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by nickpp 970 days ago
Are you aware of any innovation or successful startups that came out of the EU in the last 5 years? How can you regulate a field you have no players in?
4 comments

Define successful startups. As far as I know, there have been quite a few, but they are usually just bought out by the giant MANGA corporations.

I think what is true is that it is harder to get VC backed capital here, and hence a lot of “winner takes all” markets are won in the US. But that doesn’t mean that there is no striving startup scene in Europe, they just have different goals or measures of success than “grow a lot”.

Regulating that might even help European companies :-)

By successful I mean profitable privately held, IPOed or acquired.

Growth is a must - large companies are market makers and a continent without them will become dependent on the ones that have them.

Bought out is also fine - that how you get investment capital.

Regulation only helps incumbent companies though, which is exactly the problem in EU.

Well, you've just defined "successful" to mean rapidly growing, and by implication unconstrained by regulations.

European telecom companies are large tech companies, heavily regulated and successful. Yes, they are incumbents now. But they weren't always; at least not all of them.

Somehow your definition of success doesn't have the actual definition of success: sustainable profitable business.

It's easy to see why: all the startups loudly hailed as successful are running into billions of dollars of debt every year, but keep being propped up by unlimited investor money. In any other industry this would be a failure.

If they are not sustainable they will go bankrupt. Are you saying all those investors are dumb and just burning money for the fun of it?! That's... interesting. More gain for us consumers then - subsidized goods and services!
> If they are not sustainable they will go bankrupt.

They would if not for the infinite subsidies

> Are you saying all those investors are dumb and just burning money for the fun of it?!

For example, Uber has not been profitable for a single year in its 10 years of existence.

Same goes for most if YCombinator's "top companies".

In which other industry can you lose money (often billions of dollars a year) and still be in business and claim you're successful.

> infinite subsidies

There is no such thing. Private money is finite, it ends up eventually as investors want ROIs.

> Uber has not been profitable

Actually, they announced their first profitable quarter in 2023.

> In which other industry can you lose money (often billions of dollars a year) and still be in business and claim you're successful.

Well in the Government business, of course! Deficits around the world keep increasing and governments borrow trillions they never pay back.

Itsme is one of the best apps I use on a daily basis, I understand it is starting to expand internationally, I suspect it will be extremely successful. Another good innovation is PEPPOL.
What have other continents offered in the same last 5 years?
Just from what I am using personally Figma and ChatGPT come to mind. The whole AI wave has nothing this side of the pond. Now the success of these AI tools is not yet guaranteed, so maybe I am wrong.
Figma Initial release date: September 27, 2016

Sorry, disqualified according to your own arbitrary rules.

And regarding AI startups there's about a bazillion of them in EU, just as in the US. Sure, ChatGPT was invented by a US company but you can't really claim that there's "nothing" in the EU. Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Yeah, well, I don't have any statistics here, it's just what I notice in my everyday life: many more startups and services coming from USA and almost none from EU. UIPath is the only one I know of, I think.

But I am happy to be proved wrong, thats why I asked in the first place.

Sadly the cert for Let Me Google That For You has expired, so here's a plain old google link for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=eu+unicorns

Off the top of my head, but some of these are older than 5 years: Spotify, Voi, Revolut, Ledger, Aiven.

ChatGTP isnt a company. It is a product of OpenAI that was founded 7 years ago (so not in last 5 years). Figma is also older than 5 years.
This is a little thin.