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I never said we can't do it. We educate good enough people - just look at some of the key technical people at the american giants - Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Ur

I never said we can't do it. We educate good enough people - just look at some of the key technical people at the american giants - Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Urs Hölzle at Google, Johnny Ive at Apple. There are technical reasons - lack of deep VC capital markets and data protection laws as you point out. There are also cultural reasons - we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant.

Nanite 9y ago
> we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant. This is what happened to Booking.com, sold to Priceline back in 2005 for about $150M due to lack of growth capital, currently Booking.com accounts for 70% of Priceline's revenue, which, with some handwaving, would amount to a virtual market cap of 50+ Billion $ if hypothetically they had continued on their own.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cJ0th 9y ago
> data protection laws as you point out I don't think data protection is our problem. For one thing, if our government really meant it (which they don't), we could build businesses that attract customers from all over the world who need strong data protection laws they can't find anywhere else. For another thing, there probably is a huge, unexplored market for all kinds of software which would be in line with the current law. However, there are many roadblocks that hinder people from experimenting, like too much bureaucracy and financial dangers (UBI might come in handy here) And then there are "the little things". Take that law which urges you to fully disclose your address on your website. If I had build twitter, without knowing how it is going to turn out, I would not want my boss to be able to find out what I do in my spare time. In other words, I wouldn't have put it online.