Europe has now created more $1bn ‘unicorn’ companies than China
sifted.eu
sifted.eu
[1] https://app.dealroom.co/unicorns/f/slug_locations/anyof_euro...
Kayak, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bloom Energy and Integra Telecom (Electric Lightwave) are still doing well, Groupon and Zynga are significantly diminished and Living Social, Gilt Group and Better Place are dead.
So the answer appears to be 50/50 and social commerce was a huge fad.
What use - and to whom - are the array of shitcoins?
I increasingly feel like a total sucker for trying to do useful work. I could get rich by moving money around and accomplishing nothing but here I am trying to actually create useful things.
Yes, there are shitcoins but there are real things being built as well.
I think this is an advantage compared to the unified systems like China.
I can't speak for Chinese companies, but I have peeked around on job review sites to get some insights and what i have seen is....different.
I have also worked at some of the largest us companies, they are very good, but also a bit different.
All of them can lead to success, i don't think one is better than the other.
This is the reason many companies first scale nationally and then go to the USA (at least that's the story I heard a lot).
Edit: Also I forgot national law. Even though a lot of law is centralized on EU level, still every country has a national law different from neighbours
We often compare USA with China, but when it comes to european countries, it has to be EU?
This is an honest question, I couldn't care less about either region or gain anything financially or care about emotional internet points. I am not rooting for anyone, though I think predominantly western centric super powers is a bad idea.
But why this line of thinking and comparison, isn't it apple to oranges? Its a genuine question, despite being downvoted for whatever reason.
China's large size and huge population not necessarily an automatic recipe for success. As a matter of fact, other than USA, almost of all large countries with huge population are generally economic and quality of life failures.
On the top of my minds I can think of, Russia, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Mexico all doing pretty shitty job, relatively speaking.
It wouldn’t make sense to compare individual European nations to China.
I think the EU has a smaller GDP than the US.
The numbers might look different if the UK numbers weren't included.
But I'm aware many transpose the two terms as the same. Either way - what is not known is how those ventures were funded and whilst a company may startup in EUrope, it don't mean all that financing came from within that domain.
If that's your definition, how can you exclude big parts of China from that same plate?
Great Britain was in Europe millions of years ago and will still be in Europe a million years from now. It doesn't matter whether the subject at hand is economy or geography. Some parts of the former Soviet union or Turkey could be debated whether they are in Europe and it could even be dependent on context, but great britain will never be outside europe even if Nigel Farage paddles for the rest of his life.
And yes, the UK isn't part of the European Union anymore, but it's still part of Europe.
(It says so at the bottom ... sometimes ...)
[0] Continental Europe GDP $22.9 trillion vs. China $16.64 trillion (Wikipedia); this article appears to include the UK in “Europe”, so it isn’t just about the EU, which was ~= GDP to China before the UK left.
But I’m neither an economist nor politically trained, so if someone who is either wants to (politely) tell me I’m grossly oversimplifying, I’ll listen.
Because it includes 20+ countries with centuries of headstart, 4-5 of which milked half the globe as their colonies (including China)?
And China's epansion over the last 6000 years is way more spectacular than the short lived colonies of some european countries !
The EU isn't even a country yet while China had unified its warring kingdoms long ago...
China is not the thirld world country westerners like you think it is ! If we re behind the EU its by our own might, not their "headstart" :D
Headstart, smh, and what of the US, they have a headstart too? They barely started and are already telling us what to do - that says more abt us than them. Headstart...
Well, for most of those time, China was the most advanced economy on the planet. It dropped from the top spot around 1600 or so, and it took it several centuries to recover.
See, China didn't discover the Americas, plundered its gold and resources for centuries, and murdered millions in the process. Nor did it came to hold 2/3rds of the world as subjects in its colonies.
On the contrary, it was colonized itself, force to the whims of the British and so on.
Furthermore, it was itself coloni
I am starting to encounter your username repeatedly here and it’s always in the context of toxic comments of very little intellectual value.
China has positive interest rates unlike EU, perhaps that dampens valuations somewhat.
I can register a company with just 1 share, then issue another 1 billion shares at any time. If I then sell just on e these shares for a dollar, I am a unicorn post-money.
This folk is what they are doing. Nothing more (just the numbers of shares and amounts change a bit)
The value - I guess - is to bring enough credentials and big names to this dog-and-pony show to get people to suspend disbelief long enough to offload it.
But when western governments are printing mountains of cash that would make a Zimbabwean treasury official blush, expect more of this.
What is far ticker is a billion dollars of distributable post-tax profit.