Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#771

Post by hasmanean » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

satellite2 wrote: post #319

This article is truly bizarre. The main point it makes is that the top 500 US companies grew faster than the top 500 European ones in the last decade or so. But then it quickly mention, without any further analysis, that both their GDP actually grew at a similar pace. So the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies. So all else being equals it means that the smaller US…

Yeah they are measuring inequality but the subtext is that some of US companies are bigger because they have big global brands, which Europe has not produced. Remember Skype and Nokia?

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#772

Post by RGamma » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

relativ575 wrote: post #760

tluyben2 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see US answers to this but in the US your quality of life is fantastic if you are rich and then it degrades fast: in NL it is good to great for all. So I can pick bleeding hard work in a lottery to maybe be someone or I can do whatever I like and have most of those same perks. Where is the choice here?

I'm in the US. Quality of life is unbelivable if you're rich, great for upper middle class, good for middle class, okay if you're working class, terrible if you're poor. Of course, all of that is still very much generalization, and I find comparing quality of life in Europe with US is more or less dick measure contest. You try one when there are no fact based arguments to talk about. NHS versus Medicaid, for example,…

"Unbelievable" is a strong qualifier. Care to give some examples? Genuinely curious.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#773

Post by sgt » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #616

sgt wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting you should note anti-immigration tendencies. I believe those tendencies are fueled by ridiculously liberal immigration laws that essentially allows far too many asylum seekers into Europe. That's why you now see ghettos and zones where the police don't go in France, Sweden and even UK. I am not against immigration but I think Europe should be seriously reconsidering non-western immigration as it will…

> That's why you now see ghettos and zones where the police don't go in France, Sweden and even UK. Please name me one place in the UK where police don’t go. This is exactly the same 5 year old BS that we heard from Trump times. Even the USA ambassador was embarrassed and grilled by the journalist in the Netherlands to provide one example of “politicians being burned” and “no-go zones” in the Netherlands. https://you…

Police have been told to avoid certain areas in uniform when traveling to and from work. In other areas the police think twice about entering, as people are likely to throw things at the car etc. I have this from a friend in the UK.

If that doesn't qualify as a type of "no go", I don't know where to draw the line. In any case, it's shocking.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#774

Post by pelasaco » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #421

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe did a better job in distributing wealth more equally This assumes ex ante a similar quantity of wealth. Europe’s GDP per capita is lower than America’s. Where it’s higher, the growth is slower. The more-even distribution comes at the expense of quality of life or economic power. (Though not for Europe’s well-entrenched multi-generational and often legally-entitled wealthy.) To be clear, I don’t believe in mo…

> The more-even distribution thus comes at the expense of quality of life. What are you talking about? We have fairer elections, better infrastructure, more social security, everyone's got health insurance, we're not getting shot in school, and also we're not on the way to be ruled by a fascist so ... how exactly are you measuring the quality of life?

To be fair in France we get as well a lot of shooting, mass stabbing or other forms of terrorism. However it has a totally different cause.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#775

Post by cscurmudgeon » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #88

crossroadsguy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the low work ethic > glory .. glory.. So you were missing "glory to overwork people to death" and things like "glory to force them to work on weekends, late nights and make them feel guilty and insecure about their jobs"? And things like "glory to people going bankrupt in hospitals", right?

The first large scale study on overwork deaths says US has less deaths than many countries in Europe. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202... https://www.npr.org/2021/05/17/997462169/thousands-of-people... In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to long work hours, according to a map the WHO published with the study. That proportion is similar to Brazil and Canada — and much low…

Downvoted for bringing contradictory data. HN is anti-science.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#776

Post by cscurmudgeon » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

ddalex wrote: post #142

238475235243 wrote: post #43

I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once). Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or…

On the other hand the people in EU are happier, have better social protection, better benefits, better health systems, better consumer protection, better application of rules and laws, they make for more productive employees. Do the shareholders get as rich as fast as in the hyperactive US economy? Not, but the society functions better. I very much prefer the EU.

> On the other hand the people in EU are happier

Are they though? And maybe happiness is overrated?

The first large scale study on overwork deaths says US has less deaths than many countries in Europe.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/17/997462169/thousands-of-people...

  In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to

long work hours, according to a map the WHO published with the study. That proportion is similar to Brazil and Canada — and much lower than Mexico and in countries across most of Central and South America.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#777

Post by simonh » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

What grieves me most is the drain of talented software engineers from Europe to the US. There's a 'club' of Scottish engineers working is Seattle called the MicroScotts, and there's not a small number of them, but the are few opportunities for such people in Scotland itself. You can find top flight British, German and other European engineers at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple. The cream of British CS and Software Engineering graduates decamp to the US every year.

There are good IT jobs here in the UK in finance, defence and the games industry. It's not exactly a desert of opportunities, but there's still a clear imbalance. My daughter is looking at doing a CS or Software Engineering degree and I'm worried if she'll stay in the UK when she graduates, or the opportunities she'd be giving up if she doesn't. California is nice to visit, I suppose.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#778

Post by dmitriid » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

relativ575 wrote: post #763

dmitriid wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are tech startups and then there are "burn cash by subsidizing the 10% using VC money" My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind. > However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds This has always been the case. Until unlimited…

> My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind. Let's take a look at YC companies, which is representative to the kind of startups we're talking about here. Do you think the majority of them get the funding to burn and subsidize the 10%?

Yes, let's take a look: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/

Doordash losses: 204 million in 2018, 667 million in 2019, 461 million in 2020. 1.2 billion dollars in losses over three years. [1]

Cruise: Hard to find any data (the name doesn't help). Raised billions while producing zilch. Was acquired by GM, and is now generating only losses to the tune of 200-300 million dollars per quarter. That is, losses of around 1 billion dollars per year [2]

Instacart: Doesn't publish profitability (suprised Fry face). Had it's first profitable year in 7 years in 2020. In 2019 lost 300 million dollars. Previous data unavailable.

Should I go on?

Even the proftable darlings are usually profitable if you look at them right.

AirBnB: up and down, up and down. Sometimes down with losses up to 674 million dollars a year: [4]

Dropbox: became profitable only last year. Prior to that? Well, losses up to 484 million dollars of losses per year [5]

And so on.

The vast majority is fuelled by litrerally endless investor money with only two modes of operation: corner the market (that is, outlive other competitors who don't have such an unlimited amount of money) or get sold.

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/doordash-statistics/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1077077/gm-cruise-operat...

[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/instacart-statistics/

[4] https://craft.co/airbnb/metrics

[5] https://craft.co/dropbox/metrics

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#779

Post by thijsc » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

joelbluminator wrote: post #752

thijsc wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to know where to start! Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here. This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58... There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.…

You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe. But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.

> You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe.

There are also vast differences between states in the US. If we're comparing I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick places that are on the top end of the scale on both sides of the ocean.

> But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.

I'm not claiming that the EU is equivalent to SV, or the wider US. There is certainly much to love about SV and we can and should do better in a number of areas in which SV is already doing very well.

I'm only correcting the unfounded assumption that some people in this thread expressed that there's somehow nothing going on in the EU. Or that it's a bad place for business, it's really not.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#780

Post by hourislate » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

satellite2 wrote: post #319

This article is truly bizarre. The main point it makes is that the top 500 US companies grew faster than the top 500 European ones in the last decade or so. But then it quickly mention, without any further analysis, that both their GDP actually grew at a similar pace. So the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies. So all else being equals it means that the smaller US…

I think you missed the part about Eastern Europe. From the article:

European GDP per head is about two-thirds that of America. The figure has not fallen in the past 20 years thanks mostly to poorer eastern Europeans getting closer to Western income levels.

Would suggest that as the faster GDP Growth came from Eastern European areas offsetting a stagnating GDP Growth from the rest of Europe. Am I not reading this correctly?