[manmal]

While taxes are high, employees in Europe are still way cheaper than say SF or NYC. You can get a decent web developer for EUR 60-80k in total cost per year in Austria. Spend 100k and you get the top 5% talent.

What Europe lacks is private funding. I don’t find the article now, but years ago read that there’s 5x as much funding in the US market as compared to the EU market. Seed funding is 3-5x less than you would expect in the US.

[cameldrv]

This has seemed to me to be a key problem for the European tech industry. A few seemingly minor structural differences mean there is very little domestic VC available. Those are:

1. In the U.S., there are many pension funds that put some of their money into venture investment. In general in Europe it is illegal for a pension fund to invest in such risky assets at all.

2. In the U.S. there are many more private foundations and private universities that have large investment funds, and some of this gets put into VC. For a variety of reasons, there aren't many large private foundations and there are few private universities with large endowments.

If I were doing industrial policy in a European country, the first thing I would do is to start to invest a couple percent of the state pension funds into VC like vehicles. Given how underinvested it is, the returns should be great, and the extra economic activity should help the fiscal health of their economies a lot.