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Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

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Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#161

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

rapsey wrote: post #93
TeMPOraL wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's unfortunate, and also ironic - most of those strings weren't there initially; they were added because of "entrepreneurs" stealing the funds and producing nothing of value.

The root of the problem is that the EU funding system is just a bad way of going about funding innovation. The US private VC model is superior in every way.

> The US private VC model is superior in every way.

You do realize that most of the innovation the US pride itself about was in fact directly funded by the state through DARPA, the NSF, NASA and military contracts: Fairchild Semiconductor, the internet, Google, Space X, Moderna...

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#162

Post by inglor_cz »

bserge wrote: post #144
inglor_cz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that is why Linux is successful around the planet. It really does not touch any soft cultural differences. Geeks and their needs are similar everywhere. Something like a food delivery corp. on the other hand must know precisely what to expect from which holidays etc. There is a fairly successful Czech startup called Rohlík that expanded to Hungary, Austria and Germany, but every added country is a challenge. htt…

Takeaway.com is a Dutch company operating in half of Europe including Romania and Poland.

I do not claim it is outright impossible. The hurdles are higher, though.

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#163

Post by biztos »

euorme wrote: post #154
_qsgk wrote: post #116

I am an American founder that accidentally built a company in Europe. I hired my first person there, and through the path of least resistance, most of our 45 person team is based in Europe. I believe I am playing 'business' on easy mode compared to European founders. As an American founder it's pretty easy for my US company to pay my European team as contractors. European founders have to comply with European employm…

You're cheating the system, though. The system exists in order to support the way of life in these countries, by bringing your American employment attitudes to Europe you're not really building a company in Europe by any measure: you're building an American company. Your company is benefitting from the robust systems in Europe, without contributing. There are people you want to hire in Europe _because of people payin…

I wouldn’t say he’s not contributing, I’d say he doesn’t have employees. Same would be true if he has his “team” on 1099 in the US.

Outside of any moral questions, the risk here is that the government may decide your group of happy startup contractors are in fact employees, and then you’re in for some massively distracting and expensive restructuring (at best) or legal sanctions and maybe losing your team (at worst).

So yeah, it’s easier, but that’s because it’s cheat mode, not because he’s American. You could use any offshore company for the same thing.

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#164

Post by biztos »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #74
mathverse wrote: post #42

The term "european" is meaningless.It's all just bunch of countries working under some framework. As a european there's no shared success if one european company succeeds.And because of that there's no synergic effects that would help "european" companies to grow and improve.

There is some though; there are little to no restrictions for one country to use a service in another european country, or traveling to visit it. No currency conversion needed either.

> or traveling to visit it

Except during Covid, which might last forever.

> No currency conversion needed either

Except when you need to transact literally anything outside of the SEPA system, and then you have conversations and bank fees and very little control over either.

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#165

Post by [deleted] »

ToJans wrote: post #82

In my experience (Belgian guy that dabbled a bit with EU VCs for my SaaS) Europe is very risk-adverse, and you either have to give up ridiculous amounts of equity for a little amount (i.e. 50k€ for a 25% to +50% stake) when not established yet, or have a recurring revenue of at least 50k€/month to get reasonable propositions. Also, European culture is slightly different: most people consider a startup failure as some…

[deleted]

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#166

Post by spaniard89277 »

IdiocyInAction wrote: post #125
pembrook wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe’s lack of competitiveness in tech has been true pretty much since the birth of Silicon Valley. It was the same with the PC business back in the 80s and 90s. Here’s an article from the New York Times in 1996, struggling to understand why European PC manufacturers were all failing to expand outside their home markets: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/07/business/why-european-com... 25 years later, the story is th…

> European stock markets have been essentially flat since 2009 while American stock markets have 3X’d. The DAX30 (German Index) tripled since 2009. The British and French indices did pretty much move sideways though. The growth of the S&P 500 is pretty amazing though.

Go and watch Spanish indices. It's a sad history.

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#167

Post by tinco »

another-dave wrote: post #139
_qsgk wrote: post #116

I am an American founder that accidentally built a company in Europe. I hired my first person there, and through the path of least resistance, most of our 45 person team is based in Europe. I believe I am playing 'business' on easy mode compared to European founders. As an American founder it's pretty easy for my US company to pay my European team as contractors. European founders have to comply with European employm…

This sounds really odd to me (UK-based, previously was contracting) — if someone is hired as a contractor, normally your company would be engaging their limited company as some type of consultancy arrangement. So you wouldn't have any maternity leave or paid time off at all. In fact, from the contractor's point-of-view, you'd want to run a mile from these things as if the revenue believed you were a de facto employee…

This sounds too good to be true. I don't know about other countries in Europe, but in The Netherlands it is definitely illegal to have a contractor work in employment conditions. I.e. you're not allowed to give a contractor set work hours, not allowed to specify how they work, not allowed to prevent them from outsourcing the work, etc. If you do those things, and the tax service finds out, or a "contractor" gets sick and decides to demand you pay them sick leave, you're in deep trouble.

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#168

Post by dmitriid »

rapsey wrote: post #146
dmitriid wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes that is the business model and business is good. As opposed to EU which is a wasteland where nothing grows. Endlessly burning through infinite cash isn't a good business model. And it ultimately results in a significantly worse wasteland than the perceived wasteland of Europe. Where in Europe you have lots of companies in lots of different markets, in the US you have continuous price dumping that drives away an…

> Where in Europe you have lots of companies in lots of different markets In Europe you have lots of companies in lots of limited local markets unable to grow out of them because they have no funding options available to them.

On limited local markets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28286789

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#169

Post by spaniard89277 »

arcturus17 wrote: post #155
another-dave wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds really odd to me (UK-based, previously was contracting) — if someone is hired as a contractor, normally your company would be engaging their limited company as some type of consultancy arrangement. So you wouldn't have any maternity leave or paid time off at all. In fact, from the contractor's point-of-view, you'd want to run a mile from these things as if the revenue believed you were a de facto employee…

In Spain if you hire full-time contractors long term they can be considered full-time employees by law. There are ways around this such as hiring through temp agencies, hiring part-time or rotating them. But trying to do “FTE as contractor” is risky.

That only applies if you hire from a spanish company and for a defined set of circunstances AFAIK.

Re: Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

#170

Post by tsbinz »

_qsgk wrote: post #116

I am an American founder that accidentally built a company in Europe. I hired my first person there, and through the path of least resistance, most of our 45 person team is based in Europe. I believe I am playing 'business' on easy mode compared to European founders. As an American founder it's pretty easy for my US company to pay my European team as contractors. European founders have to comply with European employm…

If you have "contractors" in Germany, what you are describing is social insurance fraud. I would be surprised if France doesn't have rules like that.
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