company is. I have been part of one such startup for a short time years ago, and I thought it was a complete scam, so unused was I to that type of company. I've never seen any since.
> In some countries you have to pay every month some amount of money if you want to be a freelancer,
Yes, but freelancing isn't the topic.
However, I have a feeling that companies that just want to grow big and are unclear on what their business model will be when they are, are not exactly working on the most important problems. So maybe it's not all bad for Europe.
Seriously? Your plumber managed to establish a company. That kebab place across the street. The delivery guy subcontracting for courier service. And the company that wants to conquer the world can't?
And many more things.
Like, it definitely is a barrier for trivial hobby projects, if you whip something up in a single day and don't want to spend any more time on it, then this becomes a problem, but it's not a meaningful barrier for any actual project on which you're working every week that brings you some revenue.
Eventually those manager and sales people will learn that they need developers to build stuff, or else they can't manage anyone because nothing has been built or sell products that don't exist.
and it's structured in the form of useless middlemen `consulting` companies going by the names of (Atos, Alten, Accenture, ...)
finding a job in tech related industries means most probably going through them, and in practice they value business school people and management types way more than the lowly engineer.
The "bourgeoisie" never really figured out they needed workers to run the mines...
Europe lacks on marketing, distribution and ability to acquire and lock-in users, fast. This has been the american recipe to success time and again, not the quality of consumer-facing products which has been going downhill for a decade now. We can't bet on EU as a whole to create an ecosystem, instead the best use of EU funds would be for states to run the most basic consumer services for free for their citizens (such as email or a mastodon instance). It will be sub-par but it will at least create an alternative due to the EU's large distribution mechanism.
(Slightly edited) copy-paste:
Economist ran an article on this: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora...
We're in the service economy now, and Europe has no real single market for services, due to all kinds of national regulations that differ throughout the block. Nor does it have well-developed financial and labor markets, partly also because they are currently partitioned by nationality. Its stock exchanges are too many and too small, etc. The list goes on.
For many big European companies, an astounding percentage of revenue comes from the US or China. But if you start a startup building for US/China from the start, why would you want the HQ to be somewhere in Europe?
This also means that the story is very very different for products that can be shipped in boxes. Europe does extremely well in cars, beverages, clothing, chemicals and that sort of thing. Also electrical utilities for some reason.
I am struggling to think of European success stories in the traditional desktop app space - apps that have international reach and name recognition. I can only think of a handful desktop apps:
- Sketch (Netherlands)
- Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher (UK)
- Cinema4D (Germany)
Who else enjoys international success for their desktop apps? What about SaaS?
The apps above specialise in a particluar field (design and 3D animation), but missing are any apps in the "office productivity" category which seem completely dominated by tech giants like Microsoft and Google.
Note: I purposely did not mention SAP because no-one looks to SAP as a source of inspiration. Their enterprise apps are expensive and clunky.
There is always talk about a european market, but it is more like 27 markets with one access ticket.
You have 27 languages, 27 cultures, 27 political systems, 27 markets, 27 levels of development and infrastructure. Although you have a market of 300 million consumers, they all have different spending habits, different spending power, different needs...
America is one market of 300 million people, with roughly the same culture, the same language, the same laws and political system and has been exporting it's language and power through out the last 100 years, so your market is probably double the size of your population.
There is also success stories of european players: Zalando, Delivery Hero. Sap has some very innovative departments, but their Reputation all in all is shite, yes.
Also most of souther europe doesn't have the get rich quick mentality. They live by "dolce vita" - the good life. Nobody is gonna be bending over backwards here to become a millionaire anytime soon. They happily live with 20k€ a year and their families and Relationships.
I still hate the shitty software we make here in europe/germany but we are working hard here to improve that. And if a european company tells you they offer a API or Service, they probably wont shut it down because it went out of falvour this month.
i was thinking about that.
that's 27 smaller markets compare to one US or China market. you have to deal with 27 regulations and cultures. is that even worth the time and efforts?
Sometimes it seems that Northern Europeans think that the southern European is the noble savage of the developed world.
I'll speak for Italy, not having direct experience of other southern European countries. Taxes are very high, bureaucracy is omnipresent and openly hostile. A friend of mine once won a price for an invention, ~5K euros. The money was barely enough to register the company (not to pay for an office, just to register a company, a procedure that in the UK would cost 20£). The process took months. Salaries are much lower than in other European countries and people work longer hours, people of my age have been employed at-will for almost their whole careers. Unpaid overtime is the norm. Companies are small, do not provide chances to grow professionally and do not invest, productivity is low and unpaid overtime is often a means to compensate. At least once in everybody's life, your boss would come to you saying that there isn't enough money to pay your salary this month. Working hard simply doesn't matter, many software developers and translators and designers and whatnot earn as much as janitors. I don't come from southern Italy, where I suspect the situation is even worse.
In this context, you don't "happily" live with 20K euros per annum, you just have to accept that. And you have to live with your family because you can't afford otherwise. If you are lucky enough to get a government job or to retire early (which since the 70s have been the government's favourite ways of tackling unemployment), you may get a chance of enjoying this "dolce vita" of yours.
If I look at most of my European sales they are in Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. The UK was in that list until Brexit.
I don't think you need to target all 27, at least not until you are well established.
- It is difficult to issue equity and get equity (tax)
- Each EU country has different taxes. You are taxed lower in Netherlands than in Germany.
- Each country has different regulation rules. If you do something exciting. Wow let's say a social network. You would be killed by regulation and data privacy rules. Autonomous driving the same. Blockchain forget it.
- Ideology driven investments. Maybe just a feeling. But nearly on each event green energy seems to be the hot topic. It is kind of political driven. Like everyone should jump on the green energy train. It is harder to get funding for more exotic topics...
"killed by regulation and data privacy rules"
Funny to see the same people that bemoan the privacy rules being now forced to follow them due to Apple and Google. Seems like they'll have to actually sit and think how to do instead of complaining.
There's plenty of both in the EU. And blockchain is more useful as a counter-example of innovation than anything.
Blockchain: IT is controversial about the usefulness. But it is far more easier to make (legal) money with it outside of EU or in some small crypto friendly EU countries.
Your customers, of course, hate it. Will hate YOU for that.
And will try to press you to forget VAT all the time. This system introduces a incredible amount of anger and friction in the process of selling a product, that must to be as straightforward and easy as possible. And is a bless to the bigco competitors.
That leads us to the parallel VAT-less market that will be created in no time.
Well, you raise an invoice with VAT on it, you get paid, you put the VAT money on the side because it is NOT YOUR money and you pay the VAT to the financial system. Your invoice goes into accounting only when it's paid. Can you explain what's wrong with that?
> Your customers, of course, hate it. Will hate YOU for that.
160 countries around the world have VAT / GST. Haven't seen widespread "HATE" anywhere.
I'm really happy for you. Could you repeat that to my customers, please?
The VAT thus motivates businesses to spend money on goods and services. What is it used for? "VAT essentially compensates for the shared service and infrastructure provided in a certain locality by a state and funded by its taxpayers that were used in the provision of that product or service." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax
New Laws.
Is more expensive because everybody is paying a 21% more in taxes. So either the customer pays more, or the seller accepts to take a cut in their benefits to keep the price in a strategic value (below the product of his competitors)
To compensate it and survive, the startup needs now to find a way to produce the 'same' product 21% cheaper. For example, in China.
That invariably leads to your product being cloned for somebody and fake products invading your market.
How did we end up on new laws when we started about VAT explicitly?
Linux Skype Spotify Mojang (Minecraft) Rovio (Angry Birds) SoundCloud Klarna MySQL Opera Qt
Even Tidal, Rdio and Beats Music can trace their ancestry to this region.
Not to mention the only(?) remaining competition to Chinese telecom, Ericsson and Nokia, following the defeat of Lucent, Nortel, Siemens et al.
With this perspective, perhaps it can be argued that speaking of Europe as a whole in this sense is unproductive.
In the U.S., going into a tech career can be one of the best ways to make a high salary quickly -- especially without needing an advanced degree. Without this incentive, you'll have a lot less people pursuing education and careers in these areas.
A software engineer makes like 50% more salary (let alone all of the other stuff) in the Bay Area as they do in London. London is a really expensive city that pays certain industries a ton of money.
--> better engineers
--> more successful/innovative company
--> company generates more revenue
--> company can pay higher
--> better engineers
First-party can turn it into a cat-and-mouse game where they'll introduce some minor changes that require third-party apps to be updated over and over again. We've seen this happen with some education related app / system in Sweden where people built a better third-party app / client.
Finding a decent, enforceable solution this way is certainly not trivial.
This is the kind of insane regulation that holds Europe back - it’s the problem not the solution.
Then you've just crippled the ability to deliver new functionality at a rapid pace without huge associated support costs.
no?
Besides, this would reduce e-waste from perfectly functional devices that are not longer functional because the cloud endpoint went away. So it would be good for the environment too.
You genuinely can’t see how this might stifle creativity and add costs in a small, fast moving company? I can already hear the jaded developer conversations -
“Oh god, no don’t change that, we’ll be stuck with another ‘version 3 ‘ we have to support forever”.
And the managerial equivalent - “delivering X new feature will break existing APIs and as a result of the regulations we have to keep those running, adding time to the dev cycle for back/forward porting and increasing support costs, maybe hosting costs too, best shelve it”
It’s fine for slow-moving enterprise stuff, for everyone else it’s a crazy imposition. You can’t drop a feature you don’t want to support any more, you can’t completely change how one works, you’re constrained.
Of course it’s possible to work that way, but it adds load. In the context of “Europe doesn’t have enough fast moving home-grown tech”, legislating that would be precisely the wrong move.
Besides, no one is asking them to "deliver new functionality at a rapid pace", especially to feature-complete products. This whole "keep flapping your wings or you'll die" thing is a lie. It's fine for a product to be done. It's fine to stop. It's fine to go into maintenance mode.
Some do, agile startups tend not to.
> Besides, no one is asking them to "deliver new functionality at a rapid pace"
And your proposed legislation would ensure that they cannot.
> It's fine for a product to be done. It's fine to stop. It's fine to go into maintenance mode.
It's not fine for this to be the law.
This law sounds silly and counter-productive enough for EU to actually implement it!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
The article isn't about that at all?
Problem solved.
Europeans get their own tech stack. Can compete again with US companies, as the all the cost for building infrastructure is externalized.
Do you remember how one company promised people a free shirt for open source contributions, and how it resulted in an epic shitstorm of garbage patches? Just a few months ago. Now, imagine this, but with actual money instead of T-shirts.
Of course it's not easy. But if it works, can be tremendously effective.
Maybe a starter would be to give some maintainers of already successful projects a salary, if they want. Impossible to game.
There are also other grants I believe, but I'm not really an expert on this. I just know there are actually possibilities.
And I fully agree that FOSS should be paid collectively like civil infrastructure.
But we need to be careful with the freeloaders. Big companies coopted FOSS into unpaid labor: anything released with permissive licenses can be proprietarized by SaaS/Cloud companies. Almost always US based.
This would turn European financial contributions to FOSS into a gift for FAANGs.
This is why the European Union Public Licence is copyleft and compatible with GPL. But it's not enough.
Even when we do build infrastructure, there is 0 government support; governments or tech companies don't make any effort to bring any attention to EU open source projects.
All other countries have protectionist structures but EU imports all its tech, even though there is more than enough in-house talent to build it - They'd rather give out contracts to US and Chinese companies and have their EU citizens working for these companies as employees instead of giving their citizens a chance to actually run the companies.
I agree with this from a commenter below. In US you have so many more customers that speak your language and have your culture. You can move around and find common issues. One government. One law. So different from the EU.
I do not see a fix until government, law and language becomes unified to a common government, common law and the common language.
For example, the recent battle in California over how "gig economy" workers are classified:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22
Or, the problem of figuring out where you can sell your micro-mobility vehicle:
"The classification of ebikes and other forms of transport is a complex matter in the US. There are federal rules and lots of different regulations at state and city level."
https://www.mypodride.com/faqs (see the "PodRide for USA and Canada" section)
The US may be better than in the EU in this regard, but it's also not that different.
I see it like having many small US countries at the same time, while the EU law above just directs these smaller US countries to implement custom laws for their own backwater. I chose the example because for each country, all the levels you describe also seem to exist.
To be honest, it would be nice for Europe to handle the platforms and for the United States to go back to radical innovation. The times of emacs, vi, Bell labs, Xerox and pushing the computing medium to the edge.
FAANGS were started 1-2 decades ago. In past 5 years the trend changed. Ask PG. He will never move back to the US.
And no, Texas will never be the next big innovation hub.
Living in the US is dull and uninspiring if you lived away for long. Also the missing social net makes the situation worse and worse every year.
"America" is losing the talent pool.
I mainly reflected on the current trend I observered. Did not consider a sudden change in the US visa policy.
Developers get great healthcare.
It's pretty comparable.
Universal healthcare varies a lot in Europe, for instance in the UK it is rather limited compared to continental Europe, even compared to Southern Europe. In the UK you would need a health insurance costing ~200-300£pm to enjoy the same quality of care of places like Italy or Germany.
On the other hand a good developer in the US may earn enough to retire in 5 years, 500K$ per annum are not totally unheard of. In Europe if you are very very good, you may get slightly above 100K£, but it’s still extremely rare and you will end up paying half of that in taxes.
European businessmans are in general very cunning and old fashioned, they don't like sharing their profits with their employees or with othere people in general.
We get to life a relatively quiet and relaxed life, but for an employee or for a young tech enterpreneur is impossibile to make nearly as much as in the US, because the "hot jobs" here in europe are not in the tech space but in the "old space": attorneys, bureucreats, medics, church people, politics, and so on. Obviously a lot of tech workers make the switch for the US or other countries.
Source: i live in Italy where a senior top-level engineer makes 40k euros/year gross, a self-employed medical doctor specialized on foot diseases makes 100/200 euros/30 minutes, evading taxes 80% of the time.
lets say you are a small German start up. is German big enough to grow and gain enough resources before you enter say Estonia?
edit: isn't Rocket Internet business model is copying successful US company for Europe before the US company have enough resources to enter?
They did win. Not because the lack of innovation. Because the international aspect of Facebook.
Friends from holidays, people using Facebook abroad etc.
Facebook itself is always lagging the market, and then either copy or buy the thing that’s hot at that point.
And historically it's taken forever for streaming services, etc. to find their way.
Lol, I have HBO Nordic, as in they literally wrote a dedicated platform for serving HBO to Scandinavia!
If you start a tech company you start with customers in the US because the market is huge.
We still don’t have HomePod, or Dutch swiping keyboards. We’re always in the late batch of iPhones
But another benefit from LLCs in the USA might be the lighter paperwork and simpler taxes filing.
Which we also have (in France at least, as entrepreneur individuel), but both don't intersect.
There are European corporate entities nowadays. See SE[0], SCE[1] and SPE[2]. The SPE is what you'd call an LLC, GmbH, SARL etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_cooperativa_Europaea
Once someone has gone bankrupt in Europe, they are historically, are a pariah. They will struggle to get financing to take a risk with another company. This is on top of a risk-averse system that generally places much higher requirements on non-bankrupt people seeking financing.
Compare this to the situation in the US. Here there is relatively easy access to financing at all sizes of organization. It only noticeably tightens when there is a recession or there are very serious issues with the founders. When a company fails there are more options for recovery, sell-off, acquisition, etc. Labor law permits companies to jettison all employees easily too in certain situations whereas that is much more difficult in Europe. Although this is starting to get away from pure bankruptcy law it overlaps.
If the goal is to have a thriving economy based on writing and hosting trustworthy software then it's going to need subsidies; it costs more to pay for high quality software written by engineers protected by strong labor laws than it does to pay Silicon Valley rates with RSUs complicit in large-scale data gathering and exploitation.
Ironically in economic terms Europe (the EU and Ireland specifically) already hosts a huge fraction of FAANG profits and IP ownership/licensing due to double-Irish arrangements. They just offshore the development to the U.S. So mission accomplished I guess?
Once it became clear that ads were a bit more profitable than that, the success of Google/FB led to a tidal wave of VC capital searching for opportunities that looked just like those. So suddenly everyone is trying to give their service away for free and make it up on {ads, volume}.
I guess I feel very mixed about this, being a European who is now starting his own software company (taking a break from coding for a few mins at the moment). I remember when I was in my early 20s, before YouTube was acquired, my mother pointed at it and said, "Why couldn't you have made that?". My response was to laugh and say, mum, look, you can't pay for video streaming using banner ads. Streaming is expensive and banner ads don't earn much money.
Was I right? Wrong? I still am not sure. YouTube may or may not be profitable. It was extremely ambiguous to what extent Google's businesses outside of web and content ads made money when I was working there, although that was years ago, so of course it may be very different now. Obviously the YouTube founders did very well out of it, but their business model was basically "sell the company to someone who can save us, or die trying". Whether it's European culture or parental expectations I don't know, but deep down I didn't and still don't feel like that is a truly honourable way to create and run a business. I would feel guilty and bad if I were hiring people to a company without having the foggiest idea of how to ever pay their salaries, nor would I feel comfortable pitching to investors a firm whose business model was clearly unworkable. Yet, this is the standard business strategy in the Valley.
Years later I found myself in the offices of a16z. I wasn't there to pitch, although the receptionist assumed I was. I'd been invited to discuss an app I'd written that had attracted their attention. I told them the app was open source and I wouldn't take their money because I had no idea what its business model could be.
A mistake? Maybe. European? Very.
I could now go raise funds for my new venture, and maybe at some point I will. Plenty of investors have expressed interest. But, fundamentally, I still don't want to. It feels somehow like "cheating" to create a business that doesn't really make money. Or if not cheating then at least somehow not quite something you can be proud of. Certainly, the American way of creating a startup that loses money for years would not at all impress my friends, family or fiancé. They would in fact see that as failure, not success.
And I'm OK with that. So I'm probably destined to create another small European software company that may or may not one day sell to a bigger US firm. Don't get me wrong. I dream big. But deep down I know that if I attract too much attention I'll always be at risk of being steamrollered by a "success is failure" US VC backed company that has no idea how to become sustainable, but might somehow stumble onto a plan anyway and if it doesn't, well the VCs will force one of their other investments to make an acquihire and somehow it'll work out so that everyone can save face. Bankruptcy is after all, basically unheard of in the Valley, and spending other people's money for a decade is lionized.
That doesn't explain why even that time, no such companies were founded in europe. I guess your thoughts on profitability are an attempt to explain that? I can't find data on when these companies became profitable, but at least for Microsoft it seems likely that they became profitable after three years[1].
[1]: https://www.quora.com/When-did-Microsoft-become-profitable
But there were lots of tech firms founded in Europe in the 1980s. ARM is the descendent of Acorn Computers which was the UK's attempt to compete with Apple, and that was just one of many examples. Acorn developed its own computers, its own RISC OS and so on.
If you look at the history of Acorn and the interviews with its founders, one of the things that killed them off was a small home market, very limited ability to sell into Europe and it being too difficult/slow to expand into the USA due to a variety of factors. So a lot of what you see discussed elsewhere on this thread.
And obviously Finland produced Nokia which ruled the roost for a long time in mobile, but again, most Americans don't realize that because Nokia managed to dominate everywhere except the USA, where a variety of structural barriers hindered growth.
SAP dates to that time too, I think. Possibly even earlier.
[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...
[1] https://itsfoss.com/french-city-toulouse-saved-1-million-eur...
NEVER in my 30+ years as a user of computer networks or communication programs I have seen the "better software" win. It has always been the most marketing, the most shady ethics, or anything else that lead to the strongest network effect.
And a far more controversial question: would it be allowed? Or would a successful European world-dominating quasi-monopoly on the FAANG scale get banned from the US market? We've seen twitches in that direction (remember the "Tiktok will be forced to sell to Oracle" nonsense?). Or in the aerospace market, things like https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/26/bombardier-... or https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32542140 ; Boeing vs Airbus shenanigans go back a long way.
I found out the other day that one of the UK's longstanding tech companies collapsed after accidentally buying a CIA front organization for illegal arms sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti#Collapse
Or ARM: are they an "EU" tech success any more? As their ownership is passed from Japanese Softbank to US NVIDIA.
Even if they stay where they are they're not in the EU any longer anyway!
After it was basically the winner it brought in marketing, shady ethics and everything else to keep growing.
on edit: I mean there seems to be a large number of people of the opinion, and I concur, that Google now is not as good as the Google of a decade ago. This is part of the reason why I think that many products we think of as bad might actually have been very good at the time that they gained their initial success.
The definition of "better software" is vague. Does it mean technically better? Better product? Easier to use? Ethical? Probably have to ask GP for clarifcation on that.
Europe is at a permanent disadvantage with language. You either target your local market in your local language, or you do English first. If you do English first, your market isn't even in your home country. Even culturally England and the USA (and AUS/NZ) are a bit different to France, Germany, Sweden and so on.
Only one "European" success I can think of whilst typing this: Spotify (anglo-swedish).
America on the other hand has access to a literally flood of venture capital money.
And really, i18n is a minor issue.
Where i18n becomes nasty is when you have to find, evaluate and constantly coordinate with n external translation agencies. Working from Germany on an international product, this is a nightmare. From a technical standpoint we can release features within a minute thanks to our CI/CD setup, but as soon as some user-facing text is affected we have to hold changed back until all translations were collected.
There's other things like GDPR, local taxation, many cross border laws, and by culture I mean a variety of things: you'll see university graduates flogging themselves to death in Silicon Valley, but a start up in London will be slightly more relaxed by comparison. In the US, "free VC money" means there's an incentive to get to market asap, monetize, and move on. That doesn't really exist in Europe.
Siemens SiMatic - again, I won't say anything about the quality of their software, but they seem to be successful.
Google was significantly better than anything else at the time, and in spite of the problems with Google, its search result are still quite a bit better than most others I've tried.
GitHub was a huge improvement over anything that came before it, and after a review of alternatives some months ago it still clearly is the best product IMO.
Internet Explorer was a lot better than Netscape. Yes, it was a mess, but Netscape was an even bigger mess.
There are probably other examples.
Something is out of whack about the priorities here. Yes America has FANGS and is at the cutting edge of slinging ads and casino style VC culture. But have you seen the state of US banking and payments infrastructure? Plaid is pretty much cutting edge for god's sake. The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful technology it's quite funny.
Things like GDPR and OpenBanking point to an alternative way of doing technology, that to my value set is better than the ability to inflate ridiculous Uber/WeWork/etc. valuations with no correlation to real world value.
I see this said, and it was true two decades ago, but I’m not aware of any way it’s true now. What banking can you do in Europe that you can’t do in the US?
I have a European bank account and a US one, and I don’t experience any meaningful difference, indeed the third party processors in the US are generally far more feature rich than the bare bones European bank options.
Hardly: “The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful technology it's quite funny.”
More: An irrelevant implementation detail that doesn’t impact end users.
Direct debit not supported everywhere. Important for saas
In France (Paris) its impossible to rent without earning 3 times your rent in after tax salary.
Lots of decent programmers - but if you hire them its very hard (impossible) to lay them off on a employment contract.
If you don't give them an employment contract they can't rent an apartment.
As a Director you can be held personally responsible (no corporate protection) from non salary payment or other debts.
It is very complex to give shares or options to your employees without large tax implications.
result? StationF is mostly large companies. When you hire people you really need the help of a lawyer to protect yourself.
Yes, we definitively need to overcome our software problem but we have unique assets, that if accessible only in combination europe can overcome that problem. Example: High end hardware equipment, chemicals etc. we failed to have the customer facing software platform but we‘ll get there and instead of selling ads we will create combination products. Think IKEA or VW etc
http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html
He actually has several essays on how to try to create a Silicon Valley in other geographic areas, but this seemed the most relevant.
tldr:
1. The US Allows Immigration.
2. The US Is a Rich Country.
3. The US Is Not (Yet) a Police State.
4. American Universities Are Better.
5. You Can Fire People in America.
6. In America Work Is Less Identified with Employment.
7. America Is Not Too Fussy. (If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can assume larval startups will break most of them, because they don't know what the laws are and don't have time to find out.)
8. America Has a Large Domestic Market.
9. America Has Venture Funding.
10. America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers. (Compared to other industrialized countries the US is disorganized about routing people into careers. For example, in America people often don't decide to go to medical school till they've finished college. In Europe they generally decide in high school.)
11. Attitude (There's one item conspicuously missing from this list: American attitudes. Americans are said to be more entrepreneurial, and less afraid of risk. But America has no monopoly on this. Indians and Chinese seem plenty entrepreneurial, perhaps more than Americans. Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don't believe it. I think the problem with Europe is not that they lack balls, but that they lack examples.)
(Also, I think point 4 is very field-specific. While the US may have a few institutions that are universally recognized as excellent, there are also many European ones that are phenomenal within a given field. Having a truly exceptional group within field X does not give your a university the name recognition of Stanford, but it serves the same purpose when it comes to training people in field X.)
What are you thinking of here? Big US companies like Google will let you get a high-level job with no college education whatsoever. Most traditional European companies would not consider doing that.
> While the US may have a few institutions that are universally recognized as excellent
"a few institutions"? The US absolutely dominates the top universities. You have to go down to the 40s to find your first EU institution.
But Google isn't a "traditional US company" either. So I don't think that comparison holds.
> "a few institutions"? The US absolutely dominates the top universities. You have to go down to the 40s to find your first EU institution.
Good point. Is should not have used the word "few". But my point still holds: the overall excellence of the university (which is admittedly stellar in the US) doesn't matter much if the university happens to be magnificent and world-leading in exactly your field. This is part of the reason why such university rankings are a bit silly. If I'm in (making stuff up here) biochemistry and my European university has a world-leading lab for that, what do I care whether an equivalent US university can boast a magnificent English and aerospace engineering department?
I had an engineer tell me- in America people don't care about your title, they care about how much money you have. In Europe it's all about titles. In Japan it's about seniority.
I've had no problem picking the job that pays the highest and it changed me from chem engineer to programmer.
My peers that are obsessed with a title have fallen behind, making 80k a year as a 30 year old. I think these people have a significantly harder time finding a new job, where as being a programmer and engineer, I'm able to work in any industry.
One that stood out was that in Silicon Valley having your company go under was not really much of a setback, if at all.
In many other places in the US that looked like they had the ingredients to be a Silicon Valley if you led your company to bankruptcy, that was what did them in. The money folks would not be interested in financing you again, and you'd stop getting invited to the social and business events that the successful people get invited to so your ability to network would take a huge hit.
Startups in those places tended to be focused on safe things like trying to do something slightly better in an already well established area.
There seems, from my experience mostly in the UK but also talking to people from round Europe, to be a big regulatory and mental impediment in most places to setting up your own business. Being an employee is safe, you get a lot of rights, your paycheck arrives the same day every month and it's actually really hard to lose that, if you are going to lose it that's a huge tragedy, and you've probably had several months notice anyway.
A lot of the middle classes in the UK would never consider trying to start a business, even though the social safety net would catch them to some extent on failure, in reality it may save you from the street but it's not likely to be much better than that. Best stick to that safe £50k a year. Which, incidentally, is considered pretty decent pay but won't leave you much to put aside to actually kick off that business idea later. Starting a business is for high flyers, finance types, other people.
You might be right about it not being lack of energy, but I think the entrepreneurial spirit in the UK is pretty suppressed. And in the EU from what I can tell it's similar, with an added side of "and the state is going to make this very difficult too".
Europe should fund them heavily and by doing so give them the advertising power to compete with for-profit ones.
Otherwise they will end up squandering a lot of money, Covid apps are not a good example.[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/henwet/the_uk_...
This is not a trivial challenge though. It's basically about creating a business climate that would allow startups grow fast and capture dominating positions on both European and worldwide markets.
Funding, with all its importance (look at what DARPA funding has enabled) can only give a first impulse, help a team create a prototype of something innovative. The rest is on legislation, investing culture, taxation etc.
Or maybe it should just be called «the US Social Media problem»…
(There’s also the tax issue, but that’s mostly on countries like Ireland and The Netherlands being tax havens (UK too, but they left, kinda…))
Signal can be a perfect replacement for Whatsapp. If the EU want to spend money on maintaining, improving and deploying Signal, that'd be great.
People still won't use it, though.
It's too late. If Europe wants a slice of the market they need to make business as frictionless as possible like the USA did in the past - that will bring capital, eventually.
I think Europe has bigger problems to care about though.
We are left with US survivors in these particular cases.
Actually, most of the U.S. lack it as well, but having one Silicon Valley is much better than having zero of them.
European startups struggle to raise any money at all. (And I mean on the order of 100,000 eur, much less millions.) Our banks are extremely risk-averse and if they spend money at all, it is on projects that the political sphere supports. These tend to be duds.
I’ve seen and heard of 9+ months, and a ton of paperwork
For software companies, there are hardly any barriers. Gdpr and labor laws depending on country if you contract people. For both, you get someone else to do it. There are companies who do this for a monthly fee.
I have never seen a government or any regulation deliver anything "good and compelling", or take any other action to "make sure" someone else delivers it.
* US Digital Service
* 18F
* Pubmed
What?
It is driven by distinct use-cases.
But almost no-one uses Linux for general computing because open source requires configuration to be usable.
Can you give us one example of a stellar open source UI you use daily?
Blender is one of the 2 or 3 dominant tools in its field. It's a niche field, so it's not for office work, but is nevertheless an incredible tool by any standard.
For almost anyone's purposes, LibreOffice is better than any closed source equivalent tool (though some of them do have specific features that are critical for some users). The only issues with it come from being forced to interoperate with data generated by closed source applications. I don't happen to enjoy using LibreOffice very much, but there's denying its "stellar" quality compared to the alternatives.
[ EDIT: I really can't fail to mention VCV Rack, a libre+gratis virtual modular synthesizer. It wasn't the first such tool, but it is by far the most successful, and by far the best, at least in terms of user experience. It has also created an ecosystem of module developers (more than 2200 modules already), which is both a reason why and an indication of just how stellar a tool it really is ]
Of course, as a software developer, I could name a long list of FLOSS tools that are also stellar, but you and others would likely dismiss them as not of interest to "the general public". In the context of this article, that would probably be fair.
But I don't think it's surprising that highly complex UI-driven applications aren't as plentiful in open source, where the sweet spot (from my perspective) has been smaller applications that scratch particular itches. Would an open suite of office tools even get off the ground today, built from scratch without funding from Sun and then Oracle?
Maybe I was just burned too hard by trying to figure out GIMP.
The same can be said about MS Word, which has become much worse than LibreOffice, also since many years.
I have been using MS Word for 30 years, but recent versions frequently surprise me because when I have to search some command through its menus it never is where I would expect it.
With older versions of MS Word, I had no need for a manual or for a help command, because I could easily discover how to do anything that I had not done before.
With the newer versions of MS Word it is hard for me to discover how to do anything that I have done many times before, but not recently enough.
Even if I have used LibreOffice for much fewer years than MS Word, with it, like with the old MS Word versions, I never had difficulties to discover how to do something.
These days, I will never use willingly MS Windows Explorer or MS Word, instead of their open-source equivalents.
These are just some of the most obvious examples of commercial programs with a bad user interface, but there are many more.
Today, the world runs on open source, so we shouldn't call it "clunky".
You can't have everything.
Everything works perfectly already in Europe, so why let anyone rock the boat?
> In addition, with the GDPR, NIS (2) Directive & other regulations, data in Europe is definitely more “the new toxic waste”. It is in any case not a business plan.
> So not only do we lack the imagination to launch free platforms, the path to one day making money with them is blocked by regulation.
So protecting your citizens' rights and their privacy is "lack of imagination"? This is such a horrible argument. As if the only way to provide a service were to spy on your users.
I don't really think it's the argument the author is making, or if they are, they mean it sarcastically.
The frustration is with the state of affairs where American companies can destroy the entire market for software products with free services built on data mining, much like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, etc. have upended the market by completely ignoring profitability in search of marketshare.
And data mining pretty much is the only way to provide a free service and still make money.
The whole gdpr is a big mess.
In terms of investors, there is barely any seed capital. There is series A/B, but the amounts are smaller than a typical seed round. They need to see profits from day one
The only thing better than data is big data. Yet gdpr etc is basically the opposite
Worse yet the same applies to the US. Think US will lose against the Chinese model too. Not as badly as Europe given the sketchy shit US big players are allowed to do but that’s still a far cry from the collect everything model the US is up against