Comment by pyeri
2 years ago
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.
Despite being less wealthy and diverse in both language and culture, China and India produce more tech unicorns than the EU. Several smaller countries, like Singapore and Israel also do far better than the EU on a per-capita basis.
I'd attribute most of the gap to regulatory and cultural difference.
EU is also not uniform in terms of language - so most EU companies need to decide whether they go global and start in a foreign (English) language or begin in their native language and risk getting locked in there.
I’ve been mentoring startups in EU for over 10 years and there were only a handful that had issues with regulation, but 95% had issues with a language/country lock in.
You missed the billion population difference.
1 reply →
> Yes, taxes are higher. But so is average quality of life, as opposed to average GDP
What does the second part of the sentence have anything to do with creating tech companies?
GDP always gets trotted out as if it is a holy grail and a benchmark for social welfare, which it isn't so think of it as a (failed) preemptive strike against getting a longer comment thread.