Taking Risk

Even if your country is not particularly export-driven but you participate in competitive markets, the same effect may apply. For example, the US lost many manufacturing jobs to China, because American salaries were not competitive (low) enough.

Finland is sometimes said to be a country of engineers, for historical and cultural reasons. That doesn't mean engineers are paid well. On the contrary, engineer salaries are low and Finnish engineers like to complain how much more they would earn in Germany. What it does mean is that engineers have a higher social status than in most Western countries, and a lot of people want to be engineers. Finnish companies can hire good engineers with little money.

Finnish companies have traditionally been good at developing technology and bad at commercializing it. Explanations vary, from the low quality of business leadership to the lack of domestic capital; from the small size of the domestic market to foreign companies buying successful startups; from the cultural dominance of heavy industry to the culture of respecting laws and regulations.

The UK today is world leading in a few industries. Which is underselling it a bit because I suspect even North Korea is world leading in something. The UK have a bit of wealth left over from the empire and some traditions they can be proud of in amongst a sea of fairly average policies and people. Still a nice place to live if you can handle the weather. Not really a leader, more a US follower.

1. An expectation that someone else will solve their problem, rather than an expectation of self-reliance.

2. A suspicion of anyone who thinks they have a good idea, as if that person is saying they're better than their peers and needs a comeuppance

3. A rejection of any kind of dream that entails class mobility, where the legitimate desires of people are to do something that fits the class they grew up in and "work to live" instead of "live to work" so they can spend as much time futzing about with friends and family rather than growing their family's class.

Many commentators in this thread have mentioned other aspects, but I think these three things are huge cultural drivers against entrepreneurship. In the US, when you found a startup, you are taking a financial risk, possibly a career risk, but you aren't taking a personal relationship risk or societal risk in the same way you are in Europe. In most countries in Europe, the people around you will think you are becoming too big for your britches the moment you entertain starting your own company, especially to do anything new, and will either cease their relationships with you or actively seek to tear you down socially. Not only is the financial risk larger, both in relative terms and in the legal structure, but the social and relationship risk that's non-existent in the US looms large in Europe. People will legitimately think you're a bad person who thinks you're too good to be around your peers for trying to do something more than the same job your father and uncle do.

#1 above is especially insidious as well, because most of the ways successful startups get founded is by finding a problem to solve and figuring out what you'd want to do to solve it for yourself. If you don't go and do this, it's really difficult to find any sort of product-market fit that resonates on anything but a tiny fractional basis. If you want to found a global company, you need to be able to devise /the/ solution to a problem, at scale, and if you are operating under the expectation that any meaningful problem has either already been solved or is the responsibility of some other entity, you won't do this, you won't have the right mentality.

    > Finnish companies have traditionally been good at developing technology and bad at commercializing it.

    > As an immigrant to the UK I'm continually surprised on how poor life here actually is.