But we’re not talking about an arbitrary African nation in comparison to South Africa, we are talking about two countries within the European Union. Your analogy is a bit hyperbolic.
I used Africa as an example to provide the clearest demonstration of how location and associated factors impact business. With the exception of defense contracting, warfare, strife, illiberalism are pretty obvious barriers to starting a business, much less a tech business. I didn't however suggest that these were only factors or suggest that Europe is comparable in that regard. What I'm trying to demonstrate is that policies applied over a certain jurisdiction will cause people to vote with their feet and their wallets. Being in a state with lower taxes even mattered to Jeff Bezos, now the second richest person in the world, when he started Amazon. You can read it from the man himself:
You moved from New York to Seattle to start this business. Why?
"It sounds counterintuitive, but physical location is very important for the success of a virtual business. We could have started Amazon.com anywhere. We chose Seattle because it met a rigorous set of criteria. It had to be a place with lots of technical talent. It had to be near a place with large numbers of books. It had to be a nice place to live — great people won’t work in places they don’t want to live. Finally, it had to be in a small state. In the mail-order business, you have to charge sales tax to customers who live in any state where you have a business presence. It made no sense for us to be in California or New York.
Obviously Seattle has a great programming culture. And it’s close to Roseburg, Oregon, which has one of the biggest book warehouses in the world. We thought about the Bay Area, which is the single best source for technical talent. But it didn’t pass the small-state test. I even investigated whether we could set up Amazon.com on an Indian reservation near San Francisco. This way we could have access to talent without all the tax consequences. Unfortunately, the government thought of that first."
You moved from New York to Seattle to start this business. Why?
"It sounds counterintuitive, but physical location is very important for the success of a virtual business. We could have started Amazon.com anywhere. We chose Seattle because it met a rigorous set of criteria. It had to be a place with lots of technical talent. It had to be near a place with large numbers of books. It had to be a nice place to live — great people won’t work in places they don’t want to live. Finally, it had to be in a small state. In the mail-order business, you have to charge sales tax to customers who live in any state where you have a business presence. It made no sense for us to be in California or New York.
Obviously Seattle has a great programming culture. And it’s close to Roseburg, Oregon, which has one of the biggest book warehouses in the world. We thought about the Bay Area, which is the single best source for technical talent. But it didn’t pass the small-state test. I even investigated whether we could set up Amazon.com on an Indian reservation near San Francisco. This way we could have access to talent without all the tax consequences. Unfortunately, the government thought of that first."
https://www.fastcompany.com/27309/whos-writing-book-web-busi...