Ask HN: Where Is the Silicon Valley of Europe? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where Is the Silicon Valley of Europe?

7 pointswaspight23 comments

Why is there so many missing eu based equivalents of American based saas companies? Since gdpr it seems to be a good opportunity to launch such based ones just so that the customers don’t have to share data outside eu.

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I'm maybe biased but here's Reuters [1] in 2021 claiming it's Stockholm, Sweden.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/how-sweden-became-s....

The reasons are extremely complex and europe is an incredibly diverse region.

As a European I have observed 2 key reasons you don’t see a “Silicon Valley of europe” - cultural and regulatory.

In my home country it is not applauded when you start a company. People are extremely conservative and are mainly focused on working at one of the large conglomerates. This is a small example of the cultural blocker but the entrepreneurial spirit you see in SV and US is very different from elsewhere in the world.

Re: regulatory there are many barrier, each country is different. In France, for example, the process of firing someone is very difficult. To the degree that US founders and operators are very hesitant to hire in the country.

I expect many will disagree with the above but you asked so I’m giving you my opinion. Somehow, despite all of the negative sentiment you hear towards America and the occasional “I’m moving to Europe” comments we see on the internet - one thing is still true. We have yet to see a true rival to Silicon Valley somewhere else in the world.

There's Shenzhen.

I’ve heard great things, but I don’t personally know of anyone who has moved to Shenzen to join/start a tech business. I know many who have dropped their lives to move to SV (for better or worse)

Another big reason i can think of is market size. Europe is not (yet) a market. You can't "launch a product in europe", you have to pick one european country, then move to next, and at each step you'll have to adapt to the country's specificities.

Interesting, this is a big one

I don't think one is possible, to be honest, because the circles of the venn diagram simply dont intersect:

- organic pipeline of talent. Typically a university or two within commuting range. Generally needs a city. Hence, SF/SJ, but potentially also Paris, London, Berlin etc.

- access to capital at all stages of life. Its not enough to seed or do class A, you need investors and ppl who understand the game for a decade or more. Maybe London. Maybe Berlin. Pre-crackdown HK perhaps. Definitely SV.

- Tolerance for failure, pivot to new opps, etc. I cant think of any Euro investing community that is as tolerant as the US.

- a large, culturally unified market on your doorstep. Frankly this is the US, China and India and absolutely not the EU/UK. The Single Market is intellectually unified but not culturally unified. X in Greece will never be like X in Germany.

I'd love to see a multi polar SV universe, but I just cant see it happening anytime soon. I can see alternatives to SV in the US, such as Seattle and NYC, but we are not quite there yet and SV had unique advantages in its early years (1965 to 1975) that would be very hard to replicate now.

In the US, do you think that Silicon Valley will always be the center of innovation? These past couple of years the population of the Bay Area has been on the decline, but rising tech areas such as Seattle (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/surprise-seat....) and Austin haven’t been increasing in population as much as SF has been decreasing (https://neeva.com/search?q=sf%20population%20decrease&src=nv...). I know population isn’t everything but it is a proxy for where the perceived opportunity is.

not the center of innovation, but def the center of gravity post innovation and facing the market. for example, lots of original innovation coming out of clusters around the US (self driving in MI, energy in Houston), but when it comes time to get beyond seed or class A, those founders are going to feel an incredibly strong gravity towards SV.

I wont say never, but network effects make tbe gravity well of SV hard to ignore. Seattle is maybe the only other place I woukd think of as having enough capital to get out of the well.

Silicon Valley is the Silicon Valley of Europe, and also several other continents.

Europe or France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland are spiritual places, legal and banking places. Not places optimized for liberal innovation. They owned or invested massively in the US, China, India markets. They are lacking on some investments and the copying cycle sometimes but they are good at law and policy-making.

Q: Where is the Silicon Valley of Europe? A: It doesn't exist and it's very unlikely (in my opinion) that there is going to be one. When media and people talk about Silicon Valley as a whole and try to find its equialents around the world, they tend to forget why Silicon Valley is a thing to begin with. The need to have an area where businesses that operate in the same industry could perform their research, collaboration and product manufacturing stems not from some company's CEO trying to make some property investments for the sake of investing, but the need for having your partners (and competitors) in your physical proximity. Nowadays both the research and collaboration don't need to be performed at some particular spot (unless we're talking physical prototyping that has to be performed at a particular facility for whatever reason there is, but your questions seems to address the lack of European SaaS "hubs" so whatever), meaning that being somewhere akin to Silicon Valley is redundant for the most part. An argument could be made for networking, but i think that platforms like GitHub are far better for modern day tech networking than talking to randos at a bar.

Q:Why is there so many missing eu based equivalents of American based saas companies? A:Because Europe. This isn't meant to be some sort of a snarky answer, but that's how it is. Mind that Europe is not monolithic in the ways European countries treat businesses (albeit there is certain movement in that direction (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-eyes-another-go-more...)), but there are certain differences between how German businesses have to operate versus their American counterparts and in my opinion that influences the costs of developing, maintaining and promoting the product, not to mention the differences in legal areas like IP laws. It's an incredibly complex topic to study and i wish i could give you a better answer, but the more i think about, the more i realize that the actual "final answer" would require you to take into account years and years of EU policies and how they affected European businesses, differences between European and North American specialists and their mindsets, how the talent moved around throught the years and so on.

It would be the absolute easiest thing in the world for me to just write "something, something, taxpayer funds, German manufacturing powerhouses, something, something, government overreach." but that wouldn't really explain anything.

Cambridge for embedded stuff

For microelectronics, it's in Saxony, Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Saxony

It isn't a thing. You can't take the 'SV' of US and translate that to Europe. There's so much more to it than that.

Berlin probably.

There isn't one and there won't be one. Europe is incapable of growing one. Government centrally manages your salary. Government centrally manages the whole economy. Government employees are half of the entire workforce. There is no unifying language. There is no unifying culture.

And I'm sure someone will question it: I do live in one of these euro shitholes.

Wrong question.

The right one — why is there SV in the US?

I feel that not the last role was played by freedom (political, economical, social) back in the days and lacking now.

Another factor - millions of people running away from ww1,2 and still running from bs, dictators and other mess happening in Europe on a regular basis.

High concentration of entrepreneurial and just smart people were and are among those people.

Why people downvote mere facts plus an assumption?

London, Berlin, Lissabon

Amsterdam less dense but an astonishing city.

I can only think of London.

Why Berlin? There seems to be a lot of companies based in other German cities.

Based on my Linkedin inbox, London or Berlin.

Cambridge in the UK.

In EMEA region it is Tel Aviv.

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