8 ms·

Europe has none of the largest tech companies. The large ones that do exist were founded a long time ago, like SAP. Their startup pipeline is weak and IMO it’s

Europe has none of the largest tech companies. The large ones that do exist were founded a long time ago, like SAP. Their startup pipeline is weak and IMO it’s all because of government policies, as there are huge numbers of highly talented people in Europe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_technology_companies_by_revenue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_technology_c...

Barrin92 7y ago
it's because Europe is a continent of 20+ different large languages and cultures. In Sweden everybody speaks Swedish and nobody uses cash. In Germany, nobody speaks Swedish and everyone uses cash. There is no homogenous market like in the US or China where you can blow up some product to 300+ million people. That's the reason why there are fewer startups in Europe. Europe has plenty of large technology companies if one stops equating technology with "user facing smartphone application". They just happen to be export oriented, or pharmaceutical or manufacturing and transport companies. Trying to copy the US or China in producing rapidly growing startup companies is in my opinion foolish and we shouldn't buy into the constant hype of just trying to emulate America, but rather aim to increase where European companies advantages lie, in integrating high technology into existing economic sectors that integrate with industrial production. Not only is this much better suited to the economic and social European environment that simply isn't accepting of the "break the rules, worry about the problems later" mentality of internet statups, it's also arguably much more equitable and reaches a larger section of the labour market.
- swebs 7y ago
  >it's because Europe is a continent of 20+ different large languages and cultures. In Sweden everybody speaks Swedish and nobody uses cash. In Germany, nobody speaks Swedish and everyone uses cash. How much does that matter though? You could just release your app/site/whatever in English and instantly have access to the US market.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    The same things that make it hard to make one app for all of the EU also make it hard to make an app for the USA from outside the USA. Even if you hire a UK or Éire citizen for their English skills, you have all the cultural reasons that means Tesco isn’t a supermarket brand in the USA and Walmart isn’t a supermarket brand in the UK even though both are English speaking nations. The language issues are also substantial, even though the cultural output of Hollywood has made it easier for many EU citizens to learn English than each other’s languages.
    - shanemhansen 7y ago
      Walmart owns ASDA, or at least they did until recently.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        Yes, but irrelevant. The details of the Walmart brand are essentially unknown in the UK, and the very fact that Walmart are now trying to sell ASDA for almost the same nominal amount they bought it for 20 years ago demonstrates the exact difficulty I was referring to.
  - MisterBastahrd 7y ago
    Because when I want to talk to someone for support, especially when it's a small business that might be slower to addressing my support concerns because of a lack of resources, I want to speak to a native English speaker I can understand with an 800 number. US companies get that baked in. Everyone else has to grow to become that.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    It does, the citizens of different countries don't care or know each other, anyone hardly knows how EU works or what people even do in Brussels. You have news stations that are literally for 300mil people. Same with every startup and product.
- dgellow 7y ago
  ^ this, exactly. Europe is definitely not one big unique market, every country is a different one with its own specificity. They happen to share some regulation and to (almost all) use the same currency but they are quite different in their user behaviours and expectations.
- bobloblaw45 7y ago
  Well I mean you also have smaller individual countries like Israel that don't seem to do too bad.
bitL 7y ago
A typical EU startup: - hey, we are startup, we can't pay you much, is that OK? - well, we can't really compensate you with stock options, those are for founders - oh no, your opinion doesn't matter, bosses are always right - yes, you'll work crazy hours but we can only pay you for 40 In other words, EU startups have no mechanism in place to reward early employees that build the company from the scratch, it's all about making co-founders famous/wealthy. It's already bad in the US, imagine EU is 10x worse.
- hav 7y ago
  What? No! Where are you getting your information from? Having worked with a multitude of startups over the years I can say that none of them have behaved in this way in the Nordics.
  - bitL 7y ago
    Did you get a competitive salary or ~1% of share of the company as an early employee? If not, you were used. The aforementioned is a typical Berlin startup. A favorite of mine is when a company tries to pay you with debt, i.e. instead of being just a developer, you become a banker for your future boss' idea. I wish I were joking...
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Last time I was job hunting, one of the Berlin startups was offering €58k (iOS developer). Is that competitive? I find it hard to judge.
      - dgellow 7y ago
        Depends your level, but if you have some experience, no it's not something I would consider competitive (talking about Berlin).
      - superhuzza 7y ago
        No
LoSboccacc 7y ago
it's because the market is heavily fragmented and to reach sufficient numbers you need to cover the whole European market. a startup here needs an accountant of the bat to handle the tax mess, a lawyer because incorporation is all but easy in most countries with few exceptions, a gdpr specialist, etc. that's why there are comparatively few steps, the entry cost are massive and discouraging, and that's on top of the internationalisation requirements of course.
- varjag 7y ago
  This is ridiculous. No, you don't need staff lawyer, accountant or "GDPR specialist" to start in Europe. One company I worked at didn't employ an accountant until pushing to €10M turnover. They still don't have a lawyer.
  - sp332 7y ago
    It's probably a misunderstanding of the GDPR's requirement for a designated representative. https://searchnewscentral.com/blog/2019/08/23/does-gdpr-require-designate-representative/ https://searchnewscentral.com/blog/2019/08/23/does-gdpr-requ... Still a barrier to entry for startups.
    - M2Ys4U 7y ago
      Having a designated representative is for companies outside the EU anyway. If you're inside there's no need...
      - kafka01 7y ago
        This is incorrect - if you have more than 10 employees that handle data, and that basically means everyone sitting behind a computer, your company has to designate someone as data privacy officer who has to make sure that things get handled according to GDPR. These rules arent strictly enforced yet, but when you run into issues and it can be shown that you didn´t take steps to implement it, it has consequences.
lazyjones 7y ago
Where are the talented people in Europe? I was looking for some for 14 years when I had my startup (in the most liveable city in the world apparently), but nobody came. What I learnt is that - naturally - nearly all highly talented people go to the USA (or sometimes UK) to maximise their chances. Also, the 2 most talented/intelligent people in IT I know since they were kids live in the US permanently now. One is at Google. Keep believing that you'll find "huge numbers of highly talented people" here, you won't - unless perhaps you mean in the arts...
- itronitron 7y ago
  >> I was looking for some for 14 years when I had my startup ... but nobody came did anyone show up, and if they did in what aspects were they lacking? Genuinely curious.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  It depends where you are looking for them. They are plenty, but don't walk on the streets wearing a big sign.
- helij 7y ago
  You didn't offer enough money.
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    The people who came wouldn't suddenly have become more talented if I offered more.
    - helij 7y ago
      If you offered more suddenly more talented people would appear at your door. People with the know how quickly realise the range. If the top of the range is too low they don't come knocking even.
- c0l0 7y ago
  > but nobody came. )-,;
jandrewrogers 7y ago
While the government policies don't always help, in my experience they are merely a hurdle and not the underlying reason it is difficult for startups to succeed in Europe. The ambient culture that defines behavior and sets expectations in the relationships between founders, investors, employees, and society at large is much more adversarial and conservative than the US. Being an excellent engineer, the backbone of all good tech companies, is rarely recognized, poorly compensated, and engenders much less social status than if you were on the US west coast. Ironically, even though there are many highly talented engineers in Europe, European executives and investors frequently hold American engineers working in Europe in much higher regard and treat them differently than engineers from their own countries. I've seen it many times. This is not an environment that incentivizes the world-class native engineering talent that exists in Europe to perform up to their abilities in a high-risk startup. Good engineers correctly view themselves as being undervalued, so there is no point in taking the risk. Nothing will change until Europe places more value -- economic, social, and cultural -- on being an exceptional engineer instead of treating them as a modern day factory worker subservient to the managerial class. This is not something you can easily change with government initiatives.
- dc2019 7y ago
  Agree with this. Where people gravitate to in terms of career choices is very much driven by compensation patterns, and somehow, in (Western) Europe, being on the technical side of tech/IT just does not pay. Large companies (those that are not tech-centric, e.g. financial services, etc) still tend to see it as a back office function and often outsources majority of operations to India (or fly and settle temporary employees locally). Companies that places tech at the center of their business recruit and hire a lot of tech talent from outside of Western Europe. There are also local developers, but their pay, compared to jobs in, say, marketing, sales, and other rather fluffy business functions, is low, low, low. Someone mentioned Bookings before. Their pay is on-par with the market average here, which is 50-80K. And that is very low compared to how a similar position is valued in SV. Startups here in general also underpay their tech workers compared to counterparts in the US, since they point to the large companies locally (which already underpay tech roles), and say, "well, we can't afford corporate pay, we are just a startup". So you are kind of double-underpaid, even though the job descriptions are usually copy and pasted SV-speak with rainbows and unicorns.
jiofih 7y ago
Wrong list, check this one. Booking, Zalando, Spotify, Bet365, Yandex. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_companies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_com...
- Mirioron 7y ago
  Isn't Booking a US corporation and Yandex is a Russian one. Generally when people say "Europe" in this context they are mostly referring to the EU and the "satellites". Regardless, the EU alone has 50% more population than the US, while the population is about as educated, yet it's only a small fraction of the US on this list.
  - boulos 7y ago
    Booking is headquartered in Amsterdam (and not just for some sort of tax shenanigans).
bjackman 7y ago
I don't necessarily dispute that Europe is a worse environments for startups to succeed, I just don't see why taxing equity incentives has anything to do with that. And I think taxing equity incentives is fair.

Barrin92 7y ago

it's because Europe is a continent of 20+ different large languages and cultures. In Sweden everybody speaks Swedish and nobody uses cash. In Germany, nobody speaks Swedish and everyone uses cash. There is no homogenous market like in the US or China where you can blow up some product to 300+ million people. That's the reason why there are fewer startups in Europe. Europe has plenty of large technology companies if one stops equating technology with "user facing smartphone application". They just happen to be export oriented, or pharmaceutical or manufacturing and transport companies. Trying to copy the US or China in producing rapidly growing startup companies is in my opinion foolish and we shouldn't buy into the constant hype of just trying to emulate America, but rather aim to increase where European companies advantages lie, in integrating high technology into existing economic sectors that integrate with industrial production. Not only is this much better suited to the economic and social European environment that simply isn't accepting of the "break the rules, worry about the problems later" mentality of internet statups, it's also arguably much more equitable and reaches a larger section of the labour market.

swebs 7y ago
>it's because Europe is a continent of 20+ different large languages and cultures. In Sweden everybody speaks Swedish and nobody uses cash. In Germany, nobody speaks Swedish and everyone uses cash. How much does that matter though? You could just release your app/site/whatever in English and instantly have access to the US market.
- ben_w 7y ago
  The same things that make it hard to make one app for all of the EU also make it hard to make an app for the USA from outside the USA. Even if you hire a UK or Éire citizen for their English skills, you have all the cultural reasons that means Tesco isn’t a supermarket brand in the USA and Walmart isn’t a supermarket brand in the UK even though both are English speaking nations. The language issues are also substantial, even though the cultural output of Hollywood has made it easier for many EU citizens to learn English than each other’s languages.
  - shanemhansen 7y ago
    Walmart owns ASDA, or at least they did until recently.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Yes, but irrelevant. The details of the Walmart brand are essentially unknown in the UK, and the very fact that Walmart are now trying to sell ASDA for almost the same nominal amount they bought it for 20 years ago demonstrates the exact difficulty I was referring to.
- MisterBastahrd 7y ago
  Because when I want to talk to someone for support, especially when it's a small business that might be slower to addressing my support concerns because of a lack of resources, I want to speak to a native English speaker I can understand with an 800 number. US companies get that baked in. Everyone else has to grow to become that.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  It does, the citizens of different countries don't care or know each other, anyone hardly knows how EU works or what people even do in Brussels. You have news stations that are literally for 300mil people. Same with every startup and product.
dgellow 7y ago
^ this, exactly. Europe is definitely not one big unique market, every country is a different one with its own specificity. They happen to share some regulation and to (almost all) use the same currency but they are quite different in their user behaviours and expectations.
bobloblaw45 7y ago
Well I mean you also have smaller individual countries like Israel that don't seem to do too bad.

bitL 7y ago

A typical EU startup: - hey, we are startup, we can't pay you much, is that OK? - well, we can't really compensate you with stock options, those are for founders - oh no, your opinion doesn't matter, bosses are always right - yes, you'll work crazy hours but we can only pay you for 40 In other words, EU startups have no mechanism in place to reward early employees that build the company from the scratch, it's all about making co-founders famous/wealthy. It's already bad in the US, imagine EU is 10x worse.

hav 7y ago
What? No! Where are you getting your information from? Having worked with a multitude of startups over the years I can say that none of them have behaved in this way in the Nordics.
- bitL 7y ago
  Did you get a competitive salary or ~1% of share of the company as an early employee? If not, you were used. The aforementioned is a typical Berlin startup. A favorite of mine is when a company tries to pay you with debt, i.e. instead of being just a developer, you become a banker for your future boss' idea. I wish I were joking...
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Last time I was job hunting, one of the Berlin startups was offering €58k (iOS developer). Is that competitive? I find it hard to judge.
    - dgellow 7y ago
      Depends your level, but if you have some experience, no it's not something I would consider competitive (talking about Berlin).
    - superhuzza 7y ago
      No

LoSboccacc 7y ago

it's because the market is heavily fragmented and to reach sufficient numbers you need to cover the whole European market. a startup here needs an accountant of the bat to handle the tax mess, a lawyer because incorporation is all but easy in most countries with few exceptions, a gdpr specialist, etc. that's why there are comparatively few steps, the entry cost are massive and discouraging, and that's on top of the internationalisation requirements of course.

varjag 7y ago
This is ridiculous. No, you don't need staff lawyer, accountant or "GDPR specialist" to start in Europe. One company I worked at didn't employ an accountant until pushing to €10M turnover. They still don't have a lawyer.
- sp332 7y ago
  It's probably a misunderstanding of the GDPR's requirement for a designated representative. https://searchnewscentral.com/blog/2019/08/23/does-gdpr-require-designate-representative/ https://searchnewscentral.com/blog/2019/08/23/does-gdpr-requ... Still a barrier to entry for startups.
  - M2Ys4U 7y ago
    Having a designated representative is for companies outside the EU anyway. If you're inside there's no need...
    - kafka01 7y ago
      This is incorrect - if you have more than 10 employees that handle data, and that basically means everyone sitting behind a computer, your company has to designate someone as data privacy officer who has to make sure that things get handled according to GDPR. These rules arent strictly enforced yet, but when you run into issues and it can be shown that you didn´t take steps to implement it, it has consequences.

lazyjones 7y ago

Where are the talented people in Europe? I was looking for some for 14 years when I had my startup (in the most liveable city in the world apparently), but nobody came. What I learnt is that - naturally - nearly all highly talented people go to the USA (or sometimes UK) to maximise their chances. Also, the 2 most talented/intelligent people in IT I know since they were kids live in the US permanently now. One is at Google. Keep believing that you'll find "huge numbers of highly talented people" here, you won't - unless perhaps you mean in the arts...

itronitron 7y ago
>> I was looking for some for 14 years when I had my startup ... but nobody came did anyone show up, and if they did in what aspects were they lacking? Genuinely curious.
AdrianB1 7y ago
It depends where you are looking for them. They are plenty, but don't walk on the streets wearing a big sign.
helij 7y ago
You didn't offer enough money.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  The people who came wouldn't suddenly have become more talented if I offered more.
  - helij 7y ago
    If you offered more suddenly more talented people would appear at your door. People with the know how quickly realise the range. If the top of the range is too low they don't come knocking even.
c0l0 7y ago
> but nobody came. )-,;

jandrewrogers 7y ago

While the government policies don't always help, in my experience they are merely a hurdle and not the underlying reason it is difficult for startups to succeed in Europe. The ambient culture that defines behavior and sets expectations in the relationships between founders, investors, employees, and society at large is much more adversarial and conservative than the US. Being an excellent engineer, the backbone of all good tech companies, is rarely recognized, poorly compensated, and engenders much less social status than if you were on the US west coast. Ironically, even though there are many highly talented engineers in Europe, European executives and investors frequently hold American engineers working in Europe in much higher regard and treat them differently than engineers from their own countries. I've seen it many times. This is not an environment that incentivizes the world-class native engineering talent that exists in Europe to perform up to their abilities in a high-risk startup. Good engineers correctly view themselves as being undervalued, so there is no point in taking the risk. Nothing will change until Europe places more value -- economic, social, and cultural -- on being an exceptional engineer instead of treating them as a modern day factory worker subservient to the managerial class. This is not something you can easily change with government initiatives.

dc2019 7y ago
Agree with this. Where people gravitate to in terms of career choices is very much driven by compensation patterns, and somehow, in (Western) Europe, being on the technical side of tech/IT just does not pay. Large companies (those that are not tech-centric, e.g. financial services, etc) still tend to see it as a back office function and often outsources majority of operations to India (or fly and settle temporary employees locally). Companies that places tech at the center of their business recruit and hire a lot of tech talent from outside of Western Europe. There are also local developers, but their pay, compared to jobs in, say, marketing, sales, and other rather fluffy business functions, is low, low, low. Someone mentioned Bookings before. Their pay is on-par with the market average here, which is 50-80K. And that is very low compared to how a similar position is valued in SV. Startups here in general also underpay their tech workers compared to counterparts in the US, since they point to the large companies locally (which already underpay tech roles), and say, "well, we can't afford corporate pay, we are just a startup". So you are kind of double-underpaid, even though the job descriptions are usually copy and pasted SV-speak with rainbows and unicorns.

jiofih 7y ago

Wrong list, check this one. Booking, Zalando, Spotify, Bet365, Yandex. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_companies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_com...

Mirioron 7y ago
Isn't Booking a US corporation and Yandex is a Russian one. Generally when people say "Europe" in this context they are mostly referring to the EU and the "satellites". Regardless, the EU alone has 50% more population than the US, while the population is about as educated, yet it's only a small fraction of the US on this list.
- boulos 7y ago
  Booking is headquartered in Amsterdam (and not just for some sort of tax shenanigans).

bjackman 7y ago

I don't necessarily dispute that Europe is a worse environments for startups to succeed, I just don't see why taxing equity incentives has anything to do with that. And I think taxing equity incentives is fair.