Northern European countries consistently rank at the top of the world in ease of doing business
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index
Some of them have more entrepreneurs per capita than USA.
What you don’t have is the ability to attract a crazy amount of international capital to mega corporations like in California/Texas or some places in China. So it’s hard to build the very largest tech corporations there.
I think European companies tend to be less consumer oriented, not as visible, and focusing on more “behind the scenes” technology. So you get the impression there’s fewer of them than there actually are.
Like, in my industry, there’s nothing like Nvidia or AMD. But there’s ASML and Zeiss for instance, without which Nvidia couldn’t make their chips. There’s nothing like the mega super high performance foundries like TSMC and Samsung but there’s a whole bunch of smaller specialised foundries focusing on very high power, very low power and optics and MEMS stuff.