Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

blogs.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 99 posts

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#71

Post by narag »

shareme wrote: post #36

A question for European readers: Do you see the culture of the Welfare State as an obstacle to changing culture to accept that being successful, doing new business ventures is a good thing?

It's not the Welfare State but bureaucracy and tax greed.

Today I've read a blog post by Jesús Encinar, CEO of idealista.com, the go-to site for renting and buying real state in Spain. The article is in Spanish, short summary below):

http://www.jesusencinar.com/2011/06/10-ideas-concretas-para-...

"Ten ideas to promote startups in Spain"

- Limited liability

- The State shouldn't keep VAT returns for a year.

- Not overtaxing employee's stock (taxed 47% for employees)

- Not overtaxing business angels

- Easy foreign workers recruit

- Limit the need for licenses for everything.

- Lower freelancers taxes

- Lower startup social security burden

- Remove 1% tax on capital ampliations

- Stop attacking Internet sector

These are only the titles. Reading the details is depressing. Some of what you take for granted in the USA is impossible or infeasible here.

The basic idea is that, in order to startup, you must pay tons of taxes and licenses from the start, even if you're not earning a cent.

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#72

Post by T-zex »

FrojoS wrote: post #62
franze wrote: post #19

ok, as i'm currently starting my business in austria (that's in europe) i want to add my 2c. the biggest obstacle is that the government won't go out of your way. 1. i could start my company now 2. but it would be stupid, as i would miss out on the "unternehmensgründerförderung" (start up support) 3. for getting "unternehmensgründerförderung" you have to attend a sh#tload of courses (for about 2 months) which tell yo…

So who are your co-founders? Are there any? To me, the problem is finding co-founders not bureaucracy. As others have pointed out, you don't need to get the "Gründerzuschuss". None of the German founders, I know, says that bureaucracy is the biggest problem. Sure they complain and they might hire more if they could fire more. But the real problem, as the article says, is culture. Germany was once the country of the "…

He's starting a business in Austria not Germany.

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#73

Post by yummyfajitas »

afterburner wrote: post #63
anamax wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those problems aside, we could do a lot worse than modeling europe, way less gas usage, higher health insurance coverage, 2 months of vacation a year. Sounds a lot more stable to me. And roughly half the gdp/person of the US. The US govt already collects about as much (per person) in taxes as European govts. (It collects significantly more than Canada and, iirc, slightly less than France.) Yet, no one would serious…

You should be comparing government revenue as percentage of GDP. The US collects 30% less than Canada using this measure (about 24% of GDP vs 31% of GDP for Canada). European nations come in at even higher.

Why would he divide by GDP? Just because the US is rich, it therefore requires more money to provide the same service?

I believe govt revenues adjusted for PPP is the quantity you are looking for.

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#74

Post by zwieback »

rektide wrote: post #55
zwieback wrote: post #17

When I was growing up in Germany I remember hearing this exact same complaint about lack of entrepreneurship a good 30 years ago. My dad, who is a solid state physicist, was a kind of cheerleader for modern technology and was exasperated how companies were not adopting and adapting more quickly. His predictions that the economy was going to go down the tubes while the rest of the world pulled away still ring in my ea…

To talk briefly about one item here, embedded systems dev kits; They strike me as a ludicrous 'pay to play' scheme. The old standard is that you have to buy a $2500 dev kit for every developers, and that standard has kept the individuals and enthusiasts out. OEM's ought have full design files for multiple reference board available, and sell implementations for something like cost. Much of this trenchant multi-level c…

True but the situation is improving. A lot of the latest crop of ARM-based dev kits are around $100-$300 and come with complete schematics. Full-featured, size limited toolchains tend to be available for free so it's pretty easy to assess what you would get for your $1000-$1500 investment.

Eclipse-GCC-GDB with open-source JTAG dongles is a great way to get started for very little investment. So is Arduino for the lower end.

The big investement tends to be around high-end debug tools like trace probes and debuggers. It would be great to have an open-source trace probe for Cortex.

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#75

Post by cromulent »

marknutter wrote: post #61
cromulent wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not fair to compare companies that are competing on price with companies that are competing on quality. For this particular consumer, in the marketplace, it's fair enough :) And if it's unfair, bad luck.

Let me rephrase: it doesn't make any sense to compare a company that's competing on price with a company that's competing on value. They are both filling different niches in the marketplace.

Thanks, but I think that just confuses me more. To me, value is directly related to price.

From my perspective it makes sense to compare companies in order that I understand the differences between them. I would have to try hard not to compare them.

Sorry, I'm not trying to be obtuse.

In relation to the point about Rohloff as a metaphor for the Germany vs America emulation, I think the comparison would be quite useful.

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#76

Post by jbooth »

anamax wrote: post #45
jbooth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the European problems right now are problems that the US just plain cannot have -- Greece, Spain and Italy running up huge debts because they have the credibility of the eurozone without any of the responsibility. America's different, we're one country. Those problems aside, we could do a lot worse than modeling europe, way less gas usage, higher health insurance coverage, 2 months of vacation a year. Sounds…

> Those problems aside, we could do a lot worse than modeling europe, way less gas usage, higher health insurance coverage, 2 months of vacation a year. Sounds a lot more stable to me. And roughly half the gdp/person of the US. The US govt already collects about as much (per person) in taxes as European govts. (It collects significantly more than Canada and, iirc, slightly less than France.) Yet, no one would serious…

We should copy some stuff from their tax code, too. As you said, they're not collecting significantly more than us, they just have a way simpler rate. Netherlands was explained to me as "25% up to 100k, 50% on income over that". That's fair, simple and actually a lower rate for the vast majority of people. Our system is a bloated mess in comparison.

Not saying that automatically everything done by Europe is better than everything done in the US.. but mindless rah rah just leads to myopia. Let's steal good ideas where we can.

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#77

Post by bauchidgw »

prpon wrote: post #68
franze wrote: post #19

ok, as i'm currently starting my business in austria (that's in europe) i want to add my 2c. the biggest obstacle is that the government won't go out of your way. 1. i could start my company now 2. but it would be stupid, as i would miss out on the "unternehmensgründerförderung" (start up support) 3. for getting "unternehmensgründerförderung" you have to attend a sh#tload of courses (for about 2 months) which tell yo…

An unrelated question. "unternehmensgründerförderung" is that a real word or you just made it up? I would make up such words when I am mad at something and can't express my frustation in real words :)

oh, it's real. and it's just one part of the overall "unternehmensgruenderprogramm"

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#78

Post by cheez »

icegreentea wrote: post #70
cheez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada, 27% of the full-time workforce works for the government directly . This doesn't count contractors.

30% seems too high. We have ~3.5 million directly employed by all levels of government [1], and a labour force of ~19 million [2] [1] http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/GOVT65A-eng.htm [2] http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/lfss01a-eng.htm That's maybe ~15%.

I'm only counting full-time employees.

I don't have numbers on full/part-time work of government employees so I'm using the basis that $53K average salary[1] implies that nearly most are full-time, given that the average income overall is about that amount (edit: wow, it's totally not[4]).

Some more information. The average hourly wage for full-time employees is $24.72 across the entire population [2]. The same data shows that the average hourly wage for both part-time (25 and older) and full time is $24.89. This is not apples to apples, just giving you some expectation on what you can expect for a professional workforce that works both part-time and full-time.

Assuming, then, that full time is 2000 hours (40hrs/week*50weeks), the average hourly wage for part-time and full-time government employees works out to $26.55 [3].

So based on that information, I am comfortable saying that an insignificant number of government employees are part-time or they are excessively overpaid.

Further, I am then comfortable saying that 27% of the Canadian full-time workforce works directly for the government.

Not good for progress.

Edit: updated 100 times to clarify.

[1] http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/govt62a-eng.htm

[2] http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/labr69a-eng.htm

[3] http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/govt62a-eng.htm

[4] http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/famil21a-eng.htm

Re: Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

#79

Post by jbooth »

marknutter wrote: post #39
jbooth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the European problems right now are problems that the US just plain cannot have -- Greece, Spain and Italy running up huge debts because they have the credibility of the eurozone without any of the responsibility. America's different, we're one country. Those problems aside, we could do a lot worse than modeling europe, way less gas usage, higher health insurance coverage, 2 months of vacation a year. Sounds…

I don't understand how higher health insurance coverage, 2 months of vacation, and less gas usage equates to a healthy economy, or maybe I'm missing something?

Higher/cheaper/universal healthcare and less gas usage definitely lead to a healthier economy.

Ever seen the numbers on how much of your car's sticker price paid for health insurance? If we spent less on the health insurance, we'd be more efficient, right?

How much money we shipping straight to Saudi Arabia in gas usage? If we could get the same stuff done on less gas, that'd be more efficient, right?

The 2 months of vacation is just a bonus.

Post reply on HN