141–150 of 585 posts
EU is not one market. its 27 markets with different language, history, culture, preferences...etc. is it even worth the time and efforts?
It is one market for google, facebook, apple etc. They all succeeded and there's no reason a successful EU company wouldn't become european and essentially global. But for this to happen u have to have companies that grow
The author's explanation for the lack of european tech companies is that almost all software relies on business models other then charging money, and for various reasons european companies aren't able to use these business models. This doesn't seem sufficient. For three of the five big US tech companies - Microsoft, Apple and Amazon - the main business model is charging money. If the author's explanation is correct,…
Once it became clear that ads were a bit more profitable than that, the success of Google/FB led to a tidal wave of VC capital searching for opportunities that looked just like those. So suddenly everyone is trying to give their service away for free and make it up on {ads, volume}.
I guess I feel very mixed about this, being a European who is now starting his own software company (taking a break from coding for a few mins at the moment). I remember when I was in my early 20s, before YouTube was acquired, my mother pointed at it and said, "Why couldn't you have made that?". My response was to laugh and say, mum, look, you can't pay for video streaming using banner ads. Streaming is expensive and banner ads don't earn much money.
Was I right? Wrong? I still am not sure. YouTube may or may not be profitable. It was extremely ambiguous to what extent Google's businesses outside of web and content ads made money when I was working there, although that was years ago, so of course it may be very different now. Obviously the YouTube founders did very well out of it, but their business model was basically "sell the company to someone who can save us, or die trying". Whether it's European culture or parental expectations I don't know, but deep down I didn't and still don't feel like that is a truly honourable way to create and run a business. I would feel guilty and bad if I were hiring people to a company without having the foggiest idea of how to ever pay their salaries, nor would I feel comfortable pitching to investors a firm whose business model was clearly unworkable. Yet, this is the standard business strategy in the Valley.
Years later I found myself in the offices of a16z. I wasn't there to pitch, although the receptionist assumed I was. I'd been invited to discuss an app I'd written that had attracted their attention. I told them the app was open source and I wouldn't take their money because I had no idea what its business model could be.
A mistake? Maybe. European? Very.
I could now go raise funds for my new venture, and maybe at some point I will. Plenty of investors have expressed interest. But, fundamentally, I still don't want to. It feels somehow like "cheating" to create a business that doesn't really make money. Or if not cheating then at least somehow not quite something you can be proud of. Certainly, the American way of creating a startup that loses money for years would not at all impress my friends, family or fiancé. They would in fact see that as failure, not success.
And I'm OK with that. So I'm probably destined to create another small European software company that may or may not one day sell to a bigger US firm. Don't get me wrong. I dream big. But deep down I know that if I attract too much attention I'll always be at risk of being steamrollered by a "success is failure" US VC backed company that has no idea how to become sustainable, but might somehow stumble onto a plan anyway and if it doesn't, well the VCs will force one of their other investments to make an acquihire and somehow it'll work out so that everyone can save face. Bankruptcy is after all, basically unheard of in the Valley, and spending other people's money for a decade is lionized.
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> In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people. The US has those things and it's turning into a "third world country with a Gucci belt" (as someone put it) for everyone except the 1% and the indispensable knowledge worker class that can't be automated away or juiced dry for all the productivity they are capa…
>As a European, I can only hope that our culture doesn't degrade itself to that degree. The question is whether Europe will be able to maintain its wealth - which is the main thing that makes possible the luxury of having a more relaxed lifestyle - in the long term while falling behind economically. Most of Europe's wealth is based around old world economy.
Europes wealth is based, to a large extent, on hardware and a huge number of wealthy citizens. As long as hardware is a thing (not talking electronics but stuff like cars and so on), and we manage to not cut of the poorer 20-30% of society, Europe should do fine.
> For one, we lack the imagination and vision to launch something without knowing how it might eventually make money I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest barrier for any person who wants to launch something is: paperwork around establishing a company. In some countries you have to pay every month some amount of money if you want to be a freelancer, in others you need to setup a sole proprietorship,…
Eventually those manager and sales people will learn that they need developers to build stuff, or else they can't manage anyone because nothing has been built or sell products that don't exist.
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But not the majority of people
Depends on what you consider a "user". You're a user of this website too, presumably running on Linux.
But almost no-one uses Linux for general computing because open source requires configuration to be usable.
This problem will never get fixed. The author forgot to mention in depth the main reason why EU isn't even in the game: culture. In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people. A lot of third world countries are years ahead of the whole EU continent in that aspect. I say this because I live in Europe for the q…
My brother works long hours for a company that recently raised 20 millions, all of that in France. Europe is composed of many people, and many of them have a big growth mindset and ambitions. Ambition is not frowned upon, at least not in my circles. Bureaucracy is surprisingly easy to deal with.
The other thing is that people from Europe already know that if they want to work hard and earn lots of money, they can just go to the USA. But things are changing and now people build things in Europe. I think you have a very reductive vision of European people. I'll also add that "Europe" doesn't have a culture as a whole. I'm French, I'm surprised by how Italians do things, same with Germans. We are composed of different countries with rich histories and culture. Grouping everything as "European" is the same as saying "African", it hides most of the reality and complexity of the world.
Once again, proof that no good deed goes unpunished. It's a credit to Europe's social values that they find themselves prey to the profit-first institutions of Silicon Valley. And lest we forget, the world-changing beneficence of the internet and Linux originated from a Swiss lab and a Finn.
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GP's phrasing is wrong but there is a point there - it is much easier to achieve success and then regulate and distribute its benefits than to go the other way round. I am not a fan of unbridled capitalism a la the USA and fully agree that more countries should strive to reach European levels of worker and civil rights... however, there is validity to the statement that Europe is currently coasting along on the spoil…
> Europe is currently coasting along on the spoils of centuries of loot and plunder. A lavish, comfortable lifestyle was handed to the citizens of western europe Well, apart from the whole WW2 business. This is the trouble with generalisations across the continent, the closer you look the less well they fit. And if you look across a continent and back in time, the situation varies even further. Germany used to be "th…
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Firefox is roughly as good as any other browser, which is to say it does some things better and some things worse, and many things roughly the same. Blender is one of the 2 or 3 dominant tools in its field. It's a niche field, so it's not for office work, but is nevertheless an incredible tool by any standard. For almost anyone's purposes, LibreOffice is better than any closed source equivalent tool (though some of t…
You had me at LibreOffice. It struggles to render a blank page on a mac (something to do with retina resolution which is default since 2012). I've tried to use it on all supported operating systems, but everywhere it's a slow starting, glitchy mess. Still the best OSS way to interop with Office documents, but not something I would classify as "stellar".
I take offense at such massive overgeneralizations as "Europe lacks imagination." What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of hundred actually are successful. This kills business models which cannot show any profit whatsoever, and a large portion of the remainder are killed by data regulations forbidding "alternate paths of monetization" (to put i…
> What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of hundred actually are successful Might this be a flip side of regulations that combat economic inequality? If so, the two should not be addressed as separate issues. But frontpage HN posts tend to be "Applauding Europes' long vacations and progressive taxes" and "Bemoaning Europe's lack of VCs with fuck…
This was at a time when the US was actually more egalitarian than Europe.