[dharma1]

Would be great if the next Google/Facebook/Microsoft was European and HQ'd in Europe, but it's hard to see that.

ML anecdotes - Schmidhuber makes a point of how LSTM was developed on European taxpayer's dime. Backpropagation was invented by Esko Linnainmaa (a Finnish researcher) in the 70s.

Universities or startups can't compete with finance/Google/FB level compensation, so that's where a lot of the bright minds go.

[ocdtrekkie]

Maybe they'd be able to if Google et. al. had to pay their taxes and had their monopoly practices broken up.

[Maro]

I also used to think that, and in the long-term I agree, and I have (i) done a startup in Europe (failed for lacking of funding) (ii) worked for a European startup (Prezi). But right now I work for Facebook (in London), and this is a good thing. You can go to these places and learn a lot, a lot more than what you can figure out on your own with your friends sitting in a garage or at one of the moderately successful European startups (moderately successful=0.1% of Facebook, that's already like $300-500M), which any sane entrepreneur here would be super happy over, fully so.

By "a lot" I mean cultural things, vision, strategy, how to set your own expectations, how decisions are made, what tools are available, etc.

[dharma1]

I agree it's a good learning opportunity for individuals, but I still hope Europe will be able to produce new large, successful tech companies in the future. Right now a lot of the value is captured by US companies

[kuschku]

For that the European home market needs to become easier to compete on, though, and it currently looks like it’s moving towards getting a lot worse instead.

The Brexit might throw us back ten years.