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I moved roughly 10 years ago to the US from europe. In my experience, raising small amounts of money is possible in Europe and not too hard. Once you need more
by b20000 5y ago
I moved roughly 10 years ago to the US from europe. In my experience, raising small amounts of money is possible in Europe and not too hard. Once you need more money, it becomes extremely difficult or nearly impossible, unless you can spend all your time networking, which is not going to happen if you are busy building a product.
I would say that banking in Europe is much better developed than in the US. In the US, we still have checks and you need to pay for wire transfers (what???). Doing taxes in the US is 10 times more complicated than it is in Europe, and CPAs are only interested to doing them for you if you are a cookie cutter case and easy to make money off. Otherwise, good luck getting a call back. That doesn't happen in Europe. You hire an accountant, he does his job.
Entrepreneurship in the US is not easier than it is in Europe, IMHO. Raising money or scaling might be easier.
In my experience, I've been dealing with constant discrimination in the US. It is claimed that where you are from or what your social status is, doesn't matter, in silicon valley (or California in general). People are nice, they smile, but it's mostly fake. You remain a foreigner, who should still work for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy league school, even though you have the same credentials and graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy league degree on top of that).
Raising money in the US? No different than in Europe, at least in my experience. Again, no network = no raise. And you will need to overcome the above discrimination or at least the idea that you might "go back" any time, even if you are a permanent resident.
All this sounds brutal, and maybe hard to take, but I just say it like it is, and I prefer to be honest and straightforward and share my first hand experience.
- 6f8986c3 5y ago> You remain a foreigner, who should still work for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy league school, even though you have the same credentials and graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy league degree on top of that). Bingo. There's a set of something like ten schools from which Silicon Valley companies hire. If you're not from one of those, you will be cordially invited to eat shit.
- stadium 5y agoI might be an outlier but I went to a tiny middle America liberal arts university that you probably never heard of, and work for a SV startup. And I haven't heard the topic of where people went to school come up a single time.
- ambicapter 5y agoYou work for a Silicon Valley startup, but the above posters are mostly talking about people who run one.
- stadium 5y ago> There's a set of something like ten schools from which Silicon Valley companies hire. I responded to GP's comment about hiring. Ivy-like pedigree surely helps for any career path, but that's no different for SV or anywhere else.
- b20000 5y agoBut you grew up in the US. You are not a "foreigner".
- stadium 5y agoEven if that's true (it is), I have almost never had a meaningful conversation with a coworker about where we got our degrees from. Maybe that's because the conversation usually stops after I share my no-name institution. And in my current role I don't remember degree pedigree coming up once in any conversation. If there's any lesson to learn from this thread I guess it's that no amount or level of credentials can overcome cultural biases, racism, and discrimination.
- jdc0589 5y agoMay be true for hiring for entry level roles in same cases, but it is certainly untrue when you are hiring for positions with more than a couple years experience. I have literally never looked at anyone's college credentials unless I'm interviewing for an entry level role. I do not know, or care, where any of my coworkers went to school and I don't know anyone who does. To be fair, we aren't a SV startup, but we've always had an equal engineering presence there (probably 120 engineers there now vs maybe 30 in 2018).
- Dracophoenix 5y agoI assume you went to ETH Zurich followed by Stanford?
- b20000 5y agono, different EU school