Maybe because most Europeans are happy with a good work/life balance, and don't constantly obsess about pipe dreams that come through for one in a million people? Obviously such obsessives exist, but I bet they are a lot less common than in countries with a, let's say, get big or go home attitude. Also, state funded safety nets means it's less urgent to have $lots saved up to survive the next crisis.
Ding ding ding: this is the answer: those safety nets are also a cage.
Disclaimer: have started many businesses around the world, including the US and Europe. Europeans don't proceed to the glory and glamor of US startups because they have to deal with government bureaucracy, and alas such bureaucracy is contagious. The moment you wade into the grant-getting territory, you become a grant-getter. Grant-getters are anathema to technology-creators and other forms of society-changers.
You're not really defining the safety nets. It isn't as if the USA has exactly none either. Example [1]
If you're referring to the safety net that you get government money after you get unemployed, that's to ensure that you don't become homeless or get lured into crime. It has reinforcement to get you back to work ASAP.
Or it means you don't get homeless the moment you don't succeed. Those who don't work aren't living in wealth; all they have is basic necessities. The system stimulates people to work. Which, incidentally, is easier when you're not homeless and when you can afford food and toilet paper (which I happen to know you cannot buy with food stamps).
Germany, and Austria. Getting a grant in Austria essentially guarantees that the hunger you need to survive in the tech world today will be quenched by that sweet, sweet, government handout.
You are seriously arguing that the threat of starving is how you want to motivate people to work for you? Sorry but I doubt European bureaucracy is what’s holding your companies back.
The threat of starving isn't holding anyone back, and I didn't say anything about the people working for me - however the decadence of having a safety net means fewer real risks are taken, and certainly less responsibility for the basics. It means the people who work for me don't have to work too hard to keep their jobs - after all, the government will take care of them if I have to fire them for under performance.
Which happens, quite a lot more in Europe than it ever did in the USA. Americans seem to like to keep their jobs - Europeans couldn't care less.
Hardly. The safety net means they don't have to work so hard at keeping the job, because if they lose it: the government will take care of them. This has knock-on effects all over the organisation.. including productivity issues.
I honestly don't know why you got down-voted for this: I can confirm from first hand experience that everything you wrote is a fact. This place often makes no sense whatsoever in what is considered good or bad.
I didn't downvote, but the post is not very informative, at least for someone who doesn't already know what they're talking about, like you. It's not very clear what's the relationship being implied between bureaucracy and grants, which grants are those, or how do they differ between the US vs EU.
For reference, I've worked at a couple of EU startups, and we didn't get any grants. It's not like you just get money for incorporating.
I think their point about grant-getters is spot-on. Thousands of companies exist just to apply for EU grants, get them, come up with a half-assed prototype and then quit the project. Unless you have connections in government in which case sometimes you can have a second and third half-assed product.
Of course there are also many non-gov-funded startups. However 1) it is demoralizing to see them getting millions in handouts while you struggle to sell a product and 2) they keep many talented employees trapped in deadend-companies.
> obsess about pipe dreams that come through for one in a million people?
Speaking as someone from Europe...
I don't have any first hand experience, but when browsing HN or Reddit, developer salaries above $150k seem to be the norm [1], not the "one in a million people" exception. As you may know, such salaries are unheard in Europe. It seems to me that becoming financially independent in the US is a matter of years [2], not decades. Sometimes it really makes me depressed. Also you seem to overestimate the safety nets. Putting 3-4 months of US paychecks away in a savings account will put you ahead of any safety net in Europe.
[1] Yes, i know, cost of living in places like NYC or SF are not comparable to major European cities, but even when factoring higher costs of living, becoming a millionaire seems rather doable.
$150k/year is a day-rate of approximately £500/day if you take four weeks off per year. This is slightly higher than the median but reasonably achievable (more so in London).
Gigs where people have very specialized knowledge, like SAP consulting, or where they have 20-30 years of system engineering and IT architecting experience. Taxation is low compared to the rest of the world, but since Switzerland is closed off to immigration and currently working on clamping down on it even more with all their might, it's pointless to discuss freelancing there. Which means that freelancers who work there live there, and that in turn means that you get an entire tax bill and have to cash out large sums of money on taxes in one go.
Switzerland isn't closed off to immigration and working on clamping down with all their might, I wonder where you got that impression.
It's the opposite. It allows unlimited immigration from the EU. The people voted against that it's true, but the government ignored the referendum and implemented a local worker preference instead. But with unemployment very low anyway, it is easy to argue you could not find a Swiss person to do the work, so this is effectively the same as doing nothing.
There are plenty of elder Swiss who’d gladly work if they only had the opportunity but are ausgesteuert instead, so there can be no argument about not being able to find the natives to do the work. Finding someone malleable and willing to work for peanuts is the issue here, not a lack of qualified domestic work force.
The 7000 contingency limit clause for EU citizens has been triggered, and we know how the last referendum went. Foreigners are a burning topic. Try getting a B-permit from outside of Switzerland; it’s akin to winning the lottery. Whoever got in, got in. The way is shut, and the Swiss keep it.
Was there ever a time when B-permits were easy to get outside the country? I had to come in on an L and convert, most people I know also had that experience.
I agree that immigration is a hot topic. However I'm not sure what difference more referendums will make if the government feels free to ignore them. Perhaps they'll have a change of heart.
Can't tell much about contractors but e.g. Google pays you 10-15% more in Zurich than in Mountain View and you pay much less taxes (and you don't have capital gains here). It's more expensive to live here but you'll still have much more left because of the tax advantages here.
Mostly banking and finance gigs. UBS, Credit Suisse, Swiss Re, Zurich, etc. Not necessarily cutting edge tech jobs though. Also, Zug, near Zurich has turned into a hotspot for blockchain-related startups and fintech companies.
To be fair, those places have also become unreasonable with cutting costs. IT in the financial industry used to be lucrative but is now about the worst place imaginable, especially since the latest fad is laying off indiscriminately and off-shoring, until the next financial scandal hits.
Contracting on these rates requires a lot more experience than you think and a highly sought out specialization often FoTM.
Getting yearly fixed term contracts on £500 a day is also not easy even with the former.
You also lose your pension contribution which in the UK can be upto 25% of your salary (I’m on 24), ISA, insurance protection against dismissal with no cause and many other things that employers provide.
Contracting isn’t a solution it’s worse than at will employment and the OP is right outside of a few cases the salary in Europe is pitiful and the safety net does not cover anything really it only ensures that there is almost no social mobility upwards.
Europe despite having the world’s largest social redistribution event aka WW2 is still the mother of all old money and isn’t changing because outside those who in the US would become billionaires it’s nearly impossible to become financially independent in Europe as a salaried employee and even as a sole trader.
You can't compare a US salary with a EU salary 1:1. In the EU you get retirement money, you get health insurance, and all kind of other benefits. You need to calculate all these positive and negative and then compare. And that's a lot of work!
Yes, obviously it is not a 1:1 comparison, but even with additional costs for getting private healthcare etc. you are better of by far in the US. Also, i'd prefer to pay into a 401k plan over some EU government pension plan any time.
Perhaps, for me it just means that the comparisons are inaccurate.
I'd like to see an in-depth comparison which includes things such as taxation. I often see rent being mentioned in these comparisons. Cost of living is just one minor aspect. QoL is yet another, and more subjective. If you knew what my healthcare costs are and what I get out of it (or well, in the past), I am pretty confident that a lot of Americans would prefer that, except for a rich happy few. It isn't as if private healthcare doesn't have any incentive, or is always high quality. Example [1]
And even cost of living is difficult to compare. If you go to a US shop, pretty much always the price doesn't include sales tax. If you go to a EU shop, if the product is targeted for consumers the default price has to include the sales tax. I find the former -like the imperial system- not practical at best, and deceiving at worst. The latter is just a matter of seeing it from the customer's PoV though yeah it might lead to lower sales on the long run it leads to more happy customers.
The problem with this is that neither retirement nor health insurance has a guaranteed quality level, if the government reaches a slump or decides to refocus on other things, you can't get a refund/reinvest.
If I look at my governmental retirement projections, although i have been working and paying into it since age 20 it's depressing how little inflation adjusted retirement money I'll receive, although I earn a good tech-salary for our region.
Same with healthcare, in my city, Frankfurt/Germany, it's very hard to find a cardiologist that accepts patients that are publicly insured and even then the wait times can be scary for this type of situation. Hospitals have started rejecting patients that want to circumvent this by going to the emergency room.
The biggest issue for me is one of age-restriction. I'm fairly certain that my possibilities to earn this much more elsewhere will shrink over time and then I won't have a comparable cushion my US counterpart could have built, although we do the same thing. That is the equation that keeps me up at night at the moment.
If your issue isn't an emergency then yes, you'll be thrown out of emergency rooms because frankly they have much more important issues to deal with than a stubbed toe or a persistent cold.
Becoming a millionaire is harder, yes, but so is also crash down to poverty. Safety nets such as cheap/free education, free healthcare, public retirement funds, more protective labor laws and such make it easier for everybody to avoid falling and/or getting out of poverty when times are bad. Your example of putting 3-4 months of US paychecks only work if you get paid a lot already, but not if you're poor or have high expenses (kids through college, medical costs). The social agreement in Europe appears to be that it is more depressing to see people losing everything to "market forces", and that letting people become millionaires in years is not a priority at all.
For example. A few searches yields plenty of recent movies about large amounts of homeless. But more specifically, if you go to Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris by train you will have no trouble whatsoever finding lots of homeless people. Granted, Amsterdam has a few, Brussels a pretty sizeable lot and Paris has tens of thousands at least.
In each of those cities, by the way, homeless are persecuted by the local police, and nothing ever seems to make any difference. Knowing the inclination of Dutch people (protestant, or to put it more bluntly "it's their own fault, obviously"), I don't envy the Dutch ones.
And whilst the poor people in the Netherlands live in extremely shabby apartment blocks riddled with crime rather than trailer parks, other than that there is little difference : garbage everywhere. Many youth gangs that have no option but to turn to crime and prey on their own community. Immigrants being the large majority of those people.
Oh and if you talk to them you will immediately find out, especially in the Netherlands : if you actually use the social safety net, you have to submit to the government "running your life". That "help" the government provides seems to have more than a few people who abuse the power they have (to, for instance, take away child care, or any children, require you to undergo psychological internment or take away your unemployment insurance). There's no end of complaints about that, especially in the Netherlands (less, but certainly present in Brussels and less in Paris).
Brussels and paris have homeless tent cities (maybe Amsterdam has them too, I don't know. Not in the inner city it seems. Both brussels and Paris have them in the inner city.
So there seem to be plenty of ways to "fall through" the social safety net in Europe. And this is the situation in the richest, most prosperous parts of Europe. There can be little doubt that the situation in Romania, for example, is far worse.
>becoming financially independent in the US is a matter of years [2], not decades
(European here) I don't care about being financially dependent on the state, because the state is not my enemy. The state gave me healthcare, the state gave me a free education, the state takes care of stuff. I don't care about "freedom".
This way of thinking is so obnoxiously stupid. Yes some states failed in providing for their citizens. Greece was never a perfect system, the government was always corrupt, overly bureaucratic and nepotistic. That doesn't mean having and devloping trust in your government is always a bad thing. Especially if you live in Germany or Scandinavia.
Treating the government as your enemy when it is actively trying to help you and the rest of its citizens is just dumb. Somehow people who hate government trust industry moguls to have their interests in mind more than the government. What the fuck?
Good intentions of government programs do not mean good outcomes. Rent control is a classic example. Also i really wish we would stop calling out other opinions and ideas as "dumb" and "stupid".
Good intentions do result in success. Good policies result in success. If you give up and say "government" will never work, then no. Of course it will never work.
Pointing to failed scenarios and saying x failed therefore y will fail is "stupid". You must examine why x failed and make sure you don't include this element when trying to do y. It is an iterative process.
One thing is for sure. If government employees don't have good intentions, the government will be ineffective. Therefore trust in government and willingness to see government as a force for good, willingness to work in a system that does good for its citizens, is imperative to having a good system.
I believe they are related because it is harder for people to develop trust in government if the good intentions of government workers and the governmental system in general is not apparent.
Conversely it is difficult to have a large pool of well intentioned potential governmental employees if a large portion of citizens have been brought up to think that the government is evil. These citizens are much more likely to try to exploit government positions than to treat them with the responsibility for the people that they require.
I very much doubt 150k is what most Americans earn. But yeah be rich in America if you can, be poor in Europe if you can't. Although there is more in life than money, when you leave your Silicon Valley gated community you have to look at the rest of the country.
Nobody in Europe is truly poor like they are in America. Most places in the States, one is lucky if one earns $40 to $55 k per year, and that's barely enough to make ends meet (been there, done that, got the T-shirt), especially for young people starting out like I was decades prior. Had to watch every dollar on that kind of a salary with home and car mortgages (like most Americans). If I had $200 - $300 left at the end of the month after paying everything, I considered myself lucky and hoped no unforeseen expense incident would take place. And that's true for most people in IT in the States. My buddy who rubbed elbows with me sitting at lectures at the university and has the same exact degree as me is earning around $55 k after more than 25 years in the industry, and his salary is above average compared to what the rest of the people earn.
I don’t mean just the salary: in America the safety net is very poor, medical insurance is an issue, transportation and social services aren’t uniform like they are in Europe; everything is spotty at best.
The safety net in Europe isn’t that great either as far as poor people go, the best I can say is that it’s better for the middle / lower middle class but the poor are just as poor.
Social services in Europe aren’t uniform either they vary greatly between states and between cities and regions within states, food, housing and transportation is much more expensive, the availability of benefits is often overblown with the only caveat being universal health care which isn’t that different for people who cannot afford it in the US if we are all honest at this point and for the middle classes private medical insurance is still the way to go for most member states.
Whoever thinks that Europe is some socialist welfare dream state is quite wrong about it.
Being poor in Europe is quite bad and I’m not sure it’s actually any better than being poor in the US.
And the lack of social mobility for the middle classes as well as the suppression of personal agency as far as financial independence goes might blow back and blow back hard.
Europe has a big problem with government income as more than 50% of it comes from taxes which means that any crisis and any issue with the tax base tends to ripple much harder over here and as far as retirement goes then it’s quite likely that most people like myself won’t be able to retire despite paying very high amounts into the retirement fund because the government keeps raising the retirement age and there is no guarantee of that our funds would even be available to us.
This is the reason why I’m currently looking for a way to completely privatize my entire retirement savings plan, I work hard I earn very well and I deposit 24% into retirement with zero guarantee of seeing anything beyond the bare minimum when I finally will be allowed to retire which at this point is probjected to be at 75-77.
So sorry fuck that I rather take more risk and be able to retire at say 50 than having to work my ass off until I can see my 80s around the corner with no guarantee of getting anything remotely close to what I put in because sharing is caring.
Contractors and tech workers can certainly cash in $150k / yr in Europe. Jobs like that don't hang on trees, but they do exist. Whether that means working remotely, contracting or getting a regular job. Sure median wages aren't 150k many places in Europe, but that's not the case in the US either, only in the bay area.
> Putting 3-4 months of US paychecks away in a savings account will put you ahead of any safety net in Europe.
My parents had 3 kids through 5 years of University (tuition + living expenses), this was all paid by the state. Back of envelope math values it at $450k, but in the US tuition fees are much higher.
You mean like Croatia? They've had 1000 years of servitude and have only begun their 1000 years long dream of being their own masters. They will have to learn how to do that and it will take them a long time, but they are already on the top in the weapons, pharmaceuticals and auto industries ("HS Produkt", "Belupo", "Pliva" and "Rimac") and might someday become a ship building power once again. They won't be just a tourist destination forever.
Europe's potential in terms of innovation and technology is also highlighted by the number of European patent applications filed relative to a country's population. Switzerland again topped the ranking in 2016, with 892 applications per million inhabitants. Second and third place went to the Netherlands (405) and Sweden (360), followed by Denmark (334) and Finland (331). The first non-European country was again Japan in ninth place (166), which was above the EU average of 122.
The problem is not the amount of innovations or technologies created in EU. The point in the article was that many of these innovations are merely regional products and it’s really hard for European companies to make them appeal to the people outside the continent.
I'm Irish, almost all of my friends work for American companies in Dublin. This article has decided to count the ~100,000 Irish devs in American companies as American and then wonder why European companies aren't as big. Which is doubly funny when you realise that most of the American companies mentioned are "Irish" for most of the world.
Also like half of the all manufacturing equipment, tons of medical/laboratory devices and what not. The only thing that Europe lack behind is home grown ad-fueled consumer startups.
Things like machines which manufacture machines for instance.
a good friend of mine works at a glass blowing company which makes beer bottles, the machines used to create bottlecaps at an insane rate are apparantly dominated by a german manufacturer. (this factory produces over 15mil bottles a day).
producing 15 million bottle caps in a single 24h shift is hard, producing stuff this quickly at suchs a scale is a hard problem to fix.
Good point about the KDE origins. Prominent in that lineage is Apple though. It's debatable if Webkit would've been chosen for Chrome if it didn't already have a success story in Safari, and Apple created a ton of top-notch tooling for Webkit (Drosera etc.) and contributed significantly to the engine.
No large founds to sustain aggressive growth, a fragmented market with lot of regulations and tax codes to abide, small pool of high quality developers and high cost of work
The article is spot on: imagine two startups, one in Barcelona and another in Boston, developing a very similar product. The first one raises €2M, the second one $50M. Which one is going to beat the other to market?
Yes, there are other factors; work/life balance, heterogeneous markets/languages, collaboration vs competition mindset, etc. But here in Europe we also have workaholics that give 200% to their startup and launch internationally. And without cash injections, which are a by-product of ecosystem maturity, they will always lose against their USA competitors.
Well, at least in the sheer number of native speakers of the language, the first one has a slight advantage. You're right with regards to the domestic market, although my understanding is that various US states often have incompatible legislations.
The thing is, from my experience, there are start ups and lots of them. But the quality of the work would not be considered good and in many case their stuff is nothing but an unstable crud. Their banners may be taking about data and machine learning but all they have is a simple website that struggles with 10 requests per second.
Not sure where you've been looking, but this is not my experience at all here in Berlin. You can't generalise from a few crap startups (which exist everywhere, btw) to the entire ecosystem.
The title is clickbaity, as is the norm these days. The reason it's so blunt and "polarizing" is that Bloomberg is a US publication. You think they'd ever dare publish an article asking "Why can't the US do civil rights?", an arguably more important topic than tech?
Europe can do tech but they don't really make it an important target. Also many of the good people in tech choose to go Silicon Valley (which is now ~60% foreigners) so this depletes the pool of EU talent. The bigger SV gets, the harder it is for person in tech to resist the temptation to go, and for local EU startups to find the proper resources.
And the EU doesn't yet act like a single body with a unified strategy when it comes to developing the tech sector, unlike the US or China. It's hard to mount an offence against an already established leader when everybody is pulling in another direction.
Privacy.
In the EU, there's the GDPR with such rights as the right to be forgotten, the right to access and correct any data a company has in you, etc.
In the US, the FCC recently made it possible for ISPs to sell data on browsing behaviour from their clients to anyone that pays.
Neither is perfect, but they are worlds apart in this respect.
a) targeted/with court order (sort of, as in many cases in the EU this does not actually require a court order. Quite a few states just give police the authority to do this by themselves with little to no oversight). Perhaps this should be called "lawful intercept" or perhaps non-mass surveillance.
So, I would say that the situation is not quite so clear cut. In terms of your rights to prevent state spying on you, clearly the US provides superior tools to it's citizens. In fact the EU is worryingly bad. In the private sector it would be fair to say the EU is superior, except when it comes to information about debts, where again the US is superior.
Doesn't seem to me to be such a clear-cut situation. But perhaps I'm wrong. Why do you think one is superior to the other ? If you're falsely accused of something, I assure you the US is far superior. If you want your mcDo to stop sending you email, you're going to find the EU is superior. Of course, spam was mostly illegal before the GPDR, and I suspect that nothing will change in practice.
> "doing tech" needs to be something like a facebook or google
Yes, this is what is implied. Why would you think otherwise? Funny that building big corporations is frowned upon or even outright vilified by so many.
May be this is what is wrong with Europe; no more ambition to do big things.
Big tech companies can do so much more than tiny businesses. Granted, there are some things that small companies can do better especially when it requires huge risk taking, but overall, why would any small company not want to get bigger(as big as it can get)? Isn't that the point of being in business?!
Silicon Valley veteran here. Europe does tech, but we Europeans are far more focused on scientific solutions, fintech and sustainability, long term solutions for our continent and the world at large than creating overvalued startups like "Facebook" or "Twitter" whose only sole purpose is to go IPO and generate vast sums of cash for what amounts to little more than a pasttime.
We have lots of small startups and most of those are financed with the founders' own money, in stark contrast to venture capital in the States.
Silicon Valley has such a concentration because of climate and infrastructure. Climate is mild year round and the weather great. This, coupled with venture capital and plentiful job opportunities draws more qualified people.
Unfortunately only a handful of countries in Europe, like Spain and Portugal have that kind of weather, the rest is frigid temperatures during Winters and sweltering heat during Summers. Although Spain has started to pick up momentum in tech startups, it's still at the beginning and the economy there will require at least two more decades to pick up. Then there is Switzerland, a tech startup paradise, but startup companies there are focused on solving scientific problems and fintech.
One of the major differences between Silicon Valley and the European mentality is this: we don't have enough venture capitalists and those that we do have aren't the kind that would invest in companies like "Facebook" or ones that don't have a solid business model to begin with. On top of that, the founders don't want to just get rich overnight, they want their company to be sustainable at least until they're 65 and beyond, and they want the decision making power that a startup under venture capitalists wouldn't have.
In summary: a difference of mentality, and different goals, since the standard of living in Europe is much higher, focus is on different priorities.
Trains are tech. Cities that are liveable are also technology. What does "tech" actually mean? Bloomberg seems to mean it to mean "Internet, shopping, and communication related stuff". There is more to life than that.
The world borders are becoming thinner and thinner (de facto there are no borders between first world countries at all). The companies (especially huge tech) employ and operate internationally for years.
Even though the head quarters might be based in a specific country, it's not fair to call the company American or European.
Bureaucracy, market heterogeneity, risk-aversion, and brain-drain to places where there's less such limits. Not all is on us to blame, of course. USA has had a huge historical developmental advantage in tech space.
From sibling comments, I see there's a lot of content with the way of life in Europe, so I guess there's that too. I don't see it myself.
Tech (Bloomberg): smartphone apps, funded by VC and ad money.
Not Tech (Bloomberg): making software and machines used to build billions of units across hundreds of sectors per year, and also building billions of units across hundreds of sectors per year, developing new t̶e̶c̶h̶n̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶e̶s̶ things (since this isn't tech) and spending god-knows-how-many billions on R&D and so on.
So what is tech? It seems like for author of this article it means highly scalable software startups (prefably consumer) which are highly visible and you have it on your personal devices. On this turf the US is clear leader at least for people living outside of China.
But tech is everywhere and there are huge amounts of billion /100s of M dollars companies you never heard off anywhere in (at least developed) world. In my small town (~ 300k of people) there are at least three pure tech companies that were build from nothing to 1B of valuation and I am sure you can point finger anywhere on map and it is going to be same.
Who cares? Why does this article assume that giant corporations like fb and Google are even desired? For everyone but their founders, they are a cancer to society. Europe's cultural barriers are a net positive, preventing these cancers from growing and spreading. It makes it a better place to live for everyone. It's such an American centric point of view to want big companies, almost always monopolies, to thrive at the expense of everyone else. Europe does tech just fine. Maybe the question is why can't America control its cancerous companies? Now that is an interesting topic.
I'll probably get Uber down voted for this, but this is my experience from the last 2 years in preparing to get a startup of the ground.
Here's some relevant data points:
1) I have contacted over 400 service providers in multiple sectors to provide services to the startup.
* Yes that's not a typo. 400 companies have been emailed, then called. I don't mind picking up the phone and talking to someone.
2) Of the 12 service providers that were selected, only 1 company is from the UK. All others are from the US.
3) All of the EU companies that were contacted, I later found out were either:-
- Lacking in terms of functionality compared to the US competitors.
- Had no roadmaps or no visibility of when they would reach parity with US competitors.
- Were much more expensive than US competitors.
- Many EU companies had no US focus and more focused in EU, ME and Africa.
4) Of the US companies that I selected. I had interacted initially with the EU offices. Being in the UK, their systems always forwarded the contact form to the EU/UK office.
The sales individuals located in the EU office were always SUB PAR!
- They didn't know their product as well as they could have.
- Simply made up bullshit in order to backup their claim that the functionality that I required was not possible. Even though I knew it was.
- As soon as they realised that I was a startup, they were not interested in the sales lead.
- In some circumstances, I knew the industry, regulatory issues and their competitors better than they did.
- One further point. I remember contacting Skrill's London office and then speaking to an Italian woman and her shouting at me with respect to their functionality. She didn't know the product and was telling me that a certain feature was not available. The more I described to her that it was possible. The louder she got. Despite it being on their website.
- I have many emails from UK/EU individuals informing me that they can't do [functionality X] because of regulations/etc. However, other companies were able to do it perfectly fine. Again, this boils down to the employees of the company not knowing their product/industry.
- I won't mention who said this. It's a well known US service provider to SaaS companies. When I was speaking to a UK sales manager. I outlined what the startup was doing. The sales person informed me that there would be NO WAY that I would be able to get my first 100 users. To quote him: "You won't get 100 users". Needless to say, the conversation didn't last long.
5) What's worse than all this? Every single German company that I have spoken to were not startup friendly in the least. In fact, every single German company would tell me that I had no chance of success and that I should go and do something else.
Here's a typical exchange:
Me: Hi, I am interested in your product offering and would like to know if [X functionality] is available and what you pricing is.
Them: What is your current turnover.
Me: I'm a startup.
Them: Please come back to us when you are doing 7 figures a year. Good bye!
6) The difference with US companies.
- Knew the product inside and out. Knew their competitors and could inform me how they were better than [competitor X].
- In many circumstances. Once I had spoken to the initial sales employee or they had read my email and PDF attachment of the startup. I was immediately forwarded to the Sales VP and they wanted my business. Instead of pitching my startup to the service provider. They were pitching their company to me.
- In many circumstances, there was a program to help startups get off the ground. There would always be a requirement to be part of an accelerator or be VC backed. In my case, this was always waived.
- A few times, the sales employee commented that this was obviously a "billion dollar" startup and that they wanted to be part of it. That is, be a partner service provider. ...
I won’t say much but I’ve stopped taking any people management positions because just how hard it is to discipline not to mention fire people in the EU without being liable to be dragged in front of a tribunal.
I’ve met so many people that simply don’t care because they have zero fear of losing their job as anything other than redundancy which will include often a nice settlement is simply unlikely for anything short of criminal negligence.
As a solo founder i also found it easier to deal with american companies. I've had payment processors offering free consultation how to increase our revenue, and in general it feels like there is more trust among businesses there. In addition, being a non-US citizen actually makes it easier for me, as I avoid the cumbersome tax compliance. Europe can have its positives as well, e.g. i m very pleased with Hetzner's offerings but for most things you are left to figure out things on your own. There 's also an entrenched culture of EU-subsidized startups which are basically shell companies for academics etc, that rarely progress beyond that stage.
Thanks for sharing your relevant experience so in depth!
I'm looking for a business problem to solve. From your needs/research, would you have any suggestions on what I could tackle? My email is marius@juvmed.com
As someone who lived and moved around Europe for the past 2 years, I think that Europe can do tech but the problem is that they are not very well placed in terms of marketing. They don't have influence over the global media like US companies do. Maybe that explains why the Blockchain sector is thriving in Europe... It bypasses the typical media funnel that companies nornally have to go through to acquire users.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadDing ding ding: this is the answer: those safety nets are also a cage.
Disclaimer: have started many businesses around the world, including the US and Europe. Europeans don't proceed to the glory and glamor of US startups because they have to deal with government bureaucracy, and alas such bureaucracy is contagious. The moment you wade into the grant-getting territory, you become a grant-getter. Grant-getters are anathema to technology-creators and other forms of society-changers.
If you're referring to the safety net that you get government money after you get unemployed, that's to ensure that you don't become homeless or get lured into crime. It has reinforcement to get you back to work ASAP.
[1] https://www.ssa.gov/disability/
Which happens, quite a lot more in Europe than it ever did in the USA. Americans seem to like to keep their jobs - Europeans couldn't care less.
Its okay with me - the point has been made.
For reference, I've worked at a couple of EU startups, and we didn't get any grants. It's not like you just get money for incorporating.
Of course there are also many non-gov-funded startups. However 1) it is demoralizing to see them getting millions in handouts while you struggle to sell a product and 2) they keep many talented employees trapped in deadend-companies.
Speaking as someone from Europe...
I don't have any first hand experience, but when browsing HN or Reddit, developer salaries above $150k seem to be the norm [1], not the "one in a million people" exception. As you may know, such salaries are unheard in Europe. It seems to me that becoming financially independent in the US is a matter of years [2], not decades. Sometimes it really makes me depressed. Also you seem to overestimate the safety nets. Putting 3-4 months of US paychecks away in a savings account will put you ahead of any safety net in Europe.
[1] Yes, i know, cost of living in places like NYC or SF are not comparable to major European cities, but even when factoring higher costs of living, becoming a millionaire seems rather doable.
[2] If you don't spend your money lavishly.
This income exists in the UK for contractors.
$150k/year is a day-rate of approximately £500/day if you take four weeks off per year. This is slightly higher than the median but reasonably achievable (more so in London).
https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/Contract-IT-Job-Market
It's the opposite. It allows unlimited immigration from the EU. The people voted against that it's true, but the government ignored the referendum and implemented a local worker preference instead. But with unemployment very low anyway, it is easy to argue you could not find a Swiss person to do the work, so this is effectively the same as doing nothing.
The 7000 contingency limit clause for EU citizens has been triggered, and we know how the last referendum went. Foreigners are a burning topic. Try getting a B-permit from outside of Switzerland; it’s akin to winning the lottery. Whoever got in, got in. The way is shut, and the Swiss keep it.
I agree that immigration is a hot topic. However I'm not sure what difference more referendums will make if the government feels free to ignore them. Perhaps they'll have a change of heart.
Getting yearly fixed term contracts on £500 a day is also not easy even with the former.
You also lose your pension contribution which in the UK can be upto 25% of your salary (I’m on 24), ISA, insurance protection against dismissal with no cause and many other things that employers provide.
Contracting isn’t a solution it’s worse than at will employment and the OP is right outside of a few cases the salary in Europe is pitiful and the safety net does not cover anything really it only ensures that there is almost no social mobility upwards.
Europe despite having the world’s largest social redistribution event aka WW2 is still the mother of all old money and isn’t changing because outside those who in the US would become billionaires it’s nearly impossible to become financially independent in Europe as a salaried employee and even as a sole trader.
I'd like to see an in-depth comparison which includes things such as taxation. I often see rent being mentioned in these comparisons. Cost of living is just one minor aspect. QoL is yet another, and more subjective. If you knew what my healthcare costs are and what I get out of it (or well, in the past), I am pretty confident that a lot of Americans would prefer that, except for a rich happy few. It isn't as if private healthcare doesn't have any incentive, or is always high quality. Example [1]
And even cost of living is difficult to compare. If you go to a US shop, pretty much always the price doesn't include sales tax. If you go to a EU shop, if the product is targeted for consumers the default price has to include the sales tax. I find the former -like the imperial system- not practical at best, and deceiving at worst. The latter is just a matter of seeing it from the customer's PoV though yeah it might lead to lower sales on the long run it leads to more happy customers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17753294
If I look at my governmental retirement projections, although i have been working and paying into it since age 20 it's depressing how little inflation adjusted retirement money I'll receive, although I earn a good tech-salary for our region.
Same with healthcare, in my city, Frankfurt/Germany, it's very hard to find a cardiologist that accepts patients that are publicly insured and even then the wait times can be scary for this type of situation. Hospitals have started rejecting patients that want to circumvent this by going to the emergency room.
The biggest issue for me is one of age-restriction. I'm fairly certain that my possibilities to earn this much more elsewhere will shrink over time and then I won't have a comparable cushion my US counterpart could have built, although we do the same thing. That is the equation that keeps me up at night at the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCg9htpWf0A
For example. A few searches yields plenty of recent movies about large amounts of homeless. But more specifically, if you go to Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris by train you will have no trouble whatsoever finding lots of homeless people. Granted, Amsterdam has a few, Brussels a pretty sizeable lot and Paris has tens of thousands at least.
In each of those cities, by the way, homeless are persecuted by the local police, and nothing ever seems to make any difference. Knowing the inclination of Dutch people (protestant, or to put it more bluntly "it's their own fault, obviously"), I don't envy the Dutch ones.
And whilst the poor people in the Netherlands live in extremely shabby apartment blocks riddled with crime rather than trailer parks, other than that there is little difference : garbage everywhere. Many youth gangs that have no option but to turn to crime and prey on their own community. Immigrants being the large majority of those people.
Oh and if you talk to them you will immediately find out, especially in the Netherlands : if you actually use the social safety net, you have to submit to the government "running your life". That "help" the government provides seems to have more than a few people who abuse the power they have (to, for instance, take away child care, or any children, require you to undergo psychological internment or take away your unemployment insurance). There's no end of complaints about that, especially in the Netherlands (less, but certainly present in Brussels and less in Paris).
Brussels and paris have homeless tent cities (maybe Amsterdam has them too, I don't know. Not in the inner city it seems. Both brussels and Paris have them in the inner city.
So there seem to be plenty of ways to "fall through" the social safety net in Europe. And this is the situation in the richest, most prosperous parts of Europe. There can be little doubt that the situation in Romania, for example, is far worse.
(European here) I don't care about being financially dependent on the state, because the state is not my enemy. The state gave me healthcare, the state gave me a free education, the state takes care of stuff. I don't care about "freedom".
Pointing to failed scenarios and saying x failed therefore y will fail is "stupid". You must examine why x failed and make sure you don't include this element when trying to do y. It is an iterative process.
One thing is for sure. If government employees don't have good intentions, the government will be ineffective. Therefore trust in government and willingness to see government as a force for good, willingness to work in a system that does good for its citizens, is imperative to having a good system.
I believe they are related because it is harder for people to develop trust in government if the good intentions of government workers and the governmental system in general is not apparent.
Conversely it is difficult to have a large pool of well intentioned potential governmental employees if a large portion of citizens have been brought up to think that the government is evil. These citizens are much more likely to try to exploit government positions than to treat them with the responsibility for the people that they require.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Social services in Europe aren’t uniform either they vary greatly between states and between cities and regions within states, food, housing and transportation is much more expensive, the availability of benefits is often overblown with the only caveat being universal health care which isn’t that different for people who cannot afford it in the US if we are all honest at this point and for the middle classes private medical insurance is still the way to go for most member states.
Whoever thinks that Europe is some socialist welfare dream state is quite wrong about it. Being poor in Europe is quite bad and I’m not sure it’s actually any better than being poor in the US.
And the lack of social mobility for the middle classes as well as the suppression of personal agency as far as financial independence goes might blow back and blow back hard.
Europe has a big problem with government income as more than 50% of it comes from taxes which means that any crisis and any issue with the tax base tends to ripple much harder over here and as far as retirement goes then it’s quite likely that most people like myself won’t be able to retire despite paying very high amounts into the retirement fund because the government keeps raising the retirement age and there is no guarantee of that our funds would even be available to us.
This is the reason why I’m currently looking for a way to completely privatize my entire retirement savings plan, I work hard I earn very well and I deposit 24% into retirement with zero guarantee of seeing anything beyond the bare minimum when I finally will be allowed to retire which at this point is probjected to be at 75-77.
So sorry fuck that I rather take more risk and be able to retire at say 50 than having to work my ass off until I can see my 80s around the corner with no guarantee of getting anything remotely close to what I put in because sharing is caring.
> Putting 3-4 months of US paychecks away in a savings account will put you ahead of any safety net in Europe.
My parents had 3 kids through 5 years of University (tuition + living expenses), this was all paid by the state. Back of envelope math values it at $450k, but in the US tuition fees are much higher.
That is the common trope but the truth is there is no other option. There are whole countries which are destined to end up as tourist destinations.
https://www.epo.org/news-issues/news/2017/20170307.html
Europe's potential in terms of innovation and technology is also highlighted by the number of European patent applications filed relative to a country's population. Switzerland again topped the ranking in 2016, with 892 applications per million inhabitants. Second and third place went to the Netherlands (405) and Sweden (360), followed by Denmark (334) and Finland (331). The first non-European country was again Japan in ninth place (166), which was above the EU average of 122.
If these USA, inflated valuations cause me, as the developer, to receive inflated salaries, I am perfectly happy with that.
Where are you seeing that?
Why can't Bloomberg do real research?
Things like machines which manufacture machines for instance.
a good friend of mine works at a glass blowing company which makes beer bottles, the machines used to create bottlecaps at an insane rate are apparantly dominated by a german manufacturer. (this factory produces over 15mil bottles a day).
producing 15 million bottle caps in a single 24h shift is hard, producing stuff this quickly at suchs a scale is a hard problem to fix.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
Because they can't find as much funding in Europe as in US.
That’s about it.
The article is spot on: imagine two startups, one in Barcelona and another in Boston, developing a very similar product. The first one raises €2M, the second one $50M. Which one is going to beat the other to market?
Yes, there are other factors; work/life balance, heterogeneous markets/languages, collaboration vs competition mindset, etc. But here in Europe we also have workaholics that give 200% to their startup and launch internationally. And without cash injections, which are a by-product of ecosystem maturity, they will always lose against their USA competitors.
Disclaimer: am European founder in seed stage
Also which one has a domestic market with a single language of 325 million people.
There are, according to the graphics, "4 startups per million people in Paris". There are 2.2 million habitants in Paris (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris), and we have hundreds if not thousands of startups (source: http://www.techonmap.fr/). The numbers don't match.
EDIT: Well, that isn't the sole reason, but it is a reason the gap may become wider. The GDPR is a compromise I -as European- am more than happy with.
The article assumes that "doing tech" needs to be something like a facebook or google and sell customer data like there is no tomorrow.
It's a bit different around here, we like it that way.
Europe can do tech but they don't really make it an important target. Also many of the good people in tech choose to go Silicon Valley (which is now ~60% foreigners) so this depletes the pool of EU talent. The bigger SV gets, the harder it is for person in tech to resist the temptation to go, and for local EU startups to find the proper resources.
And the EU doesn't yet act like a single body with a unified strategy when it comes to developing the tech sector, unlike the US or China. It's hard to mount an offence against an already established leader when everybody is pulling in another direction.
But the US has the correct kind of free speech which is the only civil right any good American requires.
What are you thinking of here exactly?
In the US, the FCC recently made it possible for ISPs to sell data on browsing behaviour from their clients to anyone that pays.
Neither is perfect, but they are worlds apart in this respect.
1) Privacy from government snooping
a) targeted/with court order (sort of, as in many cases in the EU this does not actually require a court order. Quite a few states just give police the authority to do this by themselves with little to no oversight). Perhaps this should be called "lawful intercept" or perhaps non-mass surveillance.
US: privacy held up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
EU: no privacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#Legislation...
b) without
US: no privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
EU: no privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingd... etc ...
2) privacy in the sense of forcing companies to drop personal data
US: complex, and varies from state to state, in most cases you should be able to get it deleted https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/6-502-0467?transi...
EU: also complex, but generalized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
Relating to debts:
US: standardized, and regulated
EU: complete and total chaos
So, I would say that the situation is not quite so clear cut. In terms of your rights to prevent state spying on you, clearly the US provides superior tools to it's citizens. In fact the EU is worryingly bad. In the private sector it would be fair to say the EU is superior, except when it comes to information about debts, where again the US is superior.
Doesn't seem to me to be such a clear-cut situation. But perhaps I'm wrong. Why do you think one is superior to the other ? If you're falsely accused of something, I assure you the US is far superior. If you want your mcDo to stop sending you email, you're going to find the EU is superior. Of course, spam was mostly illegal before the GPDR, and I suspect that nothing will change in practice.
Yes, this is what is implied. Why would you think otherwise? Funny that building big corporations is frowned upon or even outright vilified by so many.
May be this is what is wrong with Europe; no more ambition to do big things.
Big tech companies can do so much more than tiny businesses. Granted, there are some things that small companies can do better especially when it requires huge risk taking, but overall, why would any small company not want to get bigger(as big as it can get)? Isn't that the point of being in business?!
We have lots of small startups and most of those are financed with the founders' own money, in stark contrast to venture capital in the States.
Silicon Valley has such a concentration because of climate and infrastructure. Climate is mild year round and the weather great. This, coupled with venture capital and plentiful job opportunities draws more qualified people.
Unfortunately only a handful of countries in Europe, like Spain and Portugal have that kind of weather, the rest is frigid temperatures during Winters and sweltering heat during Summers. Although Spain has started to pick up momentum in tech startups, it's still at the beginning and the economy there will require at least two more decades to pick up. Then there is Switzerland, a tech startup paradise, but startup companies there are focused on solving scientific problems and fintech.
One of the major differences between Silicon Valley and the European mentality is this: we don't have enough venture capitalists and those that we do have aren't the kind that would invest in companies like "Facebook" or ones that don't have a solid business model to begin with. On top of that, the founders don't want to just get rich overnight, they want their company to be sustainable at least until they're 65 and beyond, and they want the decision making power that a startup under venture capitalists wouldn't have.
In summary: a difference of mentality, and different goals, since the standard of living in Europe is much higher, focus is on different priorities.
What a sick society.
The world borders are becoming thinner and thinner (de facto there are no borders between first world countries at all). The companies (especially huge tech) employ and operate internationally for years.
Even though the head quarters might be based in a specific country, it's not fair to call the company American or European.
From sibling comments, I see there's a lot of content with the way of life in Europe, so I guess there's that too. I don't see it myself.
Not Tech (Bloomberg): making software and machines used to build billions of units across hundreds of sectors per year, and also building billions of units across hundreds of sectors per year, developing new t̶e̶c̶h̶n̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶e̶s̶ things (since this isn't tech) and spending god-knows-how-many billions on R&D and so on.
But tech is everywhere and there are huge amounts of billion /100s of M dollars companies you never heard off anywhere in (at least developed) world. In my small town (~ 300k of people) there are at least three pure tech companies that were build from nothing to 1B of valuation and I am sure you can point finger anywhere on map and it is going to be same.
Here's some relevant data points:
1) I have contacted over 400 service providers in multiple sectors to provide services to the startup.
* Yes that's not a typo. 400 companies have been emailed, then called. I don't mind picking up the phone and talking to someone.
2) Of the 12 service providers that were selected, only 1 company is from the UK. All others are from the US.
3) All of the EU companies that were contacted, I later found out were either:-
- Lacking in terms of functionality compared to the US competitors.
- Had no roadmaps or no visibility of when they would reach parity with US competitors.
- Were much more expensive than US competitors.
- Many EU companies had no US focus and more focused in EU, ME and Africa.
4) Of the US companies that I selected. I had interacted initially with the EU offices. Being in the UK, their systems always forwarded the contact form to the EU/UK office.
The sales individuals located in the EU office were always SUB PAR!
- They didn't know their product as well as they could have.
- Simply made up bullshit in order to backup their claim that the functionality that I required was not possible. Even though I knew it was.
- As soon as they realised that I was a startup, they were not interested in the sales lead.
- In some circumstances, I knew the industry, regulatory issues and their competitors better than they did.
- One further point. I remember contacting Skrill's London office and then speaking to an Italian woman and her shouting at me with respect to their functionality. She didn't know the product and was telling me that a certain feature was not available. The more I described to her that it was possible. The louder she got. Despite it being on their website.
- I have many emails from UK/EU individuals informing me that they can't do [functionality X] because of regulations/etc. However, other companies were able to do it perfectly fine. Again, this boils down to the employees of the company not knowing their product/industry.
- I won't mention who said this. It's a well known US service provider to SaaS companies. When I was speaking to a UK sales manager. I outlined what the startup was doing. The sales person informed me that there would be NO WAY that I would be able to get my first 100 users. To quote him: "You won't get 100 users". Needless to say, the conversation didn't last long.
5) What's worse than all this? Every single German company that I have spoken to were not startup friendly in the least. In fact, every single German company would tell me that I had no chance of success and that I should go and do something else.
Here's a typical exchange:
Me: Hi, I am interested in your product offering and would like to know if [X functionality] is available and what you pricing is.
Them: What is your current turnover.
Me: I'm a startup.
Them: Please come back to us when you are doing 7 figures a year. Good bye!
6) The difference with US companies.
- Knew the product inside and out. Knew their competitors and could inform me how they were better than [competitor X].
- In many circumstances. Once I had spoken to the initial sales employee or they had read my email and PDF attachment of the startup. I was immediately forwarded to the Sales VP and they wanted my business. Instead of pitching my startup to the service provider. They were pitching their company to me.
- In many circumstances, there was a program to help startups get off the ground. There would always be a requirement to be part of an accelerator or be VC backed. In my case, this was always waived.
- A few times, the sales employee commented that this was obviously a "billion dollar" startup and that they wanted to be part of it. That is, be a partner service provider. ...
I’ve met so many people that simply don’t care because they have zero fear of losing their job as anything other than redundancy which will include often a nice settlement is simply unlikely for anything short of criminal negligence.
I'm looking for a business problem to solve. From your needs/research, would you have any suggestions on what I could tackle? My email is marius@juvmed.com
Appreciate your feedback.