>booking.com is in NL, and Spotify in SE. Both outcompeted quite some US competitors.
Like wich? Does it count that a lot of their shareholders and managers are in the US? Does it count that Apple music can do the same thing as Spotify and that Booking has loads of competitors that do the same thing? They have no technical moat other than being first to the market. ASML does have a moat.
>I would add Hetzner as an example that EU labor laws are no obstacle to being competitive with US companies.
Sure, but Hetzner is a dust spec compared to AWS, virtually irrelevant outside of EU/Germany. They also came to the market much later than AWS once building a hyperscaler became more of a commodity.
One one hand, lax labor laws means you can be first to market and capture most of it before the EU can wake up from their 3 month holiday and decide to pivot but can't because unions are blocking it. See VW.
On the other, Austria has very lax labor laws around firing people, similar to US and they have next to no big tech companies so that's not the entire formula. You also need the VC capital of Sequoia and AZ16 which doesn't exist in Austria, you need the scale which doesn't exist in Austria, the low tax caproate environment which doesn't exist in Austria, and a small government regulatory environment which doesn't exist in Austria.
Like wich? Does it count that a lot of their shareholders and managers are in the US? Does it count that Apple music can do the same thing as Spotify and that Booking has loads of competitors that do the same thing? They have no technical moat other than being first to the market. ASML does have a moat.
>I would add Hetzner as an example that EU labor laws are no obstacle to being competitive with US companies.
Sure, but Hetzner is a dust spec compared to AWS, virtually irrelevant outside of EU/Germany. They also came to the market much later than AWS once building a hyperscaler became more of a commodity.
One one hand, lax labor laws means you can be first to market and capture most of it before the EU can wake up from their 3 month holiday and decide to pivot but can't because unions are blocking it. See VW.
On the other, Austria has very lax labor laws around firing people, similar to US and they have next to no big tech companies so that's not the entire formula. You also need the VC capital of Sequoia and AZ16 which doesn't exist in Austria, you need the scale which doesn't exist in Austria, the low tax caproate environment which doesn't exist in Austria, and a small government regulatory environment which doesn't exist in Austria.