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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>What Canada doesn’t have is a strong venture capital pool, a culture of risk taking, or a domestic market of 330 million people which stifles new businesses.

Replace Canada with EU and it's the same.

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You still have the timezone issue, which is a problem

The timezone issue is as much of a problem as you make it. The difference between the east coast and the UK is 5 hours - the difference between East and West coast is 3 hours. Both of those are very roughly in the ballpark of "half a workday overlapping".

That’s a big problem for a 9-5 culture company in the USA.

By that logic they can't even work from east to west coast then.

I am not sure how your clock works but 9-5 work hours will have 5 hours common between the East and the West coast.

It's only a problem if the US and EU sides need to work closely together; most tech companies will have multiple products that can be built independently. IIRC Google Docs is mainly built and maintained in Germany.

I was going to say UK!

I doubt it, London tech wages, especially in the City, beat everything else in the EU.

And are still lower than most places in the US.

Sure, but let's compare apples to apples (UK to EU) as US is unique in being the world leading economy.

I dont have enough karma to reply to my sibling comment:

> Sure, but let's compare apples to apples (UK to EU) as US is unique in being the world leading economy.

EU has a higher GDP than the US and is therefore the world leading economy.

The EU is not a single united market like the US is.

Sure, you can bunch the countries together and get high GDP number but that's not an Apples to apples comparison with the US as every EU country has it's own completely different languages, economy, political and economic agenda, culture, market, legal and tax system, and local issues plus high levels off autonomy from the EU.

The EU is not the United States of Europe therefore cannot compete with the US toe to toe as it's not 300 million people speaking the same language and having the same culture and laws, but 300 million people spread across 27 countries, speaking 24 official languages, with little overlap in laws and culture from end to end, that's why there are no successful software giants that came out of Europe and there's no EU military.

> The EU is not a single united market like the US is

The US is not a single united market. Each state has it's own economy, political and economic agenda, culture, market, legal and taxes, and local issues.

> that's why there are no successful software giants that came out of Europe.

this is just false. There are plenty of succesful european software giants , and there are numerous "unicorns" too; Spotify being the textbook example. There's an absolutely booming video games industry, Fintech and crypto (not my thing but can't argue there's no money in it) have very very solid bases across the EU too.

There's no single reason as to why the US has a stronger software market than the EU, but I would put money on it being "it's where the money already is".

What I took form your reply is that you don't understand the difference between how the US and EU differ economically, culturally and politically and what impact that has on the EU vs US tech sectors, nor are you willing to listen to arguments, yet you insist there's no difference between the US and the EU.

Therefore to end the argument here and save my sanity, I'll stop replying to you. Have a good day sir.

> The EU is not a single united market like the US is.

You made the comparison between US and EU, so it's in play. QED.

I compared them to show they're not in the same ballpark. But whatever, you pick what you want to hear.

?? No it's not. The US's GDP is higher than the EU's and per-capita massively so.

EU ~16t, US ~15t

In my experience London tech wages are not specially high unless they are linked to finance. IMHO Switzerland salaries are the highest in EU (although cost of living there is very high).

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