Absolutely spot-on. Companies here usually hire the best people for their budget, not for their bottom-line. The positive side of this comes to my mind too howe

Absolutely spot-on. Companies here usually hire the best people for their budget, not for their bottom-line. The positive side of this comes to my mind too however, which is also a very German trait. There ARE a lot of very successful digital companies in their niches (even global players) - just right now Adjust, Remerge, Sociomantic and others come to my mind. However, German companies often times for a lot of cultural reasons stop growing at some point and lacking the ambition for total world domination, explaining the lack of showing up at the very top of the list, as measured by the OP. I do observe a lot of the tradition of the German Mittelstand continuing in the mindset of current start-ups. Through the usually frugal, social and grounded approach that Germans are taking, you rather get a lot of successful medium sized companies, rather than a few A players. What you need for those is usually a single, ultra-ambitioned founder investing decades of their life. The American make-or-break mentality and winner-takes-it-all attitude is much better at producing those - but also at the cost of leaving lots of smaller companies and lesser skilled people behind.