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Comment by amix | Hacker News Reader

Europe is ~800million people with very different cultures. You can find geniuses here. You can find entrepreneurs. You can also find people that are sloppy. You can find people that have built billion dollar tech companies. Stop generalizing.

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>Europe is ~800million people with very different cultures. You can find geniuses here. You can find entrepreneurs. You can also find people that are sloppy. You can find people that have built billion dollar tech companies.

But you can't find a Silicon Valley or a similar economic and/or cultural spot. He's trying to explain why.

>Stop generalizing

Generalizing is the (literal and historical) start of science -- putting things in general categories and taxonomies is essential in understanding them.

There are categories of things -- and different places have different characteristics in aggregate, not just because "there are various kinds of people in general".

Nobody is saying that generalizing is wrong in the general sense. It's just that sometimes advantages can be had to being particular. For example, I have a feeling that the culture in Estonia (including one's attitudes towards entrepreneurship) is quite different from the culture in France.

I think what the post is trying to say, if you look at Earth, you'd say, look at those bunch of whiners, on average they don't do squat. I mean most of them are just plagiarizing and barely make ends meet. Or just starving to death...

Taken into average VC spirit is pretty dead in most places on Earth. Can VC in Africa, India and China be compared to USA?

USA shares common history, language, state system. Europe is waaay more diverse. Treating it like a singular entity is much like treating all human states on Earth as a single entity.

So please give whatever specificities you want, because your answer was more generic than mine.

But maybe my experience living, working and studying in 3 different countries in the EU is worth nothing.

> But maybe my experience living, working and studying in 3 different countries in the EU is worth nothing.

I'm not really impressed, given how wide strokes you painted. I just think it's more constructive to at least state the countries you're talking about rather than just the continent that they share.

"I just think it's more constructive to at least state the countries you're talking about rather than just the continent that they share."

If we're talking about startups, there's a limited set of places this can be about. I can assure you it's not the countryside of Spain.

I mentioned the common aspects I've noticed, because the discussion is about Europe and not a specific city or a comparison between them.

But I'm basing this on experiences in Ireland, France and Germany. Sure, they are not all exactly the same, but they end up having a lot in common.

    Austria
    Belgium
    Bulgaria
    Cyprus
    Czech Republic
    Denmark
    Estonia
    Finland
    Greece
    Hungary
    Italy
    Latvia
    Lithuania
    Luxembourg
    Malta
    Netherlands
    Poland
    Portugal
    Romania
    Slovakia
    Slovenia
    Spain
    Sweden
    United Kingdom

And Europe (not just the small EU subset) has 50+ countries.

Sorry, I was being lazy, presumably because I am from europe.

I for one think it's amazing that I see so many globetrotters (well, continent-trotters) that have experienced and gotten to know so many different European cultures. At least that's the kind of credentials that I assume when they talk about Europe as one homogeneous group of people...

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