301–310 of 585 posts
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This is the "broken window fallacy" on steroids. There is no net benefit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
How so? It's pretty axiomatic that destruction and rebuilding cycle that follows a continental-scale war lead to widespread investment and an economic boom.
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The reason the US has freely flowing funding is because the VC has an immense amount of cash from the previous generations of successful Unicorns. So why was it (and still is) easier to raise unicorns in the USA ? The thing that separate the internet economy with the traditional is the massive network effects that makes it a winner take all game. And at that game the USA has a massive home advantage with a huge cultu…
> The reason the US has freely flowing funding is because the VC has an immense amount of cash from the previous generations of successful Unicorns. So why was it (and still is) easier to raise unicorns in the USA ? You're ignoring that all of this money initially came from massive investment by the Defense Advanced Projects Administration (DARPA) which funded the semiconductor industry in its infancy, which funded t…
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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…
> a "third world country with a Gucci belt" (as someone put it) for everyone except the 1% The median American is much richer than the median European.
Also access to free education, free healthcare and so on.
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…
> 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. And yet Silicon Valley lies in one of the states with the most employee friendly regulation in the US wrt worker protection, paid overtime etc.: https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Bes...
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Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA. Similar to the US, they also pay less in taxes than the middle class. I wonder if Sweden has higher funding than the rest of the continent?
Almost all of them are old people outside of tech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_billionaires_b...
The EU should just pay anybody who makes Open Source contributions. Problem solved. Europeans get their own tech stack. Can compete again with US companies, as the all the cost for building infrastructure is externalized.
And I fully agree that FOSS should be paid collectively like civil infrastructure.
But we need to be careful with the freeloaders. Big companies coopted FOSS into unpaid labor: anything released with permissive licenses can be proprietarized by SaaS/Cloud companies. Almost always US based.
This would turn European financial contributions to FOSS into a gift for FAANGs.
This is why the European Union Public Licence is copyleft and compatible with GPL. But it's not enough.
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It's not a loan from a bank. It's an investment, and the nature of investments are that some fail. It's pretty wild that founders would need to pay back this money. That would have a massive drag on any risk taking or innovation. The entire point of venture capital and similar funding mechanisms is that in exchange for a potential massive return on investment, funders are willing to lose everything.
Loans from the bank if they are tied to you personally. A delaware c-corp has pretty good protections.
Bank strategy is to avoid risk, while VC strategy is to take risks.
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> In the 2013 list, approximately 40 percent of Sweden’s billionaires are self-made while 60 percent inherited their wealth. In the United States, by contrast, 70 percent of billionaires are self-made while around 30 percent inherited their wealth. Once we exclude inherited wealth, the United States has around 1 self-made billionaire per million inhabitants compared to 0.6 for Sweden. https://www.nationalreview.com/t…
50% of all wealth in the United States is inherited by the top 5% wealthiest families. 60% of all wealth in the United States is inherited.
We're talking about how billionaires make their wealth as a proxy for entrepreneurship. It makes no sense to talk about how many billionaires Sweden has as a measure for their entrepreneurship if most of them inherited their wealth.
Some of the stuff in this article may be fine, and trying to raise money is certainly harder in Europe, but I thought one of the biggest drags on Europe's tech industry is poor pay for engineers and other tech talent? In the U.S., going into a tech career can be one of the best ways to make a high salary quickly -- especially without needing an advanced degree. Without this incentive, you'll have a lot less people pu…