investors dont write blank cheques is the main difference. we are blunt and dont flower up potential so monetry failiure is more relative to business size.
When I heard that only half of venture-funded companies live 5 years, to me that sounded like excellent odds. I would kill to find a job where there's a 50/50 chance that it's still worth coming to work after 5 years. My experience is that unless you can convince someone in upper management to take you on as a protege (and that's 95% luck, because they're usually not technical people) you are wasting time after one year. Internal mobility (i.e. the ability to self-allocate to something better suited to one's talents and shine) should fix this in theory, but in practice most large companies do a terrible job on that front: bad performers (whether they are actually bad, or just have a shitty manager) can't move because no one wants them, but good performers' managers won't let them. You have to be exactly 51st percentile to move internally at most companies.
I've heard of similar laws throughout Europe.
I think you have probably heard a partial truth, perhaps related to some kind of bankruptcy procedure, and inferred too much.
It's true that there is typically more regulation of businesses in Europe than in the US, but often it relates to fields like employment rights, consumer protection, data protection, etc. The actual cost and effort required to operate a business (edit: in the sense of setting up a legal entity to use for trading purposes, filing the mandatory paperwork, and paying the associated fees/taxes) varies widely among EU nations, but with a very low lower bound.
This nails it. You're not going to even investigate potential - your investors don't have that kind of vision (or interest). Not a snowball's chance in Hell a Brit VC would have acted as Peter Thiel did when he came on board with Facebook. Because that would have been "flowering up potential".
Or as I like to call it, vision.
That is a cool anecdote and all but it smells like confirmation bias. I'm sure the one guy who won the lottery yesterday had a vision too. Maybe I'll have a vision tomorrow when I play a slot machine or maybe I'll have whatever-its-called when you dump a bunch of money on a long shot and it doesn't come through (were there no visionaries to see the social graph for myspace and friendster?). There's a line somewhere where a can-do attitude becomes naive and the other side of it is where practical sensibilities become choking to fresh ideas, right now I feel we are in a place where having a go is a good thing but it won't always be that way (at least in our industry).