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Comment by tedggh | Hacker News Reader

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Its not a "Europe" issue alone but even more locally.

Saying this as a IT guy, we had way too many talks with banks about IT projects that in the US will have been way easier. But in specific EU countries was constantly met with "amazon does that, why bother" type of comments. Even on governmental level, talking about "innovative investments", it was like talking to walls.

As you expect, a lot of companies (and people) left the European countries to go to the US, because it was WAY easier to get investments going there.

If you already have the money, its one thing, but starting fresh in Europe is just silly.

There are now much, MUCH more support projects in local and EU level, but its often too little, and more in the "sure, you do not need to pay taxes for X years, or we give you a small amount".

But if you ever worked in IT, its those initial investments that are the hardest (material, people) until you get a actual product and with the right marketing. And that support comes not even close.

Do i sound bitter? lol

Now, the US is not exactly going down a great phase. If your into LLMs, sure but the rest has been rather mheh for a while.

My experience in Europe is that investors look for teams of three: a CEO, a CTO, and one more person whose full-time job for the first two years will be filling out funding applications. That's a 50% overhead from day one.

Is that really different from the US, where instead of (or in addition to) doing funding applications it's schmoozing with potential investors? Hacker News over the years has had tons of posts about getting investors interested, or "growth hacking" to make the numbers look better for said investors, and of course then there's going public which is the ultimate "looking for investors".

But I suppose the main difference is private sector vs government.

One difference is that the investors expect their money to be matched by some grant, so you have to do the work twice. The grants take into consideration investments, so it's basically part of the system.

It's very simple to found a company in the US that has access to the entire 50 states and all of the investors therein, with a single/simple accounting to manage. And you don't have to live in the US to do it.

Europe/EU/EEA don't have a comparable setup. Found in one country, deal with workers in many, filings in all of the countries you're doing business, and more.

The new proposed EU Incorporation would go a long way to lowering the bar for getting started and accessing pools of funds between investors in different countries.

Has anyone thought about starting a "meta company" which attempts to provide a cross-national "compatibility layer" for doing business all across the EU?

For example, you could fill out a single set of paperwork, and then paperwork gets automatically generated for each individual country you want to do business in.

I don’t know how the difficulty compares to the EU, but US states require a bunch of per-state filings if you’re hiring employees that live there, in addition to the different tax regimes.

yeah but he’s talking about receiving investment right now

the employment and payroll tax situation is easily handled by third parties like payroll companies. none of the jurisdictions are that different with conflicting legal systems

> found a company in the US that has access to the entire 50 states and all of the investors therein

Yes but tech companies and startups are still highly concentrated in a handful of locations.

If Europe carbon-copied the same regulatory framework as the US, do you think the rest of the world would start pouring trillions of euros into the financial sector, like with the USD? A global currency reserve hegemony empire is a very different thing from a treaty-based coalition of random countries. Look at Canada right next door is doing, and their GDP/capita based on the CAD. The only serious competition is another currency hegemon, China. This is not a coincidence. The same was true historically with the British and even Dutch empires.

You mean the continent that invented pretty much everything you're using to write this post, including electric machines, computers and the world wide web?

The anti-Europe propaganda here is insane.

From context, I doubt they are saying that Europe has zero innovation — they’re likely trying to complain about current rules and regulations stifling innovation and progress today. No one thinks Europe has done nothing worthwhile, ever…

That too, is nonsense. The EU produces 18% of the world's scientific paper's compared to 12% for the US [0]

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/assets/rtd/srip/2024/ec_rtd_srip-report... Figure 3.1

Are the papers useful/impactful or does the EU just blindly throw money at scammers with PhDs?

Innovation !== Business

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