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Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

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211–220 of 242 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why social media ToS are typically concise and clear: "License agreement: We spy on you and sell your information to anyone that's interested, press accept to continue".

Say I want to buy information about you. How would I go about doing that? Where to I put in my credit card details? Facebook doesn't sell data. They sell advertising space. They're a billboard company.

Agreed. "Selling user data" is just a nice catchphrase thrown around by people who didn't look into how FB ads really makes money and how they really work.

Just at a cursory evaluation, it makes no sense, because if Facebook sold the data directly, why would advertisers even need Facebook after that? All of those questions can be answered by simply playing around with FB Advertising UI for less than an hour. But hating on FB is fashionable now, regardless of whether the reasons are justified or not. Given how there are plenty of legitimate issues with Faceebook, it really annoys me when people throw around these types of questionable accusations against FB without even looking into the subject matter first, because it just weakens legitimate criticism of FB.

Back to the topic at hand, you are totally on point about the billboard analogy. If you are a business, you don't go to Facebook and say "give me the data of these users", you say, for example, "here is my ad, show it to users who are in this geographic area Z between ages X and Y who are into surfing and indie music". And then you get to see stats about interaction of those users with your ad, like "users who are closer to age X than age Y are more likely to click on your ad", so you draw a conclusion that your ad doesn't seem to appeal as much to the upper boundary of your target age range, maybe you need to tweak the ad or split it into 2 separate ads (one for users between ages X and (X+Y)/2, and another for ages between (X+Y)/2 and Y). At no point you get any additional info on the users, and neither do you get any individual user info, just anonymized aggregates.

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

#212
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…

Also success means something different here for the most part, maybe as a result of what you said above. It's more of a 'business' than 'startup' and if you're profitable that means you have a successful business. I think that big acquisition exit/IPO is a more of a wish/dream rather than a goal here

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

#213
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok; point taken. Would you tend to agree that the majority is or expects you to be ashamed about it, or is that not what you experience?

The majority of them have experienced failure, just like everybody else. What they are (require to be) ashamed of is tricking the system or running illegal businesses that lead to the aforementioned failure.

> What they are (require to be) ashamed of is tricking the system or running illegal businesses that lead to the aforementioned failure.

Are you trying to say that most startup failures are due to their illegal nature? If that's the case for majority of failed startups in Europe that you are familiar with, that's kind of telling (whether it is in regards to startups in Europe in general or just the European startups that you are personally familiar with, that's a different question).

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

#214
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…

> As an American founder it's pretty easy for my US company to pay my European team as contractors.

if they are spending most of their contracting time at your job / are considered your subordinates, it's very very illegal at least in france (https://bpifrance-creation.fr/encyclopedie/micro-entreprise-...), and I'm very very tempted to report you to the relevant authorities.

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

#215
post #22
post #7

Payflow: https://www.payflow.es/ (surprisingly, no english version) This is a fantastic innovation if it takes off and if the charges aren't prohibitive; it has the potential to obliterate predatory payday lending. In a world of free instant automatic electronic payments, there's no good reason to delay salary payments until the end of the month.

Interesting, I didn't know payday lending was a thing in Spain. Delaying salary payments serves two purposes: first, to benefit the employer by keeping your money in their account longer; and second, at least culturally, to force you into a budget cycle "for your own good." People accept these things culturally but there's no reason they should have to. When I moved to Germany from the US I was a little shocked to di…

> When I moved to Germany from the US I was a little shocked to discover that I would be paid at the end of the month and not every two weeks. They took the cyclical paternalism one step further

This is standard everywhere in Europe by the way.

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

#216
post #7

Payflow: https://www.payflow.es/ (surprisingly, no english version) This is a fantastic innovation if it takes off and if the charges aren't prohibitive; it has the potential to obliterate predatory payday lending. In a world of free instant automatic electronic payments, there's no good reason to delay salary payments until the end of the month.

A lot of companies already offer that service, you just request it to HR.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my thoughts recently. As it appears, American venture capital simply can't build a big social media company that doesn't end up being a surveillance-driven, ad-ladden, privacy-hostile, user-despising, fake virtue-signalling behemoth. So maybe it's time for Europe to shine.

Maybe what Americans have built is exactly what people who aren't HN users want. The numbers would seem to say that.

I don't think this is what people actually want, but it's definitely what people tolerate.

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

#218
post #167

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…

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…

The same in Germany. The people can be easily classified as bogus self-employed (scheinselbststaendig). The company would have to pay social security contributions retroactively up to 4 years. Furthermore, the 'contractors' could sue their way into employment. Also, workarounds mentioned elsewhere, like employment as temp by utilizing intermediate staffing companies, became widely known in time also to government agencies. Most companies will fire/replace such staff after 18 month max for this reason.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> helsinki, stockholm, berlin, amsterdam, etc you’re talking 5X less salary than in Silicon Valley. Certainly not for the same seniority level (and not considering stocks, which people in those places do get) Or you're telling me that someone making 60kEUR in Berlin could be transferred to SV and their salary would immediately flip to $300k on the payslip? (no promotions/stock/etc) Realistically, more like 2x, 2.5x,…

And what kind of person you think we are talking about here for 60k in Amsterdam? Is that a senior Software Engineer? Or even an engineering lead (responsible for a bunch of other SEs)? Because 60k per year in Amsterdam equates around 4.6k per month + holiday pay. I can hire at most a medior - senior SE for that in AMS (let's say 4-5 years of experience) and I really don't believe a person with that kind of experienc…

> I really don't believe a person with that kind of experience would earn 300k a year in SV.

I just spoke with someone two years out of CS undergrad who’s starting at $350k TC at one of the big SV unicorns.

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

#220
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…

An European founder could do the same, hire only self-employed contractors. However, e.g. in Germany, that's only possible if the contractors work independently and have more than one customer long-term. I guess someone will notice eventually?

> and have more than one customer long-term.

This is rather a counter criterion. Government finally found out several years ago, that there is a new non-significant class of well-earning people - IT contractors - that can be legally milked by abusing laws, created ostensibly to 'protect' the weak.

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