468 Capital raises $400M to back European startups
axios.com
axios.com
Spotify was only available in Sweden for the initial 3 years, and after that they launched in the UK as well. 5 years after the local launch, they expanded into the US.
It's complicated but I do feel like, at least comparing Ireland and California, there's a lot of tall-poppy syndrome going on. I told some Irish friends I wanted to build my own house and they thought I was crazy and said it was a terrible idea. I told some Californian friends* and they thought it was awesome and wanted to come help build it.
Learned helplessness is bad enough but we're outright _teaching_ helplessness to young people.
*disclaimer: they live in Oregon now
And I'll give it to you that the Irish are one of the least DIY people around Europe.
(though I can totally understand being enthusiastic about building a house in California weather vs. Irish)
FWIW a lot of what US tech companies were doing was actually illegal or at least very dark grey in the US too. Skirting taxi regulations (Uber), hotel regulations (AirBnB) or employment law (all of the "gig economy" startups), everything done under "better ask for forgiveness than for permits"... the problem is twofold:
For one, personal liability of corporate executives has fallen out of favor. Unless you're ordering the outright murder of someone, the "corporate veil" will protect you. That means, as long as you budget in the correct-ish amount of fines, you can do whatever the fuck you want with impunity.
But the main problem is that the political system as a whole isn't very agile to react - it takes years for binding court orders if the opponent has good lawyers, the legislative branch is even slower to react, and both the legislative and the executive branch is often enough either too incompetent or outright bought off. And the "fourth branch" aka media isn't much better either - most media is under the control of big conglomerates or oligarchs.
The arm of the law might not catch everything, and when it does work, sometimes it works slowly.
Companies like Uber and AirBnb got ahead by skirting the law, and had to change their products in some European countries (like Spain) because lawmakers eventually saw what they were doing. AirBnb are now required to ask for tax ID, and Uber had add artificial delays in order to fit within the law that existed. But when they initially launched, they didn't do these things, it was only after pressure that they changed.
But that was not the only use of AirBnb, tons of properties were bought and used only for driving what essentially is a hotel in those properties, without registering with the proper entity and paying the appropriate amount of taxes. This was not legal, and never was, as hotels need to have a license, yet AirBnb allowed those entities to continue running on the website until the courts got involved. If that's not skirting the law, I don't know what is.
Now of course, AirBnb requires its users to specify their tax ID before they can let out their places on AirBnb, as the law (already existing since before AirBnb) requires.
"Lack" is a bad word but everything that's not around SV gets less funding. Yes, even in the US
> is that all the things US tech companies do to get ahead are illegal in Europe
So maybe don't do illegal BS and it will work out. In fact I'd say there's a huge market to be explored but enterpreneurs try the same stuff that works in the US without thinking about the market characteristics
> it turns out Netflix were impractical in the EU due to challenges both regulatory and linguistic
Netflix works just fine in Europe.
maybe instead of focusing why others are successful just go out and do your own thing? at the end Europe is full of unicorns and more startups are coming out of their teams.
The only thing I really see missing in Europe is the lack of dream / vision / going after big goals and having others believe that's possible. but even that gets easier each time you look around and spot a unicorn.
so just go build something
[1]https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/25/venture-capitalists-fell-i...
With public healthcare, good social services, reduced transit cost, etc. a bootstrapper can have a MUCH longer runway here - almost indefinite, if you get your expenses lower than Jobseeker's allowance (our house is paid off which helps). You can hire engineers for a third the cost of the US, too.
Europe is not a single country but a collection of vastly different countries with different opportunities and issues. May I ask which country that is?
>almost indefinite, if you get your expenses lower than Jobseeker's allowance
That's not universally true. In some EU countries jobseeker's allowance, as the name suggests, is paid to you as long as you prove you're looking for employment, not to boot-strap your side hustle as you please, unfortunately. And to get unemployment you first need to have at least 2 years of employment, at least in Austria. You can't just show up and start cashing unemployment checks.
>our house is paid off which helps
I bet that helps. Ballooning housing costs is a major issue in Europe's biggest metro areas and most young people don't have this luxury and end up spending a significant portion of their take home pay on it, so I feel you're situation is far more priviledged than the average European.
You can get last resort social benefits basically forever if you aren’t actively working much or don’t run a business.
Incidentally I bought a Muurikka from a Finnish friend last summer and it's the most amazing thing I've ever cooked with. I don't think I'll ever go back to a bbq :-)
On top of that, integrating, learning and making friends in Finnish is playing life on hard level. There are also very few English language schools in Finland.
The hardest part is likely to get jobs for both parents, unless you are both in in demand fields like IT.
That's true in all of the Nordics but I believe specially more in Finland.
I'm a naturalised Swede and had to put a lot of effort into making friends the first couple of years here. Yes, making friends is much harder than in my original culture (Brazil) but there is also the counter-side to it on the quality of friendships you make that I believe it's worth to take into account.
Making friends here is really about bonding and creating deep connections with someone else, not just a cursory acquaintance to go out to bars and do things together. In that sense I do understand completely why people are generally more reserved into expanding their social circles, it takes a lot of effort and a genuine interest in each other to foster a friendship and locals/natives already come with their own social groups from just living here their whole lives.
Cracking into these social circles is definitely hard, you will need to find hobbies and activities where you can meet people around a shared interest and usually expand from there, you won't be making friends by simply going to bars, for example.
And that's also the isolating part of Nordic cultures, you keep social circles smaller because they are more meaningful but getting started into a meaningful relationship takes time and will make you feel lonely.
People are also wary of mixing/mingling social groups as they'll feel responsible for the experience the groups have (at least here in Sweden), it's uncommon for someone to invite their different social circles into the same gathering, except maybe for birthdays.
Overall I've adapted quite well and I'm very happy with the friends I made, it is more demanding but extremely rewarding.
You're right re: JSA and JSB (Jobseeker's allowance and benefit) but my neighbours have somehow been on it for 13 years now.....
And yes, I was lucky to buy a cheap house in 2019. But it was under 100k and derelict, I've been fixing it up. Fortunately it has gigabit fibre and is a bike ride from the train.
Well, every country has people who've learned to game the welfare system in order to never have to go to work (like faking various illnesses for example), but some countries make the process of being unemployed for life so dehumanizing in order to deter cheaters, that it's not worth it it unless you're really committed to such a lifestyle (let's say, knock on wood, you're disabled from the neck down, you have to show up yearly to the government officer handling your unemployment benefits, to prove that you're still disabled and can't work. Madness!).
True, but some have awesome provisions for business creation. For instance in France you can get all of the money you would have received as job seeekers' allowance ( allocation chômage) as startup capital for your own business.
Growing up abroad and moving to a country in your thirties means you draw rather little benefit but pay in to the system massively. Because of Ireland's _extremely_ progressive/redistributive tax system, I have already paid more in to the system than a median earner here will in their entire career. Which is fine, that's the deal I signed up for, but I hardly think if I found myself on JSA for a while and noodled on a side project it makes me a leech.
It was meant to be a 6-12 month stay on a working holiday visa but we decided to stick around, and I got sponsored.
Yeah, those days are mostly gone. The real estate market is crazy now in most of the western/northern EU.
The market dipped slightly during the first lockdowns of 2020 but bounced right back up quickly and came back with a vengeance.
What do you mean by this term?
People rarely make 80k/year here and everything here is expensive af. I dont recommend anyone young and ambitious to work in tech here.
* get your nice free college in Europe
* go make a mountain of cash in California
* come back and retire in your 30's and start a family.
but that depends on a lot of things going right. I'd rather raise a family in most of Europe, and retire in Europe. But I can't deny that if I'd stayed in California I'd probably have $1-2 million more. And the tax structures here make FIRE _very_ difficult, depending on where you are. Portugal is appealing if your income is foreign (check out the NHR program), and Germany allows about 12k per year in capital gains tax-free if I recall.
It's 801€ per year, but you can deduct losses up to 20k.
From over here, US seems constantly at an edge of civil war/revolution. Lots of desperate people that jump at the first opportunity to riot and loot stuff.
Because otherwise it's difficult to judge. I sometimes read other countries complain about their awful rail system, and it turns out "the trains are sometimes 5 minutes late on Wednesdays", as they're used to punctual service at all other times.
But looking at Graz, Austria, a 80,000, even if gross, euro salary would provide a very good standard of living.
Graz is an amazing city for quality of life, nature and socializing, and is great if you want to be employed in academia your whole life. On the IT careers side, it's a wasteland of conservative hardware/automotive companies and IT service companies(cost centers) that only deal with the local market, or at best the DACH zone, and is therefore worse on pay than some Eastern European cities that deal with the international scene (Krakow, Warsaw, Bucharest, Cluj). Almost no product based IT companies who deal internationally.
Most tech jobs in Austria are where the money and infrastructure is, Vienna.
>a security hub https://cybersecurity-campus.tugraz.at
Outside of a handful of low-paid TU students and post-docs(basically academia), I think I can count the number of people employed there, on the fingers of my hand. AFAIK they aren't hiring anyone at the moment. Other of massive PR, no job openings, no investments, no tech companies and nothing significant materialized from that, just a few partnerships for PhD/research positions. Hardly a "security hub". A hub would mean you have a cluster of multiple private companies hiring people there to work on commercial solutions alongside research partnerships with universities. That's not what's happened.
The thing is, you earn less on paper than in the US, but your total cost of living (and thus, your "available" income) is way lower, too:
- healthcare is cheap and universally available, no need to stuff away money in HSAs to account for a sudden 100k$ bill from a broken leg or a million dollar bill from cancer
- public education for your children is free, you don't need to pay for private schools or (later on) for university
- housing costs are drastically lower than the US
- no need to stuff away money for pension because we actually have working government-backed pensions
- way less commute expenses - we tend to have working public transport and even if you commute by car, the distances involved are way less
- we have government-mandated vacation time - at the least 20 days a year, most employers offer around the 30 day range - and unlimited as-needed sick time, which also means you don't have to stuff away money for unpaid time off.
Hmm I wonder where this mythical cheap healthcare is...If you are not really sick (and most young people are not) you typically pay for things anyway (dental care)
>- public education for your children is free, you don't need to pay for private schools or (later on) for university
I dont have children? And judging by birth rates a lot of people dont as well.
>- housing costs are drastically lower than the US
Are housing costs relative to tech salaries really lower than the US?
>- no need to stuff away money for pension because we actually have working government-backed pensions
Again as a young, ambitious individual in Tech I would rather have more disposable income than rely on a ponzi scheme that's the gov-backed pension system.
>- way less commute expenses - we tend to have working public transport and even if you commute by car, the distances involved are way less
And we live in cramped,tiny,noisy,apartments...I would rather commute from a suburb and have a house with a garden.
>- we have government-mandated vacation time - at the least 20 days a year, most employers offer around the 30 day range - and unlimited as-needed sick time, which also means you don't have to stuff away money for unpaid time off.
Unlimited PTOs or european level PTOs are very common in US tech companies.
Agreed, but lower fertility rates are common in wealthier countries - an effect notable enough to be recognizable even in first-generation migrants. When you don't have to have a literal dozen children so that one or two make it to adulthood to support you in old age, you're fine with having one or two - or even none, given that we have support systems for old people backed by society as a whole instead of families having to take care for themselves.
> Are housing costs relative to tech salaries really lower than the US?
Yes. Here in Germany, while I agree that rents are way too high, we simply don't have something like "working homeless".
> Again as a young, ambitious individual in Tech I would rather have more disposable income than rely on a ponzi scheme that's the gov-backed pension system.
Wonder who's gonna pick up the tab for you once you are in pension.
Does the US have "working homeless" among people earning "tech" salaries?
Wonder who's gonna pick up the tab for you once you are in pension.
If you're earning US level take home salaries you should have zero problems financing your own pension plan.
> you typically pay for things anyway (dental care)
Ah yes, dental care. The thing that's literelly not included in healthcare in most places.
> I would rather commute from a suburb and have a house with a garden.
Literally nothing prevents you from doing that in Europe. Houses might be smaller depending on the country, but this exists.
Except, you know, money. In DE/AT houses are insanely expresive relative to net pay.
Looked around Munich you can find options between 500k and 700k around 20km. I wouldn't be surprised if houses inside the city would cost ~1Mi (but we're talking about suburbs right? and cities grow differently)
Around Dublin you can find for that range or even less, inside the city (in liveable areas)
For comparison, searching around Chicago it's probably a bit less (though with bigger surface area) - excluding the foreclosures or fixer-uppers.
Buying a house in SV is also insanely expensive even with SV salaries, so.
At least you can actually buy a house here. A friend of mine is a teacher and just bought a 180 m² house plus garden in the suburbs of Munich, 20 minutes from the city center.
And a friend of mine works with the president and took me on a space ship to the moon. Is this how this game works? How much is his teacher's salary and how much did the house cost? Those are important details worth mentioning to form an argument. Otherwise, without stating any facts, we're just making stuff up.
I worked with Munich devs and they all said you can't afford a house in the suburbs without an inheritance due to how insane the Munich housing bubble has gotten with houses going for over a million Euros, so I doubt your friend could buy a house just on mortgage based on his salary.
Lol, NO. Every Gen Z to Millennial European I talked to knows that our pyramid pension system is a scam and will collapse by the time we'll retire. Unless we happen to die before we can reitre at the age of 85 or whatever it will be increased to until then.
If you want to survive off your pension in 30-50 years, then you'd better have made some solid investments, otherwise your government pension will be worthless by then.
No kids: USA > Europe
1 kid: they are similar
2 kids or more: Europe > USA
In the USA each kid is an extra 3000 usd a month expense at least, more if one goes private and include university tuition.
How parents can pay for two or more kids’s education in USA (or UK) is beyond me.
With two or more kids in USA you essential force your children into wage slavery by going into huge amounts of college debt.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/cqegh2/daycar...
https://www.reddit.com/r/breakingmom/comments/qtk3d8/how_we_...
So the difference is conservatively 2000 extra per month per child.
The point is this scales linearly so two kids is 4000, three is 6000.
The amount of child expenses in Europe goes up hundreds per month. In USA it goes up by thousands a month. That’s an order of magnitude difference.
More kids, the better Europe becomes compared to USA.
I doubt that, or at least it is very dependent on where you live. Both cars, gas and parking (as most employers in the US seem to offer free parking for employees) is generally much cheaper in the US. And while most places in Europe have (more or less) working public transport it is quite expensive. In the US I've used public transport in New York City, Chicago and Washington DC and they all had significantly cheaper public transport than here in Sweden for example.
This doesn't seem to be true. A 30 day commuter pass in New York costs $127. https://new.mta.info/fares
In stockholm a similar pass costs 970 SEK, or about $100.
https://mitt.sl.se/sv/kop-biljett/#/periodbiljett
So public transit seems to be significantly cheaper in Stockholm than New York at least.
That doesn't happen magically, it's being deducted from your paycheck (i.e you are stuffing away money).
Austria is, with few exceptions, a very bad market for tech/IT careers. Oversupply of talent but low VC investments, small market with focus on networking, culture that values middle managers way more than ICs, archaic culture with too much emphasis on titles and degrees, high taxes, poor fiber infrastructure in cities, hyper conservative cash-based society, inflexibility to remote work and freelancing for foreign companies due to complex government bureaucracy, high real estate prices(for buying), non-competes are legal and enforceable, all-in contracts with zero overtime pay, 25 vacation days standard for most tech workers, company benefits are non existent unless you count free coffee and a banana, companies focusing more on hiring seniors and rarely hiring or training juniors, almost no product based SW companies with the IT industry being mostly service based (in other words, a cost center); I could go on.
Quality of life is great though but tech careers here are a joke, even Eastern Europe has better and more exiting opportunities now due to the influx of outsourcing from US/UK unicorns.