[satvikpendem]

> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom.

Much as people seem to dislike when I say this, but, Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems, which, while sometimes something good does come out of it like the DMA, it does not help long term when there are no good home grown big tech (or indeed, any sector in the top 100) companies of their own.

[Silhouette]

"Europe" is about 750,000,000 people in about 50 countries. There are huge differences in both culture and economics between one country and another and often even among different parts of the same country. It's probably not a great idea to generalise to "Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems".

One of the main reasons Europe doesn't have a lot of big tech companies is that a lot of its most innovative and successful companies get bought out by the giants in the US before they reach that scale themselves. I expect this is going to happen less in the future because of the recent shifts in opinions though.

[fakedang]

Or maybe they leave voluntarily, because the EU is simply not a place to do business? Because the EU has been regulatory-captured by aging tech entities such as Siemens, IBM and SAP?

Mistral, Zendesk, Basecamp, etc. left Europe for the US early on. If we take into account European founders who started their companies in the US right away, the list is even longer.

[Silhouette]

The EU and Europe are different. 27/50ish (depending on who you ask) countries in Europe are EU member states and they collectively have about 3/5 of the European population.

My own country - the UK - is (in)famously not a part of the EU and I don't think anyone would seriously claim that we have no technological innovation or successful tech businesses here in Cambridge. The city is practically overflowing with tech startups either spun out directly from university research or keen to employ people from the local tech community.

But what tends to happen is that when one of those companies reaches a certain stage the founders will cash out. Not everyone needs to be the next Bezos or Musk. Not everyone needs to see their company of 20 or 50 or 100 people grow to 5000 with international divisions set up before an eventual IPO. Not everyone wants to go through multiple rounds of VC funding and then have to run their company under the influence of the VC's people on the board. There are a lot of founders who would be very happy to take an eight figure payday after 10 or 20 years of working on the business and then have no need to work any longer if they don't want to and the freedom to do almost anything they want for the rest of their lives. I've personally known a few of them. Some did effectively retire. Others later started something new. But one thing I don't recall a single one of them ever expressing is regret over the timing of their exit.

If anything I'd say what is missing here is a culture where people feel the need to carry on past that stage in their startup's growth. And so instead of that successful business continuing - perhaps after some other form of exit for the founders - as a local company that might eventually become big enough to buy up other successful startups we instead see them get taken over by companies ultimately run from the USA because they're the ones with enough resources for an acquisition at that scale. Of course there have been a few that did become much bigger before an eventual exit - ARM is probably the most obvious one locally and for all the tragedies in the Autonomy story it was another - but they are the exception and not the rule here.

To come back to the car business we were originally discussing today - I doubt very much that we will build the next Tesla or BYD or even Polestar here in Cambridge - but I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.

[fakedang]

I'm not going to include Russia or Serbia or even Turkey, when talking about European statistics on entrepreneurship, because the EU is the overarching force that dictates widespread European policy. Talented entrepreneurs from Russia or the Balkans go to London or the US to set up shop anyways (my cofounders being an example).

The UK's business policy since Brexit has been largely dictated by factors outside its control, in the hallways of Washington DC and Brussels. The UK is no longer the forcing function on EU business policy that it was before - it's quite frankly the other way around now.

On founder culture and aspirations, it might be fair to say that the social welfare net provided by the EU countries is generous enough that it discourages entrepreneurship, compared to say the US or China or even India. I won't fault the social net ever, but the fact of the matter is that a growing economy is necessary to facilitate a growing social net. But EU policy has been drafted to strongly favor the incumbents over the startups, to favor the Goliaths over the Davids - even if David happens to be a middle market company trying to make its mark. It's also why EU companies in that position strongly favor American partners instead of European ones - Goliaths don't want to innovate, but they want new innovation regulated so that it doesn't hurt their bottom line.

Another factor is that 10 years since Brexit, the EU still hasn't created a viable enough exit alternative that could replace the London of the 2010s. While it's much easier for an American company to go public, EU policy does not make it easy. Which is why founders look at acquisitions or PE as a much more viable route to exit.

> I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.

That's already happening across the EU, and herein is why it's very difficult to create homegrown champions. American companies and Chinese companies are encouraged to control the entire vertical chain, it being a matter of policy in the latter. EU companies have to resort to licensing agreements and a potential future acquisition.

[leonidasrup]

When European Union tries to regulate the influence of US companies in Europe and establish some European digital sovereignty, US government comes to help and applies pressure on European Union.

" “To start a direct confrontation with USA right now is probably not the smartest way to react,” said Christel Schaldemose, the Danish social-democrat lawmaker who led the drafting of the Digital Services Act."

https://www.politico.eu/article/jd-vance-waging-war-eu-tech-...