I won't call an MSO/Cable company news as boring. Why the American industry creates so much attention is due to the dominance of American Technology Sector and American media firms. The MSO sector has lot of potential for innovation with the rising sectors such as Home Automation, Gigabit fiber or to sum it up (Internet of Things). When it comes to technology, even Nokia the most respected handset brand of the pre-smartphone age, was acquired by Microsoft, an American firm. Unless Europe gets more flexible with its tech industry (like encouraging Kickstarter/Ycombinator type firms) they would never gather the focus like the US.
ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
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Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#92This has very little to do with national moods/prejudices and much more to do with boring/atypical industries vs. hot consumer ones. ONO got no attention largely because it's "boring" to a mass audience. There are plenty of examples of this domestically, e.g. + Child focused ecommerce company Zulily filed a $2.6B IPO, but got very little attention. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740927 I'd also note that there…
Holy hell, Karmaloop is eyeing an IPO? That's insane, they were always this street wear boutique to me.
Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#93Ugh. Let's talk about media.
Commercially speaking, media has one goal - procuring eyeballs. Just because eyeballs aren't fixated on a particular story doesn't make it sad, it just means it's not a compelling story.
So why is WhatsApp a compelling story?
1. Broke conventions - company only had 55 employees and valued at $19b. This isn't normal for us. A telecommunication company selling for $9.5b makes sense.
2. Story of triumph - the founder of WhatsApp was "from a small village in Ukraine". You can't get any more American than this my friends.
You see, America is quite possibly the greatest marketing engine in the world. This is what separates itself from the rest of the world. We are engrained story tellers, not because of some magical gene inherited, but rather because we know good stories sell well.
Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of great risk for great reward is a myth. The risk that the founder of Facebook assumed for example was close to nil, because he didn't have any job or money to start with. He risked the precious time that he would otherwise use to party at some Harvard fraternity. Similarly for so many other tech founders. They just happened to do well something that they liked at the right time. There are many small busine…
Risk is relative. For a broke college student to quit school, move across the country, have no (or little) income, all for an idea that they have no clue will work is a huge risk. In the same vein, someone quitting their job after having already committed to car payments, house payments, and alimony is also a huge risk.
He went to Philips-Exeter. He wasn't exactly broke.
Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#95ONO really was an startup? I don't think that any startup, in the HN sense(garage startup), has the financial strength to become overnight a cable company.
Anyway, I haven't heard about this "guy", Eugenio Galdon, and it seems that he was the chief advisor of Calvo Sotelo, former president of Spain.
So, in my opinion, this is hardly news. This is a typical story of spanish success, where a "well connected" person, with the financial help of big investors, takes advantage of regulatory and (foreign) technological changes.
Panoramio, idealista... even Inditex are real spanish startups, much better examples of entrepeneurship.
Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#96This has very little to do with national moods/prejudices and much more to do with boring/atypical industries vs. hot consumer ones. ONO got no attention largely because it's "boring" to a mass audience. There are plenty of examples of this domestically, e.g. + Child focused ecommerce company Zulily filed a $2.6B IPO, but got very little attention. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740927 I'd also note that there…
> Nearly a quarter of the top 20 projects
So, a fifth?
Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#97This has very little to do with national moods/prejudices and much more to do with boring/atypical industries vs. hot consumer ones. ONO got no attention largely because it's "boring" to a mass audience. There are plenty of examples of this domestically, e.g. + Child focused ecommerce company Zulily filed a $2.6B IPO, but got very little attention. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740927 I'd also note that there…
I completly agree with this: When Tuenti (the Facebook of Spain) was sold it was very very covered in the press (in Spain and in all Europe) although it was “only” a 70MM adquisition, as you say, is not how big is the sucesss or how much money is done, is how boring or how popular the startup is what makes how much cover the news get.
Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I think in Denmark the media mainly notices American and Danish business, and not as much those from rest of Europe, unless they do something that really impacts people. People definitely care about what Danish businesses are doing. It's true that monetary success isn't the only measure people care about, e.g. Copenhagen Suborbitals, a nonprofit, gets a ton of startup-like tech press. But people also care about…
The problem is that isn't making the news even in Spain..
When Tuenti (the Facebook of Spain) was sold it was very very covered in the press (in Spain and in all Europe) although it was “only” a 70MM adquisition, is not how big is the sucesss or how much money is done, is how boring or how popular the startup is what makes how much cover the news get.
Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit. What is crass is the perspective that Americans are unreflectingly capitalistic and pre-occupied with monetary success. Most business owners I know started their business because they saw a need for something and they wanted to deliver what was needed. Financial success is important because it allows their organization to continue functioning but it's hardly the top motivator for business owners I've spoken…
You have this thing called "The American Dream" and you have an entire cultural history tied to self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier"... Clearly every single american isnt subject to the same cultural pre-occupations, that's absurd. But there are only certain cultural phenomena possible in one place or another. A right-wing party in the UK could not even begin to use any of the ideas or rhetori…
> A considerable amount has been written by the european experience of america and an almost ubquitious theme in the accounts is "the feeling of unlimited possibility", an ostentatiousness and pre-occupation with wealth, etc.
You say "etc." there like those two things are related in some way and a reader could figure out how to extrapolate. Surely the feeling of unlimited possibility does not entail ostentatiousness and preoccupation with wealth? They're just two things that you ascribe to Americans without much argument.
The "American Dream" is an idea about the distribution of money in a society, not about money itself. If it were just about money, lottery winners would be considered realizations of the American Dream. If it were even about success in business, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies would be heroes in American society. (From political debates to popular media, they're decidedly not.) If there were some government policy by which all Americans could be made filthy rich (ignoring the intrinsic impossibility of that), I don't think anyone would consider that a realization of the American Dream either. The dream assumes that money is a central value in society, of course, but maybe that's because things like inner peace, being a good person, and deeper notions of happiness haven't historically been explicitly constrained in so many human societies the way the ability to accumulate money has.
Out of curiosity: if Americans are prototypically self-motivated and desire to make money, push the frontier, explore, and invent, and that Europeans don't (as a culture) dream of those things, do Europeans have widely shared dreams? What are they?
Re: ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
#100[deleted]