While there certainly is more cultural diversity across Europe than within the US, this article overlooks some other fundamental problems faced by new businesse

While there certainly is more cultural diversity across Europe than within the US, this article overlooks some other fundamental problems faced by new businesses in Europe as they try to scale out to different markets. For one thing, you have to figure out how customers can pay you. This is not a trivial problem, particularly for B2C companies, because there is nothing even resembling a universal method of payment. Credit cards are near universal in some countries but hardly used in others. Direct bank charging via SEPA or other Direct Debit schemes is popular in some countries but not others. There are national schemes that are widely used but only in one country. Then there are the tax rules. The EU is absurdly bad at this, as anyone affected by the VAT rules can tell you. I've talked with local businesses here in Cambridge UK that are considerably larger than any of mine, and some of them still say that with hindsight they would have simply dropped all of their customers from within the EU but outside the UK when the rules changed last year, because the compliance costs simply aren't justified. There are also very different legal environments in fields like consumer protection and intellectual property, which can have a big impact depending on your line of business. And finally, there are the overheads of starting and running a business at all, which obviously is a prerequisite to scaling. The UK is regarded as relatively business-friendly compared to some of our European neighbours, yet the current government has already hurt small business owners with not one but two major tax hits since taking office last year. Those apply even for small all-director businesses, which might be the case for the stereotype three-guys-in-a-garage kind of startup, but as soon as you take on any employees at all you're in for a whole new world of joyous regulations, form-filling, cash-grabbing and statutory obligations. It's a crazy situation that makes setting up a real company that can grow and create jobs a significantly worse proposition both financially and in terms of regulatory overheads than just going it alone or in a small group and all being self-employed. And as I said, this is in the UK, which is paradise for entrepreneurs compared to some other European nations. Ultimately, the factors that give startups the best chances to become established and then scale up are mostly about flexibility and moving money around easily. You can go too far -- I wouldn't want to give up reasonable protections for employees to exploit them in the way that US companies routinely do, for example -- but in general, most of Europe has a lot to learn from our friends in other developed economies about those two key areas.