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>but the tides are turning and the EU is motivated In what way are the tides turning? We've been reading news articles on how Berlin is Europe's silicon valley
by FirmwareBurner 2y ago
>but the tides are turning and the EU is motivated
In what way are the tides turning? We've been reading news articles on how Berlin is Europe's silicon valley for the past 10+ years but I don't see much VC or interesting tech giants coming out of there, or high paying job there. The only thing they seem to have copied form SV is impossible to find housing for outsiders, though I think it's easier to move to SV than Berlin now.
Tides turning and motivation aren't enough. You need venture capital, and EU has none. At this point, every EU city that has some web dev body shops and one built a food delivery app then calls itself the SV of Europe to the point it's become a meme.
SV is more than overhyped VC funded apps though, you have Berkeley and Stanford next door, the biggest defense contractors outside, with all the gray-beards of 3D graphics there, all the gray-beards of silicone and RF there, of CPU design, of kernel development, etc. You can't replicate this highly experienced melting pot of CS and HW expertise anywhere else by throwing some VC money in a hippie city that has a technical university.
- mytailorisrich 2y agoWell in terms of amount of VC capital invested the UK is head and shoulder ahead of Germany and France... So "Berlin is Europe's silicon valley" is largely wishful thinking or a sales pitch. Those "makerspaces" are, IMHO, totally irrelevant. Ease of access to capital, of setting up a company, of structuring it, of doing business, taxes, are what makes the difference and most EU countries rank consistently lower than the UK on any of those aspects.
- grumpy-de-sre 2y agoI think the biggest challenge in Berlin/Germany is that very little of the capital that has been poured into the startup sector has made it's way back to the the engineers. Part of this is due to severe restrictions on employee share schemes (changed recently), low employee turnover (3-6 month notice periods), enforceable non-competes, and heavy tax burdens on income. As a result you see a surprisingly low amount of engineer led/founded companies. Germany has genuinely innovative companies though, but they don't look anything like SV, eg. Trumpf, Zeiss, etc.
- WinstonSmith84 2y agoYou may be right, that there won't be any "SV" in Berlin. It's true that it's unlikely to happen for all the reason you've provided and others. And the real SV in California is clearly not the SV it used to be either. It's easy to see everything a bit more distributed going forward. Some things happening in Berlin, other elsewhere in Europe - and still some in California and elsewhere in the world - and maybe China is going to seize its chance this time, who knows... Let's see, we live in interesting times.