[kavabean]

I wonder if the following could be relevant.

1. In my experience, Europeans are less dominated by the "newer is better" desire to constantly get the latest gadget/technology. I wonder if others agree.

2. European money appears to be more dominated by old money / aristocracy and that these people like to invest within that network. Engineers are less likely to be part of the aristocracy and are treated more like commodities than the enabling superstar athletes they are (at least the kind that make unicorns). I know quite a few engineers that make over $200k in SV but only one who makes over 100k GBP.

[timonv]

It's not a single country. There's different ideas, ideologies and beliefs all around. Conservative Dutch versus conservative Italian is quite different.

> 2. European money appears to be more dominated by old money / aristocracy and that these people like to invest within that network. Engineers are less likely to be part of the aristocracy and are treated more like commodities than the enabling superstar athletes they are (at least the kind that make unicorns). I know quite a few engineers that make over $200k in SV but only one who makes over 100k GBP.

At least here in the Netherlands that seems to be pretty common. Generally, investors are more conservative, and rarely take major risk. Salaries are also just slightly above working for a consultancy, but not always.

[pluma]

Here in Germany a lot of the public debate is still about "new media". The Internet largely gets thrown in a single bin with telco and TV. The most well-known startups are in e-commerce.

Good luck founding GitHub in 2008 Germany.

[andreamazz]

As far as gadget goes, "newer is better" is a dominant factor in Europe too. The problem lays in the enterprise world. One time a client told me "you call this Visual Basic application old, but it's not. It's consolidated". Can't argue with that logic. As for the second point, you're right on the money. I can't count the amount of engineers that make less than 25/30k€ here.

[pluma]

It's 2015 and I'm happy I finally have clients that let me set the baseline of Internet Explorer support to IE 8. Not long ago I still had to support IE 6.

I have no idea how American start ups can get away with demanding users live on the bleeding edge but apparently cultures can be very different.

[mschuster91]

> I have no idea how American start ups can get away with demanding users live on the bleeding edge but apparently cultures can be very different.

Most of the startups have private customers, not corporate!