I am very well traveled and I spent considerable amounts of time in Europe in various different countries, I am however American, with particularly Midwestern s

I am very well traveled and I spent considerable amounts of time in Europe in various different countries, I am however American, with particularly Midwestern sensibilities. One of the most common threads throughout the culture and society in nearly every European country I went to were three things in particular, that I think impact entrepreneurship: 1. An expectation that someone else will solve their problem, rather than an expectation of self-reliance. 2. A suspicion of anyone who thinks they have a good idea, as if that person is saying they're better than their peers and needs a comeuppance 3. A rejection of any kind of dream that entails class mobility, where the legitimate desires of people are to do something that fits the class they grew up in and "work to live" instead of "live to work" so they can spend as much time futzing about with friends and family rather than growing their family's class. Many commentators in this thread have mentioned other aspects, but I think these three things are huge cultural drivers against entrepreneurship. In the US, when you found a startup, you are taking a financial risk, possibly a career risk, but you aren't taking a personal relationship risk or societal risk in the same way you are in Europe. In most countries in Europe, the people around you will think you are becoming too big for your britches the moment you entertain starting your own company, especially to do anything new, and will either cease their relationships with you or actively seek to tear you down socially. Not only is the financial risk larger, both in relative terms and in the legal structure, but the social and relationship risk that's non-existent in the US looms large in Europe. People will legitimately think you're a bad person who thinks you're too good to be around your peers for trying to do something more than the same job your father and uncle do. #1 above is especially insidious as well, because most of the ways successful startups get founded is by finding a problem to solve and figuring out what you'd want to do to solve it for yourself. If you don't go and do this, it's really difficult to find any sort of product-market fit that resonates on anything but a tiny fractional basis. If you want to found a global company, you need to be able to devise /the/ solution to a problem, at scale, and if you are operating under the expectation that any meaningful problem has either already been solved or is the responsibility of some other entity, you won't do this, you won't have the right mentality.