Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

To be fair, US model produces both. The same regulatory and cultural burden that makes EU an infertile ground for money-burning billion-dollar scams also makes it harder for decent companies to create useful innovations[0] in general.

I feel we could use a little more easy capital in double-digit million € range, but retain or even improve the friction above low triple-digit million €. Basically: experimentation is good. Unchecked growth from zero to multinational behemoth is not always so good.

There are two hard problems though:

1. At the lower end, it's very hard to distinguish a legit experimentation from a scam. We already have too many fly-by-night small businesses preying on the population. I'm not sure how to fuel more legit startups without making the latter problem worse - as we can tell from the EU grants, adding more strings tends to kill good businesses faster than bad ones.

2. At the upper end, big corporations are geopolitical weapons. Nations and blocs like EU are always in conflict with others; currently, it's mostly economical warfare. This means that any country or bloc tends to be happy if they can spawn a billion-dollar company.

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[0] - Where by "useful innovation" I mean one that's ultimately yielding a net positive value for the society, and is not purely a business model innovation like it's common with so many hot tech companies these days.

UIPath has a huge development office in Bucharest, most of the company is there.

Don't kid yourself, he went to NY for the money :-))

> 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.

You can't paint all of Europe with the same brush, and whilst most of Europe may be in the single market, they're not the "same" market. In my experience, there is a high variance amongst European countries (Eurozone or not) in risk-aversion vs risk-tolerance, which seems to be echoed in some studies/observations[1]. I've never really been able to see what the main factors that determine this may be -- I used to think it was correlated to how much each country participates in the global economy, but that would explain UK and Spain, but not Germany.

I also find it a bit narrow-minded to think of Europe as risk-averse simply by judging their attitudes towards tech investments. Spain (where I'm from) definitely appears to be one of the most risk-tolerant EU countries when you look at certain sectors and our foreign investments in infrastructure and other types of construction, but one of the most risk-averse when it comes to tech. If I were to speculate (and I stress, speculate), it seems to be influenced by the type of markets with capital that we have access to: the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. This is also the case when you think of partially publicly funded projects that are quite risky -- especially in countries that are politically unstable like ours. A perfect example would be renewable energies, which would have been the great success story in Spain until new legislation practically killed any hopes of it being eventually profitable.

Germany, on the other hand, seems risk-averse _even_ within their own main domains (industrial engineering, automotive, etc). They also have a big global presence and prestige/reputation, but I have never lived or worked in Germany so I wouldn't even dare speculate why this is the case. I've often seen the finger pointed at bureaucracy, but other countries with similar levels of bureaucracy and hurdles don't seem to be as risk-averse. Different cultures, I reckon.

The UK (where I now live) on the other hand was one of the most risk-tolerant countries in the EU (until their departure) when you think of tech investments. The fact that they speak in English and have a strong services economy helps in that respect, I would guess. I'm definitely not an expert.

1. https://voxeu.org/article/cross-country-differences-risk-att...

> Yes that is the business model and business is good.

Not necessarily. A "wasteland where nothing grows" is obviously bad, but... there's a reason we don't let nature to optimize crops for growth, nor do we do it ourselves. We grow crops for food. We literally care about the fruits of their labor. And so is with businesses - the social value of a business is in the prosperity it creates for the people.

The SV growth model, at the extreme, is overfitting the "growth -> acquisition" path - often creating negative value for the society, by disrupting an existing market with an offering that's too good to be true, subsidized by infinite investor money, and then leaving a gaping void after burning out or getting acquired. This would be like a crop plant that first releases poison into the soil, killing competing crop species, then sucks out all nutrients and dies without producing edible fruit. It's not something you'd like to grow on your field either.