That's a deep question that is asked nowhere near enough. And when it is asked, my experience has been it's mostly been Americans doing the asking. Here's a st

That's a deep question that is asked nowhere near enough. And when it is asked, my experience has been it's mostly been Americans doing the asking. Here's a story. I was once visiting Silicon Valley for work and getting dinner with a friend who lives there. I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. On the way over I'd bought a copy of Der Spiegel, which likes to write tabloid-esque articles about the Power Of Tech Firms. The front cover this particular week was one such article and I had found it kind of funny, so I was showing it to my friend and we were discussing it. Next to us in the restaurant was another table with an elderly gentlemen dining alone. Suddenly he leaned over and joined our conversation. It turned out he was some sort of economics academic and one of his 'research interests' was this question of why the EU doesn't generate tech firms. He had a lot of insight and I've never forgotten that discussion: it has influenced my thoughts about how to set up my own software firm. One of the points he made is that outside the USA there's no real culture of granting early employees equity, whereas in the US tech industry that's standard. ARM is apparently one of the few exceptions, in which the co-founders did in fact hand out equity early on. The incentivising effect this produces is profound. I've felt it myself - when I joined a startup, having an ownership stake as well as a salary made the difference between doing the work, and genuinely caring about the company, being willing to get into arguments and fight for what was important, etc. So a culture gap with respect to ownership is perhaps one reason. The man made other points that were more commonly observed, like the different approaches to regulation. A few days ago people were surprised to discover that the UK/EU Brexit treaty mandates SHA-1 for some obscure data interchange format. This is typical for the EU. In the US people at least pretend to care about the innovation-harming impact of regulation, even on the left. There's zero culture of that in the EU. The EU views more regulation as inherently good, and anything that isn't caked in hundreds of pages of regulations as being merely on the TODO list. It also brooks no dissent: one of the EU's "red lines" in the negotiations was that they didn't want the UK to undercut their "standards", defined as regulation. Any country that attempts to deregulate gets taken to court by the EU Commission itself, in its own courts, which almost always rule in favour of the Commission regardless of what the law actually says. This creates a one-way ratchet of ever more convoluted and obsolete rules, which in turn imposes a thicket of complexity costs on companies that have other things to focus on. Many of these rules are justified on the grounds of making trade easier but often have the opposite effect. Finally there are the very real cultural aspects. The US/Valley culture practically celebrates failure. This isn't necessarily good - failure is still failure, but family and friends at least seem to be pretty supportive of entrepreneurs in general and "failure" is very flexibly defined. For instance creating a company that never makes money isn't a problem in the US thanks to a mix of this culture and bottomless VC money. Whereas that would be perceived as failure by family and friends in Europe.