> One reason the EU missed out on the internet is our unlimited willingness to be regulated.
Bollocks. The key difference between here and the US is the simple fact that we don't have enormous amounts of "dumb money" from pension and hedge funds screaming to be invested into anything that remotely smells like it could be worth money one time - remember Yo! which got 1M funding?! - and then founders making big money at IPO time, which many of them then choose to invest into new startups.
That means that you have to either rely on philantropic investors, family or borrow money from banks at ridiculous interest rates (and often requiring deposit of a car/house or other expensive assets to back the loan).
Navigating GDPR and the laws here is easy - one might say, life is even easier here than in the US for startups because you don't have to fear getting kicked in the nuts over bogus patent and other IP claims or absurd multi-million dollars civil damages lawsuits.
>Dumb money is not the basis for the web as we know it.
It's not, but it's the basis of ad-driven, surveillance-ware, and user engagement optimized companies that drive the ludicrously high profits and wages in the US tech sector.
Do you see US tech workers lining up to work for Canonical? Yeah, I thought so too.
I know that thread, that's why I used it as an example.
Hiring in tech is broken regardless, so most candidates optimize for compensation as that way at least the end result justifies the effort of going through those several stages of various hazing rituals each company has lined up.
And like the Canonical employee said in that thread, they receive 80% quality applications despite all of those shitty hoops Canonical makes you jump through even before they talk to you. So yeah, there seems to be no shortage of devs regardless of how bad a company's hiring practices are, as long as they're an established name and/or pay great.
For the web itself, yes. But for a lot of the services we use daily - Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Uber, AirBnB - lots of "dumb money" for cheap/free services or to outright price-dump the legitimate competition were the basis of their success.
Because in the US, money has nowhere else to go. Stocks? Wildly overpriced. Real estate? Wildly overpriced. Bonds? Zero returns. Mineral extraction? Risky outlook. Energy sector? Subsidies are likely on the horizon, better to wait. Infrastructure? NIMBYs
That's not the case for the EU. Money gets reasonable returns in energy sector, industry, any investment in Eastern Europe, tourism, PPP infrastructure projects, etc.
Is this a joke? European banks are much much more yield starved than their American counterparts. Your bonds have negative yield and pretty much every type of investment is more profitable in the US than in Europe. That's why big EU banks like Deutsche Bank or Credit Suisse have been severely underperforming, and thats why housing bubbles in Europe are much more severe (Spain, Greece, Portugal, etc)
You are literally describing the opposite of the truth.
Easier to invest into something if you only have a short car drive to the company you're investing in; additionally everything cross-border involves a lot more effort with coordinating taxes.
In any case at least YC does invest into European companies [1] - the key thing is you have to get far enough to have a meaningful product that VC funds can invest in, and unlike the US we don't have a lot of billionaire former founders who go around throwing a couple thousand dollars left and right for promising ideas they hear in an elevator.
Are you saying they'll miss out on a multi billion dollar profit opportunity because "it's not a short drive". Many VC firms have European offices, there's Zoom or a plane flight. Cross border investment is not a new or alien thing so dealing with taxes or regulation isn't something they can't cope with. So money not being available isn't a convincing reason.
> Are you saying they'll miss out on a multi billion dollar profit opportunity because "it's not a short drive".
Not "miss out" per se, rather a "prioritize companies in close proximity". There's a reason why a lot of the former startup turned unicorns are all concentrated around the Silicon Valley.
Bollocks. The key difference between here and the US is the simple fact that we don't have enormous amounts of "dumb money" from pension and hedge funds screaming to be invested into anything that remotely smells like it could be worth money one time - remember Yo! which got 1M funding?! - and then founders making big money at IPO time, which many of them then choose to invest into new startups.
That means that you have to either rely on philantropic investors, family or borrow money from banks at ridiculous interest rates (and often requiring deposit of a car/house or other expensive assets to back the loan).
Navigating GDPR and the laws here is easy - one might say, life is even easier here than in the US for startups because you don't have to fear getting kicked in the nuts over bogus patent and other IP claims or absurd multi-million dollars civil damages lawsuits.