Comment by dharmaturtle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dharmaturtle | Hacker News Reader

PG has a related essay: Why Startups Condense in America

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.)

As a European, I do think he hits several marks correctly. But I don't at all understand point 10. If anything, it's been my experience that the US is more focused on people having "the right" education for the job. Could anyone elaborate on what he might possibly mean?

(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.)

> If anything, it's been my experience that the US is more focused on people having "the right" education for the job.

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.

> 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.

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 think the point about the workforce being flexible is tremendous.

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.

> Americans are said to be more entrepreneurial

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".

I remember reading a similar article a very long time ago, back when "reading an article" usually meant reading it on paper so have no recollection of where or how to cite it, and it had a similar list.

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.

The first point didn't age so well. All developed countries have an easier immigration path for skilled workers than the US. Yes, even Japan.

I don't think any of those matter. America has distribution and is unapologetica about marketing and people heavily hustling and pushing their product. EU countries have so far tended to place obstacles instead because of mentality.

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