> raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard This. I am European but live and work in US. Simply put, US wins hands down because they: - have resources, read $$$$ - take risk - have the right entrepreneurial mindset Europe? let's just say they are not even close.
In Europe, everybody wants to be a manager because mere developers is not high enough status. In the US, a 45yo DB engineer is akin to highly skilled wizard.
What country is that? Germany? France?
In Sweden it is the opposite because
1) more responsibilities
2) salary increase too small (and taxes too high, you can end up in the wrong bracket)
3) flat hierarchy (Du reform)
And just to add to this, from a certain level (revenue) that's not that high (and depends on idividual states) you need a presence (VAT registration) and a business bank account in the country you're selling your services/goods in, even if you're not actually located there. E.g. a medium sized online shop based in the Czech Republic that is shipping to Hungary. Now imagine this if you're shipping to many EU states...…
Might have been true at some point, but nowdays even smaller payments are easy to send between EU banks. VAT payment is done in your home country, and you can deduct the VAT. The social aspect is harder; the amount of work to get a consistent revenue stream from another EU country can be enormous compared to doing buisness in another city in your own country. There are people who specialize in sales between EU states…
Plain incorrect for consumer VAT. You have to charge VAT based on the origin of your customer. Different percentages, different ways to figure out the origin of your customer. For businesses you can do reverse VAT, and you’ll have to ask and check that.
Bank payments are easy yes, but credit cards are not ubiquitous, online payments are different in all countries, direct debit is not always supported across countries.
Want to establish a business in Europe? Good luck wasting 150 hours a month only for compliance with billions of laws and spending the rest 10 hours for the actual development.
> you need to hire german speaking people and that means opening a Sales Office in Germany No you don't need that. You can have your German speaking people move to Italy and work from there. That's the whole point of the EU. The same for VAT, you can register in one country and have that sent to multiple countries according to your sales. No presence needed
As EUropean living in a different country for work, is not that easy at all. Try to do your taxes in Swedish or German or French.. Or try to have a social life with people that while could speak English will probably switch to their own language when in more than 2-3 person. Yes of course you can learn the language, but dont think you can be proficient in a couple of year, especially if working 40h/week, and still yo…
> will probably switch to their own language when in more than 2-3 person.
That's just rude and why would you want to socialise with such people. I had some great experiences and even when I was the only person not speaking the local language, everyone spoke English in my presence. There is plenty of people that have standards and if you cannot find them at a given time, just focus on something else.
Hot take: the problems here are cultural. Consider these data points: 1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you still see echoes of this "pioneering"…
>Being comfortable makes you less risk-averse, even lazy Do you mean more risk-averse? Anyway, to comment on this point. Non-Europeans, get quite a few things mixed up. >We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent. The bigger problem is two-fold and has to do with your second point: 1. Europeans have very se…
> Loose mandatory holidays kinda suck to work with for bigger projects, at best you can weave them together with your PTO.
those are like a few days per year
it's maybe relevant once or twice a year
>Even working 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started doing
> 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,…
> Also: being a software engineer/computer programmer in Europe is not as sexy as it is in USA. It's getting better, yes, but here the "engineer" is the last monkey. Managers and sales are the ones who get the credit. So, European mentality also plays a role here. 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 bu…
Why would you assume they’d change? They will simply go to non tech companies and “manage “people there
My favorite European tech company is Atmel (Norway), which developed the AVR-8 microcontroller which is in the original Arduino (Italian). Particularly, Atmel made the last 8-bit microprocessor which was just a bit more carefully thought out than everything else on the market and carefully positioned to give a lot of bang per buck. Atmel got bought by Microchip (San Jose, USA) Today when I think of Europe I think of…
The absolute vast majority of "GDPR popups" are actually illegal under GDPR. Unfortunately, law enforcement has been asleep at the wheel.
Unfortunately the law was so bad even its creators can’t implement/understand/respect it.
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.
Or that people pay great % in tax and they cannot afford to save their own money to start a business. They need to apply for government grants instead (which people who decided about them can be corrupt) or share their business with someone from the start. That's a buzz killer.
Funnily big corporation are free to avoid tax as they please, because the high earners won't even turn to the streets to protest so they can be taxed through the nose.
Generally I define a 3rd world country as a place that has a lot of inequality, corruption across the board, poor to no worker protection, failing and antiquated infrastructure, no free access to health care, high incarceration rate, persecution of journalists, a large working poor population with no ability to move up the social ladder, etc. Which one of those does the US not have?
The US has worker protections and social mobility, so you're flat-out wrong on two of your points. And actually the US has free access to health care via a variety of programs, it's just not universal, but I'll concede that's being pedantic. Every country is going to have inequality, corruption, antiquated infrastructure, and persecution of journalists, so those are meaningless unless you provide some sort of compari…
Comparing all of these points against Western Europe, the US is objectively behind. There's your point of comparison. Western Europe has far more expansive worker protections (just look at "right-to-work" states, you can get fired for any reason whatsoever), far more encompassing free healthcare (not just for the poor and older individuals, Medicare and Medicaid is what you're referring to I presume right? There are no other programs for free healthcare in the US), far freer press (according to the World Press Freedom Index, the US is 44th, most Western European states are higher), infrastructure is not crumbling in Western Europe in the same way it is in the US, far lower inequality (this is obvious, check any inequality index), less corruption, on what point exactly of these is the US better than Western Europe?
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
It's not for Amazon... And historically it's taken forever for streaming services, etc. to find their way. Lol, I have HBO Nordic, as in they literally wrote a dedicated platform for serving HBO to Scandinavia! If you start a tech company you start with customers in the US because the market is huge.
We finally have prime since a year. I had that almost 15 years ago in the US.
Actually. We only got Amazon.nl since a year or 2. Bevroren that we had to use the German Amazon
We still don’t have HomePod, or Dutch swiping keyboards. We’re always in the late batch of iPhones