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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> it's super hard to find talented people, and that makes a difference at the end of the day.

It's difficult pretty much anywhere. And even in areas where there are lots of good people (SV), you then have to pay a lot.

There are plenty of talented people in Italy, that is not what I would consider the major problem.

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Italy has an education problem though. Only 1 in 10 have a higher education diploma. Among the 30-34 year olds, it's 20%, but this is still less than half what most northern European countries have (Ireland is top with 50%). [Source: IMF & Eurostat via my newspaper today.]

Italian university is... complicated. There are areas of excellence -- medicine, architecture, even engineering (!) -- but a lot of undergraduate courses are expected to run for more than 5 years, and that's a very long time for non-STEM stuff. The average length is much lower in other countries, and the format much more flexible.

And I say this as a serial drop-out who now lives abroad.

You have a point here, but due to the distribution of our (small) cities, we don't have many meetups here, for example. I love Italy's, just not for working.

Other European countries have similar urbanization levels/curves. And the most 'concentrated' country, the one with most of its people in cities, is, surprisingly, Australia. And they don't seem to have a ton of startups either...

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