5 ms·

I am originally from Europe and I must ask : how many startups of global reach has Europe produced in the last 30 years compared to the US as a whole (or even j

by ews 1y ago

I am originally from Europe and I must ask : how many startups of global reach has Europe produced in the last 30 years compared to the US as a whole (or even just the SF Bay Area). What is Europe doing in AI compared to the US or China?

plantwallshoe 1y ago
How has living in the same country as a crop of successful tech startups made the lives of an average American noticeably better?
- slowmovintarget 1y ago
  That's a non-sequitur. Achieving Euro-Big-Tech for social media and AI would not improve European's lives either, except for the few oligarchs that would run the equivalent corporate giants there. I can't help hearing Bender's voice after getting kicked out of the Casino...
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > How has living in the same country as a crop of successful tech startups made the lives of an average American noticeably better? Average American is materially wealthier than the average European, with more influence over the latter than the latter has over the former. Go above the bottom 20% or so, and you have vastly higher living standards in most of America compared with most of Europe. This is obscured by our terrible treatment of the bottom 10%, as well as by the burdens we put on our middle class. But the American middle class is wealthier and, I’d argue, more powerful than most European countries’, the exceptions being in the West and the North of the continent.
  - anthk 1y ago
    In your fantasy world, maybe. The truth is that even the loaded people die earlier and live up worse than the average Southern/Western European.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > even the loaded people die earlier and live up worse than the average Southern/Western European You repeated this misinformation in another thread.
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds - https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap - April 2nd, 2025 Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 | https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554214 The study is fascinating on its own without needing to be lied about.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    60 percent of Americans can’t afford a basic quality of life. I disagree with the way this is argued. Materially wealthier how? Home equity? Household net worth? Absolutely of no value based on the currently observed outcomes. If you ignore the wealth metrics, Europeans live objectively better lives than a majority of Americans. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert-kennedy-gdp https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > 60 percent of Americans can’t afford a basic quality of life Define that “basic quality of life” and map it to the EU. We define our baselines much higher in America than they do in Europe because of course we do, we’re richer per capita. Quality of life for the bottom I think 50% of Americans is worse than in Europe, almost entirely due to food quality and healthcare. But for most Americans, it’s materially better for most values worth measuring. (For the richest Americans it’s way better, but that isn’t how I believe one measures a society.) Keep in mind that I’m counting the whole EU. If we restrict ourselves to its richest members, sure, QOL is higher in Switzerland and Norway than in Mississippi.
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        Unburdened by housing costs, affordable and accessible healthcare, transportation, child care, groceries, etc. It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US, more so as upcoming Medicaid cuts occur. https://www.kff.org/quick-take/about-17-million-more-people-could-be-uninsured-due-to-the-big-beautiful-bill-and-other-policy-changes/ https://www.kff.org/quick-take/about-17-million-more-people-...
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > Unburdened by housing costs, affordable and accessible healthcare, transportation, child care, groceries, etc. Few European social welfare systems unburden their populations of all of these. Those that do are comparable to America’s wealthiest states. > It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US It’s also a lot easier to earn more than that wage in America [1][2]. (And you can absolutely live an okay life in NYC if you got your subsidies right on a job that pays ~$20k/y.) [1] https://kagi.com/images?q=average+monthly+wage+eu+member+map#PreviewImageModal https://kagi.com/images?q=average+monthly+wage+eu+member+map... [2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-median-income-by-state-in-2024/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-median-income-by-sta...
  - tzs 1y ago
    How much of that is attributable to tech startups with global reach founded in the US in the last 30 years?
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Counterpoints: Even upper-middle-class women are more likely to die giving birth in the US than in (almost any part of) Europe. Middle-class families can be financially ruined by chronic or terminal illnesses within the family. Below-average income families in the US have heavy financial hurdles trying to get their kids into college. Religious homeschooling is currently preparing a generation of undereducated American children. GDP isn't quality of life.
- ews 1y ago
  I am making way more than 10x of what I was making in Europe, for exactly the same role. Cost of living is definitely not 10x.
  - plantwallshoe 1y ago
    Tech workers make tech salaries are not living anything close to the modal American life.
15155 1y ago
Invariably someone will roll in and say "ASML" (despite this being a US-financed venture.)
- jbverschoor 1y ago
  Doesn't matter.. The US is financed by the rest of the world / China. Silicon Valley is financed by China, Japan, and the Middle East
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  I've worked for ASML. The C-Suite are nearly all European. The manufacturing is worldwide, but mostly Western. Only one facility in the US, employing about 100-200 people. As for US-financed... it's a publicly-traded company that makes most of its revenue from selling to big chipmakers, so largely Taiwanese and Japanese "funded".
mertbio 1y ago
Why do you think that Europe has to race with the US in number of startups? Shouldn’t we focus on the quality of life instead? The rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe. People in Europe are also happier than the ones in the US. What those startups will bring?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe Source?
  - anthk 1y ago
    Sorry if we the Europeans burst your bubble: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=rich%20people%20in%20the%20us%20live%20worse%20europe https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=rich%20people%20in%20the%...
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      One, a search isn’t a source. Two, the medical source in your results [1] doesn’t support your hypothesis: “Survival among the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.” The wealthiest 25% of Americans have mortality similar to the poorest 25% in Northern and Western Europe. And the wealthiest 25% of Europeans as a whole outlive the wealthiest 25% of Americans. The richest Americans, where I mean top 1 to 5%, on the other hand, match with the richest Europeans because of course we do, we’re accessing the same global pool of health services. But there is zero evidence rich Americans are outlived by poor Europeans, even if we restrict ourselves to its wealth West and North. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
ramblerman 1y ago
I am originally from Europe as well. And still living there (not sure if that’s why you phrased it like that) but how many innovations from the us are really adding to the value of life vs just forcing eyeballs to screen. Linux came from Europe. A lot of open source does, see blender. I know VC money is sexy but does it add real value
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  Interestingly enough, I am not originally from Europe, but chose to move here over the US. In no small part because I utterly despise the VC fueled hustle culture winner takes all disruptive bullshit from the US. I don't want to be anywhere near that particular toxic wasteland.
  - labster 1y ago
    Sir, are you aware that this very website is run by VCs as an advertisement for hustle culture? You are, in fact, “anywhere near” this particular vast wasteland.
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      Yes, I am. I don't work for it, I just post shit here.
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  Huh? That is a strange way to dismiss the innovation from the country that brought to market: - the light bulb - the mass produced car - the airplane - the artificial heart - the gold standard in Covid vaccines - the personal computer - the smartphone - the internet - email - GPS - MRIs - consumer grade LLMs - the world’s largest public cloud providers - TCP/IP and BGP - the web browser - the most popular search, social media, and e-commerce companies in the world I know it feels good to say “but did they really make human kind better off?” and dismiss American innovation as another goofy VC-funded cash grab iPhone app; but the US is responsible for technology that has made the world better many times over. This mentality is why Europe will never replicate the success of the US technology sector. inb4 “but we don’t want that success!”
Ralfp 1y ago
Ask your uncle who lives in old country, what he values more. EU-developed startups or universal healthcare that cured his child without bankrupting his household?
anthk 1y ago
How many startups in the US have actually been both sucessful and useful to the society? The times of Bell Labs, C, Unix, Lisp/MIT machines... are long gone.
zmxz 1y ago
European here. You're spot on with your question. Europe is an extremely hostile place to start a business compared to USA. USA embraced capitalism and is geared towards proving concepts FAST and enabling networking. I love that about USA and I miss that in Europe, when it comes to IT/Tech sector in particular. I'm not aware if Europe produced anything of significance in the past 30 years, we're lagging heavily behind USA/China and that's a fact. One could argue that Linus Torvalds is European hence Linux === European but I won't resort to such petty claims. We produced very little value. We're having issues due to language discrepancy. Even though a lot of people speak English, it's often the case that we Europeans aren't able to communicate as well using English as we can in our native tongue. The lack of unified language is visible. The diversity in culture drives people to favor their own, we're bad at teamplay (this is from my personal experience and I am guilty of this). There's many valuable lessons we could have learned from USA but we failed to apply them. We have various freely available systems that are great at, say, education - but education means nothing when it's difficult to apply it once people are done with it. I worked with plenty of people from USA and I had huge prejudices towards them, in terms of "they talk a lot" or "they are not as competent, they are really slow when it comes to pumping out code" but I learned I was wrong to the point it's not funny. If anything, USA is really good at starting and pushing projects out that actually work. Ultimately, do we even have a microchip factory (we might, but I'm unaware of it)? Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to explain my POV and agree with you. Personally, I'd love to see movement in EU's tech sector. We're 30 years behind USA in tech. I won't touch upon quality of life or similar topics because I'm interested in exploring technology.
- satyrun 1y ago
  I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing. As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing. > As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition. As a German, I would claim that getting Germans on a hype train is incredibly hard. I also cannot see anything that is "intellectual" about these LLMs. To me, the whole LLM scene is rather like "rich alpha tech bros are tech-broing; a lot of sycophants in the inner circle of these tech bros attempts to use the dictate of the moment to become rich fast; and a lot of real or feign AI fanbois attempts to rid the hype wave to make easy money".
dietr1ch 1y ago
I think this is just because law and taxes are more forgiving in the US for companies to strive and gain advantage against companies in Europe. Companies do well there, but only some people do. This difference is clear and large even when ignoring the homeless population. Higher-ups do extremely well, tech jobs are cushy, but people doing the more hands-on work tend to get the shorter end of the straw staff with low pay and long commutes.
lawn 1y ago
That's a weird statistic to single out. I'd assume that general health or happiness would be much more important than the number of startups.
drcongo 1y ago
That's a bizarre metric to judge a continent on. I mean, I could throw it back at you with : how many people's lives are ruined because of bankruptcy from a routine medical procedure that millions of Europeans get for free?
arp242 1y ago
The entire notion that startups must have "global reach" to be relevant seems odd to me. There are and have been plenty of startups throughout Europe, and the typical story is that they get bought by American companies and eye-watering amounts of VC capital. Not saying that's the only issue; it's also true that getting meaningful funding is excruciatingly difficult in much of Europe. However, at the same time US companies have this "one little trick" to get a global reach: enormous huge stacks of cash.
deterministic 1y ago
Number of startups has nothing to do with quality of life.

by ews 1y ago

plantwallshoe 1y ago

How has living in the same country as a crop of successful tech startups made the lives of an average American noticeably better?

slowmovintarget 1y ago
That's a non-sequitur. Achieving Euro-Big-Tech for social media and AI would not improve European's lives either, except for the few oligarchs that would run the equivalent corporate giants there. I can't help hearing Bender's voice after getting kicked out of the Casino...
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> How has living in the same country as a crop of successful tech startups made the lives of an average American noticeably better? Average American is materially wealthier than the average European, with more influence over the latter than the latter has over the former. Go above the bottom 20% or so, and you have vastly higher living standards in most of America compared with most of Europe. This is obscured by our terrible treatment of the bottom 10%, as well as by the burdens we put on our middle class. But the American middle class is wealthier and, I’d argue, more powerful than most European countries’, the exceptions being in the West and the North of the continent.
- anthk 1y ago
  In your fantasy world, maybe. The truth is that even the loaded people die earlier and live up worse than the average Southern/Western European.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > even the loaded people die earlier and live up worse than the average Southern/Western European You repeated this misinformation in another thread.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds - https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap - April 2nd, 2025 Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 | https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554214 The study is fascinating on its own without needing to be lied about.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  60 percent of Americans can’t afford a basic quality of life. I disagree with the way this is argued. Materially wealthier how? Home equity? Household net worth? Absolutely of no value based on the currently observed outcomes. If you ignore the wealth metrics, Europeans live objectively better lives than a majority of Americans. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert-kennedy-gdp https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > 60 percent of Americans can’t afford a basic quality of life Define that “basic quality of life” and map it to the EU. We define our baselines much higher in America than they do in Europe because of course we do, we’re richer per capita. Quality of life for the bottom I think 50% of Americans is worse than in Europe, almost entirely due to food quality and healthcare. But for most Americans, it’s materially better for most values worth measuring. (For the richest Americans it’s way better, but that isn’t how I believe one measures a society.) Keep in mind that I’m counting the whole EU. If we restrict ourselves to its richest members, sure, QOL is higher in Switzerland and Norway than in Mississippi.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      Unburdened by housing costs, affordable and accessible healthcare, transportation, child care, groceries, etc. It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US, more so as upcoming Medicaid cuts occur. https://www.kff.org/quick-take/about-17-million-more-people-could-be-uninsured-due-to-the-big-beautiful-bill-and-other-policy-changes/ https://www.kff.org/quick-take/about-17-million-more-people-...
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > Unburdened by housing costs, affordable and accessible healthcare, transportation, child care, groceries, etc. Few European social welfare systems unburden their populations of all of these. Those that do are comparable to America’s wealthiest states. > It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US It’s also a lot easier to earn more than that wage in America [1][2]. (And you can absolutely live an okay life in NYC if you got your subsidies right on a job that pays ~$20k/y.) [1] https://kagi.com/images?q=average+monthly+wage+eu+member+map#PreviewImageModal https://kagi.com/images?q=average+monthly+wage+eu+member+map... [2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-median-income-by-state-in-2024/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-median-income-by-sta...
- tzs 1y ago
  How much of that is attributable to tech startups with global reach founded in the US in the last 30 years?
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Counterpoints: Even upper-middle-class women are more likely to die giving birth in the US than in (almost any part of) Europe. Middle-class families can be financially ruined by chronic or terminal illnesses within the family. Below-average income families in the US have heavy financial hurdles trying to get their kids into college. Religious homeschooling is currently preparing a generation of undereducated American children. GDP isn't quality of life.
ews 1y ago
I am making way more than 10x of what I was making in Europe, for exactly the same role. Cost of living is definitely not 10x.
- plantwallshoe 1y ago
  Tech workers make tech salaries are not living anything close to the modal American life.

15155 1y ago

Invariably someone will roll in and say "ASML" (despite this being a US-financed venture.)

jbverschoor 1y ago
Doesn't matter.. The US is financed by the rest of the world / China. Silicon Valley is financed by China, Japan, and the Middle East
IAmBroom 1y ago
I've worked for ASML. The C-Suite are nearly all European. The manufacturing is worldwide, but mostly Western. Only one facility in the US, employing about 100-200 people. As for US-financed... it's a publicly-traded company that makes most of its revenue from selling to big chipmakers, so largely Taiwanese and Japanese "funded".

mertbio 1y ago

Why do you think that Europe has to race with the US in number of startups? Shouldn’t we focus on the quality of life instead? The rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe. People in Europe are also happier than the ones in the US. What those startups will bring?

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe Source?
- anthk 1y ago
  Sorry if we the Europeans burst your bubble: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=rich%20people%20in%20the%20us%20live%20worse%20europe https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=rich%20people%20in%20the%...
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    One, a search isn’t a source. Two, the medical source in your results [1] doesn’t support your hypothesis: “Survival among the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.” The wealthiest 25% of Americans have mortality similar to the poorest 25% in Northern and Western Europe. And the wealthiest 25% of Europeans as a whole outlive the wealthiest 25% of Americans. The richest Americans, where I mean top 1 to 5%, on the other hand, match with the richest Europeans because of course we do, we’re accessing the same global pool of health services. But there is zero evidence rich Americans are outlived by poor Europeans, even if we restrict ourselves to its wealth West and North. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago

ramblerman 1y ago

I am originally from Europe as well. And still living there (not sure if that’s why you phrased it like that) but how many innovations from the us are really adding to the value of life vs just forcing eyeballs to screen. Linux came from Europe. A lot of open source does, see blender. I know VC money is sexy but does it add real value

surgical_fire 1y ago
Interestingly enough, I am not originally from Europe, but chose to move here over the US. In no small part because I utterly despise the VC fueled hustle culture winner takes all disruptive bullshit from the US. I don't want to be anywhere near that particular toxic wasteland.
- labster 1y ago
  Sir, are you aware that this very website is run by VCs as an advertisement for hustle culture? You are, in fact, “anywhere near” this particular vast wasteland.
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    Yes, I am. I don't work for it, I just post shit here.
Esophagus4 1y ago
Huh? That is a strange way to dismiss the innovation from the country that brought to market: - the light bulb - the mass produced car - the airplane - the artificial heart - the gold standard in Covid vaccines - the personal computer - the smartphone - the internet - email - GPS - MRIs - consumer grade LLMs - the world’s largest public cloud providers - TCP/IP and BGP - the web browser - the most popular search, social media, and e-commerce companies in the world I know it feels good to say “but did they really make human kind better off?” and dismiss American innovation as another goofy VC-funded cash grab iPhone app; but the US is responsible for technology that has made the world better many times over. This mentality is why Europe will never replicate the success of the US technology sector. inb4 “but we don’t want that success!”

Ralfp 1y ago

Ask your uncle who lives in old country, what he values more. EU-developed startups or universal healthcare that cured his child without bankrupting his household?

anthk 1y ago

How many startups in the US have actually been both sucessful and useful to the society? The times of Bell Labs, C, Unix, Lisp/MIT machines... are long gone.

zmxz 1y ago

European here. You're spot on with your question. Europe is an extremely hostile place to start a business compared to USA. USA embraced capitalism and is geared towards proving concepts FAST and enabling networking. I love that about USA and I miss that in Europe, when it comes to IT/Tech sector in particular. I'm not aware if Europe produced anything of significance in the past 30 years, we're lagging heavily behind USA/China and that's a fact. One could argue that Linus Torvalds is European hence Linux === European but I won't resort to such petty claims. We produced very little value. We're having issues due to language discrepancy. Even though a lot of people speak English, it's often the case that we Europeans aren't able to communicate as well using English as we can in our native tongue. The lack of unified language is visible. The diversity in culture drives people to favor their own, we're bad at teamplay (this is from my personal experience and I am guilty of this). There's many valuable lessons we could have learned from USA but we failed to apply them. We have various freely available systems that are great at, say, education - but education means nothing when it's difficult to apply it once people are done with it. I worked with plenty of people from USA and I had huge prejudices towards them, in terms of "they talk a lot" or "they are not as competent, they are really slow when it comes to pumping out code" but I learned I was wrong to the point it's not funny. If anything, USA is really good at starting and pushing projects out that actually work. Ultimately, do we even have a microchip factory (we might, but I'm unaware of it)? Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to explain my POV and agree with you. Personally, I'd love to see movement in EU's tech sector. We're 30 years behind USA in tech. I won't touch upon quality of life or similar topics because I'm interested in exploring technology.

satyrun 1y ago
I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing. As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing. > As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition. As a German, I would claim that getting Germans on a hype train is incredibly hard. I also cannot see anything that is "intellectual" about these LLMs. To me, the whole LLM scene is rather like "rich alpha tech bros are tech-broing; a lot of sycophants in the inner circle of these tech bros attempts to use the dictate of the moment to become rich fast; and a lot of real or feign AI fanbois attempts to rid the hype wave to make easy money".

dietr1ch 1y ago

I think this is just because law and taxes are more forgiving in the US for companies to strive and gain advantage against companies in Europe. Companies do well there, but only some people do. This difference is clear and large even when ignoring the homeless population. Higher-ups do extremely well, tech jobs are cushy, but people doing the more hands-on work tend to get the shorter end of the straw staff with low pay and long commutes.

lawn 1y ago

That's a weird statistic to single out. I'd assume that general health or happiness would be much more important than the number of startups.

drcongo 1y ago

That's a bizarre metric to judge a continent on. I mean, I could throw it back at you with : how many people's lives are ruined because of bankruptcy from a routine medical procedure that millions of Europeans get for free?

arp242 1y ago

The entire notion that startups must have "global reach" to be relevant seems odd to me. There are and have been plenty of startups throughout Europe, and the typical story is that they get bought by American companies and eye-watering amounts of VC capital. Not saying that's the only issue; it's also true that getting meaningful funding is excruciatingly difficult in much of Europe. However, at the same time US companies have this "one little trick" to get a global reach: enormous huge stacks of cash.

deterministic 1y ago

Number of startups has nothing to do with quality of life.