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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

Europe can't even build its own tech companies and now it's trying to destroy foreign ones. Fundamentally the European cultural hostility to business and change is not compatible with a modern tech economy, and it'll continue to fall further and further behind the US and Asia, as GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant.

A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?

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Because fostering the growth of tech companies isn't the most important thing, and the European bureaucracy has been more effective than the American one at more important things, including reducing the harm of Big Tech.

I'm not opposed to more robust growth, but not at the cost of becoming America. Of course, the slower growth was caused in great part by wars and the mass killing and/or expulsion of a significant portion of the population, while America prospered thanks to mass immigration. These things are changing.

That's not to say that an elaborate bureaucracy isn't built into Europe's DNA. After all, this is a continent that was largely shaped and governed by the Catholic church for a long, long time. At least in some respects, the European civilisation is more similar to the Chinese civilisation than to the American one.

I didn't realise Spotify, Revolut, Wise, Nokia, and Mistral weren't tech companies.

Of course you haven't heard of some of them because you're in the US, which is still struggling with the concept of instant bank payments, paid leave, and non-lethal health care. And the gloriously unbureaucratic IRS still expects some communications to arrive by fax.

Revolut has ties to russia, and nokia wasted a lead in cellphones and is now a shadow of its former self. Spotify, yeah, you can count the nr of jobs Spotify has created and compare it with the nr of jobs google has created. Then you can count how manny spotifys are needed to make up the difference. Wake up, europe is dying and its the fault of socialism.

Why do people always shift the goal posts like this?

- Initial claim: "Europe doesn't have tech companies"

- Rebuttal listing a bunch

- "No, but look at market cap or number of jobs, it's not the same!"

Which is it, does Europe not have tech companies, or are they just smaller than the US? Because if it's the later, that's trivial to explain why - Europe is a continent where the biggest countries have less than 1/5 the population of the US. A tech company in France (e.g. Doctolib) has a significant curve to serve customers in other European countries - translation, different laws and regulations, sometimes currency, different market expectations. It's really really not comparable, and I wish more Americans have the basic logical capacity to realise that.

allegedly according to an acquaintance who works at Spotify in NYC, a significant amount of the employees transfer from Stockholm ASAP (presumably on L-1) for the higher salaries offered in the US

You seem to be under the impression that things are inherently better in the US. They really aren't. California easily rivals the worst corners of German bureaucracy. The only positive thing you can say about it is that you can do things in English there. And California easily matches its tax pressure. It's an expensive place.

I'm singling out that state because that's where most of the software innovation comes from and it's GDP is a bit of an outlier. Outside of California, the US is a bit of a mixed bag of states that is actually not that dissimilar to much of western Europe for things like growth, prosperity, and indeed GDP/capita. Some states like Texas have natural resources (and a relaxed attitude towards planetary destruction) that explains much of its economics.

Most of the wealth in the US is concentrated in a relatively small number of states where it is concentrated with small groups of people (the rest isn't that wealthy). If you take Germany and compare it to each of the states in the US, it probably comes out on top of many of them for metrics as GDP per capita, happiness, innovation, etc. Sure, it's maybe not a power house like California when it comes to software. But it's not like most of the US is doing that well on that front.

And if you start looking at healthcare, the alarmingly large prison population, and general levels of misery among the population, it's really not that amazing of a place any more. You might have more dollars. But they are worth a lot more in Europe than they are in the US. The same money buys you a lot more goods, services, housing, and quality of life over here. There are a lot of things that are kind of broken in the US. And that has a lot to do with its policies.

And there's more to technology than just software. Tesla definitely buys German machines when they want the best. And a lot of those wind mills popping up on in coastal waters, made in Europe too. The US automotive sector kind of imploded in recent years. If it weren't for the import tariffs, there would be a lot more European and Chinese cars on the roads there. Machines to make chips come from ASML, which is based in the Netherlands. There's nano tech, nuclear fusion (several companies active in the EU breaking records), etc.

And the thing with software is that it's easily copied and imitated. A lot of what MS, Meta, and others do isn't exactly rocket science. Whatever moat the US has there, it isn't geographic.

> Europe can't even build its own tech companies

I'm not sure where this notion comes from. First, Europe does build its own tech companies — Bolt, Bol, SoundCloud, and Spotify, which started in Sweden. Second, do we really consider companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and Twitter as pure progress?

I think the case is that the US has been really good at promoting its domestic products. Another reason why the US has more tech companies, and why more companies move to the US, is the lack of legislation for worker protection. However, this is the same argument as to why most products are manufactured in China.

> GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant

First, this is clearly not true [1]. Second, GDP per capita is a poor metric for assessing wealth and quality of life [2].

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?.... [2]: https://time.com/5118026/gdp-metric-success-wealth/

Startups move to the us because of the ease of access to VCs (or capital in general)

> I'm not sure where this notion comes from.

From the outside the EU sounds like on large unit. Where in facts it is a fragmented group. The EU has plenty of tech companies but it is pretty competitive when you have that many countries to cater to, each with their own culture, language, and laws. So you will target a specific market - like France, with marketing in french, adapted to the French context. Expanding to anew place is expensive and difficult. So you end up with lots of local, small/medium size businesses instead of one unified large business.

Just my personal opinion living here. And not saying it’s bad, it’s just a different dynamic

It might be true, but could you be more specific as to what qualifies as easy access to capital? Because EU does have VCs https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/which-country-has-the-mo...

Your link does show exactly how massive the gap between the US and Europe is. There is a single EU country on the list, Sweden. And it has 2/3rd the capital per capita the US has

> A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?

US-style "supergrowth" of modern tech companies is arguably at the expense of public interest. If anything else, I'm glad the EU has the bureucracy in place to contain it.

It must be tough running a Euro company, your own taxes end up funding your competitors!

> European cultural hostility to business

Is that the real issue? I thought it was that trying to compete in such a stacked market, against the incumbent Usual Suspects who are gorged on "R&D investment" packages makes SF VC look a cakewalk so you just move to the US instead.

> why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe

I don't think anyone believes that European-based BigTech monopolies would be particularly more beneficial than the current US-based ones. Pretty much the whole point is not to facilitate massive tech monopolies in the first place (and to break them up whenever they do emerge, a la the US breakup of Ma Bell)

Maybe they want the bureaucracy that halts growth of tech companies to have more power and control because they want growth of tech companies to be halted?

Europe runs on real freedom of choice, not 5 nationwide chains that do everything. MNT runs out of someone's apartment in Berlin.

There's definitely truth to the argument that EU bureaucracy often stifles innovation, but it's not quite so black and white. The aim here isn't just to "destroy foreign companies," it's to enforce competition and curb abuses of dominance

It is not given that regulation leads to worse outcomes. For example, healthcare is regulated in most Western European countries, but we have better healthcare at lower cost (emphasizing the latter part, because people often come in with some story that the US is subsidizing Europe).

Besides that we have a lot more protection against big tech through better privacy laws. Enforcement has not been perfect yet, but we see a lot of day-to-day improvements (like in Europe you can use Facebook without ad tracking, currently it's paid, but the EU found that not to be legal).

I think one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of tech companies make a lot of money by externalizing cost and exploiting societies. Like Uber took the market by ignoring local labor laws. Meal delivery companies replaced regular wage (with benefits) workers by contract workers (luckily found to be illegal here now). Closed AI companies are taking all the creative work by millions of people to make their money-generating models without giving anything back. Amazon operated at cut-throat margins to destroy local (mom and pop) shops and raised prices once pretty much all competition was destroyed. Klarna earns money by preying on people who do not have the money to buy something, but are algorithmically tricked into buying stuff they probably don't need.

A subset of tech is just transferring monetary/cultural/etc. wealth from society to a small group of billionaires and it's ripping apart society.

> workers by contract workers (luckily found to be illegal here now).

Note that, at least for France, it was not found to be illegal to use contract workers; rather the jobs-as-they-existed were really employment contracts according to the reality of the arrangement and not procurement contracts; merely not calling them "employment contract" does not absolve the parties of the obligation of a work contract.

Amen! Europe will be a future tourist paradise for wealthy foreigners, and it will be the king of low wage service industries. I always encourage smart people to move to the US or Asia, where there is a bright future waiting for them. Europe is dying as long as people and politicians keep pushing socialism.

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