| I moved from SF to the Nordics on a startup visa and feel obligated to temper expectations whenever I see these. - There are good schools and people, but don't expect the density of top people to be anything close to SF. Finding friends to talk shop with requires active engagement. - Every European country is trying to promote itself as startup friendly, and what you are seeing from a distance is being heavily curated by government funded marketing efforts. I recently declined to take part in an marketing video because I cannot in good faith suggest people leave SF/US unless it is for ideological reasons. Expect your company L's valuation to be 1/10th of what the would be back in the US. Expect to make up the private investment shortfall with hugely distracting public funding, both in terms of wasted time applying/reporting and tangental product development. Labour laws will require you to have a _at_least_ extra 3 months of runway on hand so that you can give the mandatory notice periods. -Nordic work culture gets really old really quickly if you're a high achiever type. - Nightlife is just one of those things America does bigger and better - Finally, and this is admittedly tongue in cheek, expect to be taxed to hell and back on all things fun unless it involves making babies. Anyone planning a move to Europe as an entrepreneur, please take time to talk to people and understand the downsides. It's still okay to move for ideological reasons or if europe offers a better environment than your home country. But understand a lot of what you are seeing is being promoted by marketing departments, not entrepreneurs. |
> - There are good schools and people, but don't expect the density of top people to be anything close to SF. Finding friends to talk shop with requires active engagement.
This is true in terms of density, but if you do put in a bit of effort, you can find lots of hardcore skilled people to talk shop with. Depends on your speciality but lots of good devs in Helsinki, across web/mobile dev, embedded, game dev, machine learning (check out papers coming out of Nvidia Helsinki office), audio and graphics dev (great demoscene legacy), also more exotic fields like quantum physics or SAR satellite tech.. In fact you can find experts in most fields to hang out with
> - Every European country is trying to promote itself as startup friendly, and what you are seeing from a distance is being heavily curated by government funded marketing efforts. I recently declined to take part in an marketing video because I cannot in good faith suggest people leave SF/US unless it is for ideological reasons. Expect your company L's valuation to be 1/10th of what the would be back in the US. Expect to make up the private investment shortfall with hugely distracting public funding, both in terms of wasted time applying/reporting and tangental product development. Labour laws will require you to have a _at_least_ extra 3 months of runway on hand so that you can give the mandatory notice periods.
There is some truth to this (though I would say early stage valuations are perhaps half, not 10%), but there is nothing fundamental stopping you from building a global company in the Nordics, there are many examples of this - Skype, Spotify, Supercell etc. Also I think there is more and more VC money available, also from US VCs, to Nordic companies - they are seeing the high quality of startups and attracted by the non-inflated valuations. If anything, I would say that as an employer, reasonable engineering salaries and somewhat less competition for talent is in your favour vs SF.