Comment by jamesblonde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesblonde | Hacker News Reader

I lead a European owned and operated Data/AI company, Hopsworks. We are the only competitor to Databricks/Snowflake/etc based-in and from Europe. We can still compete, as we have a deep research/industry background (ex-MySQL and KTH folks). Crossing the chasm is harder from here. Even if you build a great product (we are best at real-time AI) - we had a paper at SIGMOD 2024 where we showed higher thoughput/lower latency by a factor of 4-40X Databricks, AWS Sagemaker, and GCP vertex - we lack the echo chamber. (Try the mental exercise where Databricks' peers acknowledge massive over-performance through a peer-reviewed paper and imagine how much noise it would generate). Still, we can replace our competitor at their largest European customer, Zalando, for real-time AI. But it's a much harder slog than it should be due to the 10X lower round sizes (due to 10X smaller VC fund sizes). European pension funds place way more money in US VC funds than in EU VC funds - that is self-defeating.

There cannot be echo chamber as long as entrepreneurship is not seen as generally acceptable in European culture

Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease.

Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally.

Hardly anything to do with "entrepreneurship" and more about the insidious nature of US imperialism and how damaging neoliberalism is to the world.

Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.

> Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease.

It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.

Really? Who do you know who isn't working in tech and finds something to celebrate in entrepreneurship?

I am thoroughly perplexed by this statement. Every single person who starts their own restaurant, painting company, events planning company, etc. is an entrepreneur. The appeal of saving up enough to break free of your job and start working for yourself is so pervasive as to be almost entirely unspoken. It’s something that, being raised as an American, you simply believe is good in the same way you believe that stealing is bad.

And yet I can’t name a single entrepreneur that I know personally outside of tech.

> Every single person who starts their own restaurant, painting company, events planning company, etc. is an entrepreneur.

These are completely irrelevant to this thread, so I'm perplexed that you're perplexed. Read the thread, see that it's about differences between the US and the EU, and then realize what is meant by entrepeneur _in context_. Europe isn't very different from the US when it comes to plumbing company owners.

In Australia one of the most common paths to wealth outside of owning property is literally taking up a trade as an apprentice, then after a couple of years beginning your own plumbing/electrician/brick laying/etc business.

That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).

Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.

Europe is obviously full of sole proprietor tradesmen, shop and restaurant owners etc. It's completely orthogonal to the apparent shortage of VC-funded startup unicorn hustle culture.

I think the fact that you can claim this without any apparent sarcasm means you operate in a very specific part of society most people aren't a part of.

I live in the United States where entrepreneurship is a common way of living. I have the stats to back it up too.

Maybe you just live in an echo chamber such as reddit where you believe entrepreneurship means making millions of dollars in the tech industry.

>Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.

Reject it? They pay hundreds of billions for it. Every year. For decades now.

Europe runs on American tech, using American and Chinese hardware, powered by American energy, and protected by American defense.

Surely you're confused here, because Europe didn't reject these things, they offshored them and then teased Americans about working so hard. Europe's economic situation right now is borderline catastrophic, mostly because they built a society on someone else's support in the uncannily calm times after the wall fell.

and european investors invest more money in usa than eu

Given the US has a money making culture that is very business friendly, it completely makes sense. The "American Blight" could roughly be translated as "Investor Returns".

True we pay for it so we don't have tu subject our own people to the horrible working culture of the US. No maternity leave is diabolical. No money when you're sick for a month? How do you accept this

For dead-end/entry level work, the laws are not great.

Once you get off the ground though, you get most of the same benefits as Europeans, while taking home much more income. Especially in tech, the benefits and pay can be extravagant (Netflix famously had a year of maternity leave). Although you will likely work more time overall.

Keep in mind that generally social media is full of young American people. Once people get into their career, they don't spend much time on doomer social media. It's also socially taboo to not jump on the "conditions are so hard now" bandwagon.

If you can get into the top 40% in America, you will have what you need to live a pretty decent life.

What you are calling extravagant is the norm in some European countries, even if you don't work for Netflix.

Europe is great if you don't have very valuable skills, you are pretty much guaranteed at least a decent quality of life.

The US sucks if you don't have very valuable skills, there aren't many guarantees.

But if you do have valuable skills, it's very hard to make a case for living in Europe. Once you reach the top 30-40% of Americans, you're living like the top 10% of Europeans.

That's why the US has been draining EU tech workers for a few decades now. The value prop from the US is much better if you're a strong player.

But I'm also not supposed to be saying any of this, because like a good little medium 6 figure household, I'm supposed to be wearing the mask of "difficult economic times" so as to appear virtuous and sensitive to others.

Note that, in the Netflix example, this is at (or mostly) full pay.

Show me one US tech company that does not give generous maternity leave.

Besides, if you work for 10 years in US big tech, you can retire after that.

Entrepreneurship is the fountain of wealth. What else are you going to do, extract natural resources?

I hate that I agree, and yet, I agree. The EU has a giant single market, has a pipeline of elite tech talent from everywhere from Finland in the North on down, has long since settled on English as the lingua franca of business but has plenty of tools to solve i18n, and yet...culturally is just hostile to entrepreneurship in a way that goes beyond reasonable suspicion of fakery. what's that all about?

I don't think it's regulation, btw. Starting and running my company in the UK pre Brexit was way easier than doing it in the US. Keeping the IRS happy is no joke.

Brain drain I expect. All the people who believed in freedom and entrepreneurship have had maybe a century of incentives to leave Europe and head for the US.

Society seems to rely on a tiny pool of overly-motivated people to do most of the work. There has historically been a healthy pipeline and many good reasons to convince them to leave Europe. And apparently sufficient safeguards to stop them building too much if they stay, based on the lack of success the EU has had in tech.

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