[azmodeus]

There has been a much stronger capital supply than in a shattered group of countries.

The EU does not exist as a unit, it's 27 sovereign states cooperating. In the EU the single market is an achievement across countries, but can't compare with single large internal markets.

China as the second economy of the world managed to succeed with a centralised plan.

So I think market size and economic power is a bigger indicator than centralised vs not.

[terminalshort]

Tech companies are the least capital intensive of any industry (pre-LLM bubble). Lack of capital is not a good explanation when Meta and Google were started on investments of < $100K. China has kept out foreign competition and applied heavy censorship across its tech companies, but they arose and competed as a free market amongst themselves, not by central planning.

[lossolo]

> Lack of capital is not a good explanation when Meta and Google were started on investments of < $100K.

It is. As you said, Meta and Google started with small investments, but now they are multi trillion dollar behemoths. Any company, even with millions of dollars in funding, can’t compete with them because they have tens of thousands of developers and infrastructure worth tens or even hundreds of billions of USD. They have penetrated the entire EU market and have enough money to burn, allowing them to survive any competition that isn’t state funded. The risk for private capital is huge, and the EU simply doesn’t have the same amount of capital that the US does.

The only alternative would have been the Chinese route, building local equivalents of Google, AWS, Amazon, Meta etc. like they did in China but it seems that ship has already sailed for the EU, given the current state of things.

[disgruntledphd2]

> the EU simply doesn’t have the same amount of capital that the US does.

This isn't true, it's just that all of the EU excess capital gets invested in the US, so it appears true.

[lossolo]

Of course, it is true. The EU also does not have a reserve currency and cannot print 2 trillion a year. Where do you think the majority of these 2 trillion goes?

[azmodeus]

I think capital and market access are the key factors in general startup success, the USA is number one in both atm