[mrtksn]

I don't think its about regulation, its the mindset. Since some time there's this trend of indie European developers with some who managed to make themselves a name like Peter Levels and be hosted on big podcasters and these people keep calling their projects "startups" and making about as much as a high street kebab shop(in this community they like to boost about their revenues). Levels is famous enough to be interviewed by Lex Friedman and in this 4 hours talk they mention how an American company just took his idea and copied his ways and made 30 million dollars by making an iOS app of it and Levels talks as if it never crossed his mind to be the person who did it and make serious money.

Also he constantly complains about regulations etc but some striking things come out of it from time to time. For example he complains that its hard to get access to the EU's supercomputer and compares this to US where you can just buy tens of thousands of GPUs from Nvidia and not go through the EUs bureaucracy and never occurs to him that you can do the same in EU and the the EU funded supercomputer is just an extra.

Its just so weird, the mentality is very different. Maybe it works when you are working on a niche and it is a good way of making a living or even getting rich but that's not how you build empires.

The regulations are just a meme at this point, no one seems to know what regulation stopped them from doing the thing they will do. IMHO the reality is that you can just built the thing in USA and access EU markets from there and there's no need for replication in EU, therefore EU has plenty of startups but very few scale ups and unicorns and that's not going to change unless EU closes its markets to USA.

[mentalgear]

Levels is all hype, no depth. It’s absurd that he frames himself as somehow “disadvantaged” by the EU’s HPC access rules, when those systems are explicitly reserved for scientific research, not for cranking out AI avatars or the latest “AI-generated game” cash-grab. Complaining that you can’t use taxpayer-funded supercomputers for your next hype cycle isn’t a sign of innovation - it’s Levels' so often displayed self-entitlement and pseudo-intellectualism.

[mrtksn]

Sure but he became the poster child of a certain trend. Besides, you can see the mentality all over the place.

Contrary to what the social media makes you believe, EU isn't run on tickets income for old building - the place is packed with high tech niche businesses but they don't seem to be interested much in scaling.

Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn. They just keep making money. It's really cool, he loves his life and He's probably much happier than Zuck or Musk but with that approach you end up staying a niche instead of a behemoth like the American companies. In USA the instinct seems to be how to make this global and take all the money. The European approach is good for society IMHO, no enshitification once you circle the market however when your market is open to people who are willing to do the put a lot of money first, kill the competition be a monopoly or duopoly and then screw everyone and and make filthy level of money then you become one of those killed.

[pzo]

> Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn

If something in europe has potential to dominate then it's eventually being bought by US capital, see Skype, Nokia. If someone is throwing at you 10+ digit check then it's hard to resist and even if you want to resist good luck with persuading your early investors about not taking the money.

EU doesn't have petro-dollar and as good money printer as US. EU doesn't also have citizens & big funds that ape savings into local stocks, another reason most companies IPO in US.