| Much of Europe came late to the party, it’s hard to start a startup especially on the continent and even harder to get funding. The UK is doing alright especially around fintech and some of the more academic startup tho the latter tends to be bought up rather quickly. The costs of starting a company and the overall employment culture is quite antithetical to the whole fail fast startup culture. The cost of failure is substantially higher than in the US and the cost of scaling up astronomically higher and this is before you need to deal with unions and work councils. The big nations in Europe as in France and Germany are trying to catch up but the next most likely spot would be the likes of Estonia followed up by Croatia. Estonia is trying to become the Israel of Europe tech wise and they are on the right path. Both Estonia and Croatia also have the digital nomad visa which allows you to come and work remotely from there for a whole year tax free, they hope that it would attract some talent that would like to settle and start companies there. Estonia is especially well situated no corporate tax on unless the money leaves the country or is taken out as dividends, huge tax breaks on everything else and a flat 20% income tax rate that can attract a lot of tech talent from the rest of Europe. Salaries in Europe are rising in tech they are still not anywhere near the US with the exception of some top talent in London and contracting but with 50% marginal tax rates and little to no compensation in the form of stock retaining top talent is difficult in this relatively mobile economy. I’ve seen offers as high as €150K for senior self contributors and technical managers coming out of Estonia not many but a few, and even at half of that you’ll still be making most likely more than in Germany after tax. |
Not sure how you got Croatia on a map of startups. That digital nomad thing is nothing more than a few nice phrases made to look like its some heaven for IT companies. It couldn't be further from the truth.
The taxes and bureaucracy roadblocks on the individuals and companies are one of the highest in the world. One must be completely crazy to come over for some (non-existing) startup (or even established) scene. The government doesn't give a rat's ass about this industry.
The only reason why there are a lot of people in this industry working for foreign companies is that the salaries are quite low (compared to rest of the EU) but still considerable better than a median domestic salary. But as the last census is going to show (there were already some leaked statistics) the young people are leaving in droves and the shit is no joke as the population is rapidly decreasing. Why work here for say double the median salary (a little less than 1K euro) for some foreign company, when you can emigrate and make at least 7 times more? But more truthfully, people are leaving because they cannot even get a bit more than half of the average salary.
So if I were thinking of opening a startup, it would be pretty much anywhere else but here, it just doesn't make any economical sense.