| > Tech funding can be difficult to find The money YC participants get is typically viewed as the least valuable part of participating in YC. > Would say what makes Switzerland attractive is being able to find highly educated engineers Having effective access to the engineering talent in the EU (now) is useful but also excludes Russia, Norway, Eastern Europe, North America, India, Asia and Australia. > What's lacking for web startups is experience scaling up to international markets; Part of this is the competitive advantage the US enjoys in the Internet for largely historic reasons: everyone pays to connect to the US. The US doesn't pay anybody. This (along with market size) is why hosting is cheaper in the US than anywhere else such that companies get more for their money in the US, helping companies both large and small. Local hosting becomes far more important in content-driven businesses (Spotify, Youtube, etc) where you want to be as close to the customer as possible to not only save on long-haul bandwidth but also have lower latency. That case aside, the economics really don't favour hosting a large-scale Internet startup anywhere other than the US (even if the company isn't in the US). Actually there is another exception based on regulatory environment. Some companies (rightly) simply won't want to host in the US and be subject to US laws. The clearest example is online gambling, which is illegal in the US, but there are others (eg Swiss bank customer data can't leave Switzerland). |