Comment by nightsd01
2 years ago
Yep, there is a big reason why Europe has so few successful big tech companies, it is a regulatory hellscape. They have so many pointless privacy regulations that only the “big” companies can even hope to compete in many markets like ad tech.
There is a big reason why the USA outside of Silicon Valley and Seattle has so few successful big tech companies: because success begets success and capital breeds more capital. If it was just European regulation you'd expect SV equivalents everywhere except for Europe. That didn't happen.
And the last thing we need is more competition in ad tech.
Given the size and abuses by the existing ad tech giants, why do you say they last thing we need is more competition. wouldn't more competition mean they have less money and get away with less and have to behave better?
No, we need them to go away. Like the dinosaurs or the Dodo. Because competition between ad tech giants means the public is collateral damage in the ensuing war. That's because the advertiser money flows to the ad tech company that is most efficient at extracting dollars from their audience. Even a .1% increase is enough to swing the battle, and that arms race has been running since 1994 or so, the results are there for all to see.
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Silicon Valley equivalents are brimming up in other parts of the world, Taiwan is very much known for its hardware technology. There are documentaries about Shenzhen becoming a tech hub too. Even here in Bangalore (India), there are many tech companies doing massive amount of good work.
But they're also right in the sense that regulation acts like a barrier in many parts of the world. I had often wondered why did Linus Torvalds and other Engineers travelled to Silicon Valley to found Linux, etc? Did they not find opportunity in Finland or any other nearby European countries?
That's because once you have a runaway success the US will tax you lower and your quality of life will be higher than what you can achieve in Europe. The USA is a great country if you're on to a winner. So the vacuum cleaner in SV tends to suck the air out of a lot of EU successful start-ups and engineering efforts simply because that's where the money is. Typical start-up valuations in the USA dwarf those in Europe, access to a single unified and mostly mono-lingual market are far more of a factor than any EU regulations, that's just a dumb meme that gets tossed around by the clueless. Yes, taxes are higher. But so is average quality of life, as opposed to average GDP, which relies on outliers.
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Seattle, Boston, New York, and Austin have joined the room.
I think I covered Seattle.
And so have Eindhoven (ASML), London (Revolut, Monzo, Wise and Deliveroo), Paris (DailyMotion, AppGratis), Berlin (Soundcloud, Mister Spex, Zalando, Helpling, Delivery Hero, Home24 and HelloFresh) and Amsterdam (Sonos (ok, technically Hilversum), Booking.com, TomTom) etc, etc. So what?
Tech companies exist the world over. The specific kind of tech company that requires a mountain of free cash and that can monopolize a whole segment is a SV anomaly and Microsoft is the exception simply because of when it started.
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