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Europe's Software Problem

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Re: Europe's Software Problem

#391

Post by jbverschoor »

cblconfederate wrote: post #134
MangoCoffee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but google, facebook, apple...etc. already huge in US with vast amount of resources before they enter foreign market. a start up in US/China have one big market for them to grow domestically and gain enough resources before entering foreign market. lets say you are a small German start up. is German big enough to grow and gain enough resources before you enter say Estonia? edit: isn't Rocket Internet business model i…

facebook entered europe at the same time as US and there were even a lot of european competitors. It did not really displace them, what happened is their competitors lacked to motivation to outcompete facebook in europe. The only remnant of that era is VK for obvious reasons (both it and Yandex are actually pretty good though not great)

No it didn’t. It stayed in the US until it blew up.

They did win. Not because the lack of innovation. Because the international aspect of Facebook.

Friends from holidays, people using Facebook abroad etc.

Facebook itself is always lagging the market, and then either copy or buy the thing that’s hot at that point.

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#392

Post by anthk »

arcturus17 wrote: post #314
kgwgk wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Spain was razed to the ground during the Civil War [...] same goes for Germany indeed" I wouldn't say that Spain was "razed to the ground" compared to Germany.

Yes, it is an exaggeration while in the case of Germany it’s literal (though in Spain, a few towns were razed, and many were heavily shelled) People eating cats and rats off the streets is not an exaggeration however - there is abundant oral testimony to support that. The point is that the damage hardly justifies talking about economies who live off inherited wealth, in either case.

There is an old saying in Spain meaning "they scammed you": Te han dado gato por libre (They gave you cat -meal- as hare). So, yes. after the civil war and Francoist repression Spain was utterly crushed down.

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#393

Post by jbverschoor »

MatthewMcDonald wrote: post #55
imNotTheProb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have LLCs?

I don't know about the bankruptcy laws, but Germany's GMBH (similar to an LLC) requires 25k in capital to get started.

It used to be 18k here. Not anymore. However an LLC will provide you with almost no protection anymore.

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#394

Post by aliasEli »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #200
sime2009 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about Germany after WWI?

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#395

Post by jbverschoor »

Bayart wrote: post #153
zepto wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful technology it's quite funny. I see this said, and it was true two decades ago, but I’m not aware of any way it’s true now. What banking can you do in Europe that you can’t do in the US?

Instant bank transfers over SEPA for one, without third party payment processor involved.

Not supported everywhere

Direct debit not supported everywhere. Important for saas

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#396

Post by jbverschoor »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #249
notanormalnerd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to highlight this. There is always talk about a european market, but it is more like 27 markets with one access ticket. You have 27 languages, 27 cultures, 27 political systems, 27 markets, 27 levels of development and infrastructure. Although you have a market of 300 million consumers, they all have different spending habits, different spending power, different needs... America is one market of 300 million pe…

>You have 27 languages, 27 cultures, 27 political systems, 27 markets, 27 levels of development and infrastructure. If I look at most of my European sales they are in Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. The UK was in that list until Brexit. I don't think you need to target all 27, at least not until you are well established.

And suddenly your 300m market is only 100m people

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#397

Post by jbverschoor »

seu wrote: post #90

> European investors specifically are much more interested in traditional business plans than US venture capitalists. “Data is the new oil” does not translate well into German, French or Spanish. > In addition, with the GDPR, NIS (2) Directive & other regulations, data in Europe is definitely more “the new toxic waste”. It is in any case not a business plan. > So not only do we lack the imagination to launch free pla…

Protecting? They’re dining small companies millions, but fail to do anything against “big tech”

The whole gdpr is a big mess.

In terms of investors, there is barely any seed capital. There is series A/B, but the amounts are smaller than a typical seed round. They need to see profits from day one

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#398

Post by boruto »

jbverschoor wrote: post #382
emj wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can attest to this. We maintain different sales channels for all EU countries.

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#399

Post by tored »

hardolaf wrote: post #278
fvdessen wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Europe, at least Sweden, used to have this approach for the traditional industry, e.g. companies like Ericsson, SAAB, Volvo, is/was all heavily involved in the Swedish defense industry with government backing and at the same time they sold consumer products.

Perhaps the ending of the cold war ended this policy, thus a boom of new companies never took place.

Re: Europe's Software Problem

#400

Post by yreg »

w4rh4wk5 wrote: post #37
ema wrote: post #15

I think a law that forbids blocking third party clients (either through terms&conditions or technical means) would level the playing field a bit. Though I see issues around balancing the need of platforms to update their APIs and an API update essentially blocking third party clients who don't keep pace.

While I'd appreciate such a law, I doubt it would work in practice. First-party can turn it into a cat-and-mouse game where they'll introduce some minor changes that require third-party apps to be updated over and over again. We've seen this happen with some education related app / system in Sweden where people built a better third-party app / client. Finding a decent, enforceable solution this way is certainly not t…

A similar thing is part of the PSD2 regulation[0]. It forces banks to open APIs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive

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