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Comment by mnau | Hacker News Reader

EU has to tech scene, so it doesn't want a potentially successful project to be transferred to US.

What is the most biggest EU software company? SAP?

Tech is like film. Big unicorns with big exits are like the blockbuster tent pole superhero films that net hundreds of millions of dollars. You don’t have those the whole industry collapses. No art flicks or risky experiments with new ideas without Guardians of the Galaxy.

It’s not just investment capital which usually grows out of exits but also the whole ecosystem of services and consultants and experts and law firms specializing in the sector. All of it.

The EU doesn’t have enough routes to exit due to both regulation and a way more conservative business climate. As a result you don’t get a big tech ecosystem and most exits result in the whole thing being pulled into the US orbit.

Regulations are not a problem, it's the lack of a big common market. Expanding from let's say Belgium to Germany is almost as difficult as expanding to the USA. That's why the two countries that have a big tech scenes (US/China) are the ones that have big unified markets.

That argues for more U in EU. Hard sell against a rising populist current though.

Regulation is what makes that hard.

Not really. Regulation serves the interest of the consumer, rather than the kind of deregulation that serves the interest of the shareholder.

In the US you build your app and everything is in English. You can launch that across all of the states as-is.

In Europe (not even the EU specifically) you’re gonna need i18n, particularly with B2B. If you want to launch in Germany, for example, you’ll be expected to provide an interface in German. You can’t presume everyone speaks English, because they don’t. Expect multilingual support too.

Then you have payment. Different countries have different cultural norms, so what people are used to using in the Netherlands is unlikely to be supported generically elsewhere. It’s not gonna be enough to just support Stripe and card payments or PayPal for B2C.

Regulation doesn’t mandate any of this. It’s effectively conducting business internationally.

Top companies from Stoxx 50:

  LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (422B Euro)
  ASML (347B)
  L'Oréal (241B)
  Hermès (240B)
  SAP  (203B)
  Totalenergies (142B)
  Siemens (140B)

For comparison, Spotify is only 50B.

These are top companies, not top software companies (even if we include Spotify).

So it's really SAP.

I mean, you do realize that there is more to an economy than software? Which is basically either retail or ad selling anyway?

The original comment was that EU sucks at software as a business that makes money.

The response was a list all companies, i.e. completely unrelated to original comment.

Edit: i see a typo in original comment 's/to/no/g'

isn't Stoxx 50 just the EU? i think you're missing some huge players (Shell, Novo Nordisk etc)

but to get back to the general point, that list looks kind of bleak to me. bags, makeup and oil. at least there's ASML in there (i hope they won't have a reason to move their listing to NYC).

> isn't Stoxx 50 just the EU? i

Not even that, it's just the Eurozone. So it's missing most of Scandinavia and the UK, which are probably the most 'techy' economies in Europe.

That China has a more vibrant tech scene than Europe is a real shame.

And yet China's relative success is due to protectionism (or failed antitrust in USA/EU).

In a "winner takes all" situation, how else can the EU compete ? (The US did protectionism too while their industries were fledgling, to avoid getting crushed by the British...)

This is not a winner takes all situation at all.

SAP and Spotify come to mind, more recent promising startups are this one and Stable Diffusion.

As someone who has spent the last 30 years in European tech companies, mostly startups, that is news to me.

Europe does not tend to produce as large tech startups as the US, in part because a lot of promising companies leave for Silicon Valley first chance they get because funding opportunities are better there. But then neither does most of the US, partly for the same reason.

We see the same all the way down - when I worked in a UK based technology VC, we saw both people decamping from the regions to London, and from London to SV for these kinds of reasons, as well as an influx of tech companies from all over elsewhere in Europe who saw London as one of a short list of European cities to move to in order to make things easier - some of whom undoubtedly would move on to SV.

I myself moved to the UK 24 years ago because I co-founded a startup in Norway, and the VC's that invested in us adviced us to move the company to London because there was insufficient capital for tech/software companies in Norway at the time.

Europe has plenty of tech. Tech is not all, or even mostly, the tech giants. It could have more, and it could put more effort into keeping more here. But regulations will not be enough for that - it'll take more capital infusion.

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