Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

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This is a pretty bad take, imo and confuses cause and effect. Why does US press hype their startups? Because they do have track record of creating revolutionary companies, something that can be traced back to 70s (Atari, Apple, Microsoft).

It’s much easier for an established player to replicate the success elsewhere, despite of over-regulation. Just see how successful are US firms in India, but it will be mistake to not fault Indian bureaucracy and regulation for the lack of its own set of high-tech companies. So I would take Airbnb's success in EU with a grain of salt.

In US, you can start a LLC, get a bank account, a tax ID, all within a few days. The process is completely online. Taxes? A single form for the whole year when you’re starting out. Hiring and laying off employees is relatively easy. How many European countries can claim the same?

> In US, you can start a LLC, get a bank account, a tax ID, all within a few days. The process is completely online. Taxes? A single form for the whole year when you’re starting out. Hiring and laying off employees is relatively easy. How many European countries can claim the same?

In Poland, for example it's remarkably similar. I had an LLC, bank account and EU VAT ID without leaving my home.

Hiring gets a little bit more tricky because we like having accessible health care and don't like throwing people under the bus so you have a notice time of anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months depending how long that particular person has been your employee.

Taxes? You pay once/month but even then you most likely have an accountant handling that for you.

>In Poland, for example it's remarkably similar. I had an LLC, bank account and EU VAT ID without leaving my home.

That simplicity changes drastically once you're a newly arrived immigrant into an EU country, with some countries being much worse than others, see France for example.

To be fair, company formation difficulties vary country by country in the EU, which is part of the problem. Hence the Collison brothers calling for a EU level incorporation to smooth over this stuff (which would be great).

There is definitely a cultural aspect.

There is a much bigger resistance to change and to new things in Europe and iften the first reaction is indeed to shoot down new ideas.

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