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Comment by d4nt | Hacker News Reader

There's no denying that the US is better at making tech billionaires than Europe, but the US list of top tech billionaires is hardly a picture of new thinking and innovation: Gates, Allen and Balmer are all from Microsoft (which, like SAP, was founded in the 70s). One would be Ellison (Oracle was founded in the 70s too). And one would be Dell (and making computers is something the British invented).

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As I mentioned below, if you expanded the list from 10 to 50 or 100, the US list would be a Who's Who of start ups, and the Euro one a Who's That? Besides Skype and Spotify, unfortunately there just haven't really been very many mainstream start ups coming out of Europe.

Also, I'm not sure what Alan Turing has to do with Sinclair and Amstrad failing and Dell being successful. From what I understand of the early development of the computer, much more work was done in Boston, NY, and the Valley than in the UK.

I agree with everything you say, there is no doubt that the US is way better at producing successful tech startups.

But pg's point was specifically about how the Euro top ten was dominated by old companies and boring business models. My point is that aside from google, amazon and Facebook, the US top ten is not all that hip and fresh either.

>"My point is that aside from google, amazon and Facebook, the US top ten is not all that hip and fresh either."

That's a pretty big aside.

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