The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
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The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
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Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#2I like the arguments. I had to fight my family as well when making any ventures. Will they be fruitful? who knows. However my family was always saying "why risk failure, when you can have a nice 9-5 job that always pays well and is fairly stable?" or "why risk working your ass off for a year and "show nothing for it"" where to me working my ass off for a year is a year of education i'd have never received otherwise.
And my family is fairly progressive.
We are immigrants from Ukraine (circa '92)
Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#3I agree about the mentality problem, though I think it's mostly due ignorance in general and values that are often toward the wrong thing.
Regarding taxes, it's pretty ridiculous, I would never encourage people to open a business here if they can avoid it.
I'm moving to the US next year and I can't wait to stop paying the ridiculous amount of money (in proportion of what I earn) that I pay now as a consultant.
I think I can add another reason why doing startups is hard in Italy: finding a cofounder or team members. I've worked in one of the biggest startup incubator in Italy (h-farm), and I can say from experience that it's super hard to find talented people, and that makes a difference at the end of the day.
Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#4I just saw the image of Italy on the backside of an Arduino on desk, and was thinking about how innovative the Italians are. Then I saw this on HN :)
Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#5I agree about the mentality problem, though I think it's mostly due ignorance in general and values that are often toward the wrong thing. Regarding taxes, it's pretty ridiculous, I would never encourage people to open a business here if they can avoid it. I'm moving to the US next year and I can't wait to stop paying the ridiculous amount of money (in proportion of what I earn) that I pay now as a consultant. I thin…
> it's super hard to find talented people, and that makes a difference at the end of the day.
It's difficult pretty much anywhere. And even in areas where there are lots of good people (SV), you then have to pay a lot.
There are plenty of talented people in Italy, that is not what I would consider the major problem.
Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#6I like the arguments. I had to fight my family as well when making any ventures. Will they be fruitful? who knows. However my family was always saying "why risk failure, when you can have a nice 9-5 job that always pays well and is fairly stable?" or "why risk working your ass off for a year and "show nothing for it"" where to me working my ass off for a year is a year of education i'd have never received otherwise.…
Why not? No kids yet. Limited downside. At most you've wasted some time and a small amount of cash, and you can always fall back on the steady job.
Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#7National Geographic made an editorial describing how teen brains are more prone to risky behavior:
>> Peaking during adolescence is risk-taking. We court risk more avidly as teens than at any other time. This shows reliably in the lab, where teens take more chances in controlled experiments involving everything from card games to simulated driving. And it shows in real life, where the period from roughly 15 to 25 brings peaks in all sorts of risky ventures and ugly outcomes.
If teens think as well as adults do and recognize risk just as well, why do they take more chances? Here, as elsewhere, the problem lies less in what teens lack compared with adults than in what they have more of. Teens take more risks not because they don't understand the dangers but because they weigh risk versus reward differently: In situations where risk can get them something they want, they value the reward more heavily than adults do.
The period's uniqueness rises from genes and developmental processes that have been selected for over thousands of generations because they play an amplified role during this key transitional period: producing a creature optimally primed to leave a safe home and move into unfamiliar territory. The move outward from home is the most difficult thing that humans do, as well as the most critical—not just for individuals but for a species that has shown an unmatched ability to master challenging new environments. In scientific terms, teenagers can be a pain in the ass. But they are quite possibly the most fully, crucially adaptive human beings around. Without them, humanity might not have so readily spread across the globe. Full version at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/teenage-brains/dob...
Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#8I agree about the mentality problem, though I think it's mostly due ignorance in general and values that are often toward the wrong thing. Regarding taxes, it's pretty ridiculous, I would never encourage people to open a business here if they can avoid it. I'm moving to the US next year and I can't wait to stop paying the ridiculous amount of money (in proportion of what I earn) that I pay now as a consultant. I thin…
> it's super hard to find talented people, and that makes a difference at the end of the day. It's difficult pretty much anywhere. And even in areas where there are lots of good people (SV), you then have to pay a lot. There are plenty of talented people in Italy, that is not what I would consider the major problem.
You have a point here, but due to the distribution of our (small) cities, we don't have many meetups here, for example. I love Italy's, just not for working.
Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#9I just saw the image of Italy on the backside of an Arduino on desk, and was thinking about how innovative the Italians are. Then I saw this on HN :)
Actually Italians have been huge innovators in history and still are in some areas, it's just the system that makes it harder now.
Re: The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game
#10I just saw the image of Italy on the backside of an Arduino on desk, and was thinking about how innovative the Italians are. Then I saw this on HN :)
Italians have provided some of the world's greatest innovations in civil and mechanical engineering and continue to do so. Perhaps their creative energy has not yet been channeled towards the space of web apps and mobile apps, which the HN audience is biased towards.