Tech investors can’t get enough of Europe’s fizzing startup scene

How perceptions of this company has changed. Prices are ridiculous, both from the Deliveroo mark up and what the restaurants charge extra to make up for that markup (4EUR bottled water seriously?)

More than half the riders here in Belgium are illegal immigrants using fake rider accounts that don't speak the local language. There's a squat near my house where they all hang out waiting for a call.

Seriously, look in side the window and you see a bunch of guys sitting around on broken chairs and crates surrounded by their Deliveroo backpacks (which are all filthy and worn out). They're so destitute and sorry looking that when one comes in to a restaurant to pick up a delivery you think omg.

I'm not someone who usually takes the side of "those poor workers" but in this case Deliveroo really runs on paying the poorest, more vulnerable people in society pennies to deliver over priced meals that a restaurant sold them for something like 30% less than they usually would.

Meanwhile the industry's gravitating toward ghost kitchens, putting even more unfair pressure on local restaurants.

Seriously I'd love drag whatever MBA is behind this company and show them what their "high valued startup" looks like here. I don't understand how these people sleep at night.

And then there's Lendable: "Loans at 28.6% Representative APR" and we're supposed to be amazed they turn a profit?!

America was built in part by swindlers and robber-barons in a system who let them get away with it by design. In many of Europe's different legislations, failure in the bankruptcy way has/had serious consequences for the business person responsible. Play fast and loose with your responsibilities like you might in the US, confident that the corporate veil will bail you as long as you don't do anything criminal, and you might find yourself staring down the barrel of a loaded fiscal gun.

Even in the United States the conditions for a startup ecosystem to thrive are localized mostly to California, both financially and culturally. Risk intolerance and shortness of ambition is pervasive in our society too, just that a few historical factors have allowed for a business counterculture to thrive in parts of it.

2) greater hiring/firing friction due to stronger employee protections,

3) greater fixed operating costs/overhead all around due to increased incorporation costs/bureaucratic requirements.

I don't think these things are necessarily negative, but in a world with competition between markets with high incorporation friction and low incorporation friction you'd expect entrepreneurship to concentrate in lower friction markets.

Personal bankruptcy is another good example where Europe just has no equivalent.

Combine this with the lack of 'safety net' for someone who owns the business (you dont qualify the same as if you were a regular non participatory employee) and the lack of angel funding/froth in general... its not as simple as you may imagine, especially for non citizens.

Its possible, but its not as simple :)

Edit typo

Myself I ran into "problems" when it came to parental leave, parents in Sweden usually gets a combined 480 days of parental leave, of which about 360 are at 80% of your income levels.

Problem is that if you (like me) plan on bootstrapping something then you're not taking out salary during that period, so even if you paid a lot of money in taxes the year before you still get marked down as a zero-earner if you plan to take time off with your kids.

Luckily the Swedish govt realized that this hurts things in the long term so they actually relaxed the rules in this area so you can retain your previous income levels for 3 years if you want to take advantage of parental leave.

(Not entirely sure if they fixed this if you get sick though, regular employees that get sick can retain most of their income for a while but not entirely sure if these 3 years startup grace period applies when getting sick)

People in Europe seem to be more focused on what is deemed „safe“. Parents don‘t want their kids to become „entrepreneurs“ - they want them to find a „safe job“.

I‘m sure that many parents in the U.S. want that, too, for their children. But the U.S. is a country that was founded by immigrants. By people who, in the very founding of the country, broke with old traditions and with the „normal way“ of doing things.

Another commenter mentioned that many startups seem to be headed by immigrants, or that many of the „big guys“ in Silicon Valley started out as such (PayPal Mafia, Google guys, WhatsApp...). It‘s the same thing: You need to break with tradition to become an entrepreneur.

So, in a sense, you need to be standing a little „outside“ of the society in which you are moving. People who visit Europe from the U.S. often notice that Europeans tend to seem less open to random encounters with strangers, and that they tend to hang out in tight-nit social groups.

This is, of course, a generalization. But having lived both in Germany and in California I see this as an accurate description.

And I would argue that it‘s a lot harder to do a startup when you‘re inside a tight-knit social circle, where you have to explain yourself, where you face embarrassment if you fail, and where people might say „Who do you think you are, founding your own company?“.

It‘s a lot easier to do that if you, as Steve Jobs once famously said, have freed yourself from the concept that you must do what you are told, and should not bump into the walls too much (i.e. the „rules“ according to which society claims to work). After all, a real startup is an entity designed to break some of those rules, and to replace them with new ones.

Also, it seems to me that Europeans and Americans (especially Californians, East Coasters and Austiners) differ in where they seek salvation from their problems:

In Europe, I would argue, it is still very much more the politicians and the state. And I do not think this is the case as much in those areas of the U.S.. Again, the observations of a better social security net on the one hand and a lagging behind in entrepreneurship seem to me not to be a contradiction, but two sides of the same thing.

That idea that you can fix what you see as broken by doing a startup is slowly becoming a lot more mainstream in Europe, for sure. But, I think, for Europeans this is more a learned behavior, something inspired by what they see in Silicon Valley and in entrepreneurship shows as „Dragon‘s Den“, whereas in the U.S., it‘s always been a way of life and a philosophy for at least some substantial part of the population.

Do not forget, also, that many countries in Europe were dictatorships just two generations before. In Germany, half of the country lived in socialism up until my parent‘s generation.

In such an environment, you do not raise your kids to take risks, to put yourself in the spotlight, or to change the lives of others. And these values of „being safe“ and „fitting in“, they filter down, from grandparents, to parents, to children. It takes generations for them to die out. So there‘s that, too.

Author should have / could have used the title "Tech Investors can't get enough of Europe's growing startup scene". Would have conveyed a much less bubbly / frothy / transient nature.

EU creates 39% of global startups, but only 14% of unicorns. Success rate

It's historically much more revenue than growth focused, but there's quite a lot of successful startups over here as well. It ties in closely with the local culture of "Mittelstand" and a far larger share of SMB's/family businesses than bigcorps in the US.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

( I'm not related to the scene)