Comment by petcat
5 days ago
The problem is the EU is still suffering startup drain to USA entirely because of market and regulatory burdens. We just saw this most recently with Heart Aerospace. They warned EU regulators repeatedly that it was very difficult to develop frontier technology in Europe. And then they eventually just relocated to California completely.
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
These are political and societal issues that are very difficult to solve. Not to mention that energy insecurity and cost makes Europe non-competitive from the outset.
This particular example is hardly representative. The market they work on is difficult. They may have an ambition to become Tesla of airplanes, but it did not take a long time before traditional manufacturers learned from Tesla’s success and took over. VW builds more electric cars, and number one globally is a Chinese company. With airplanes, becoming an independent manufacturer is a long and risky path. In the end, their main choice is between being acquired by Boeing or Airbus if they are successful, or being outcompeted by incumbents or Chinese. I do not think this reflects the investment climate in Europe in general. There are fields where startups can do well, and fields where starting something new in Europe is generally a bad idea. I’m not sure that’s always because of regulations.
All the money is in Silicon Valley, that's why they move there.
If this was a US vs EU thing, I would love to hear a US tech giant that isn't in Silicon Valley or Seattle.
Fact is, even in US, no other city was able to replicate that success. For example, there would be no point to move your startup from EU to New York for example.
Micron was founded in Boise Idaho and is still headquartered there. Cymer, which makes the EUV light source in ASML machines, was founded in San Diego, and is still there.
And likewise Europe has a fair number of unicorns as well. But nothing like silicon valley.
Just to name a few:
---------------------
Cisco — Research Triangle Park (Raleigh), NC
Dell — Round Rock, Texas
Epic Games — Cary, NC
HP — Houston, Texas
IBM — Armonk, New York
Lenovo — Morrisville, NC
Oracle — Austin, Texas
Redhat — Raleigh, NC
SAS Institute — Cary, NC
Tesla — Austin, Texas
Lots and lots of US tech giants are not in Silicon Valley or Seattle. In fact, Texas, North Carolina, New York, Georgia, and Virginia have huge hubs of tech giants - especially the Research Triangle Park in NC.
I agree with the general premise that US tech isn't exclusively in Silicon Valley or Seattle. But those regions clearly still play an enormously outsized role in the US tech industry, to the point where it seems unlikely US tech would be as globally dominant without them.
Notably several entries on your list are companies that were founded and grew successful before moving to the locations you listed, often for tax breaks and/or to fit the politics of the company executives. Aside from Dell, all the companies you listed as being located in Texas became successful elsewhere first. Texas has proved it can lure in already successful companies more than it has demonstrated it can grow them.
Which is itself a legitimate achievement, but if the question is how you grow new successful tech companies, it's not a super useful data point especially if we're taking about different countries. There are relatively few barriers for a company that grew up and became successful in the environment of Silicon Valley to move to Austin with the promise of lower taxes, but Europe can't quite replicate that same migratory model to grown their own tech industry.
Those are the size of European tech companies. I mean, HP is about 10 times smaller than Siemens. So your list basically proves nothing.
Tesla clearly is a "tech giant", and it started in Silicon Valley by the way.
1 reply →