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Interesting case study of a company that was a leading trophy company in the US in the 70's or 80's that had a model that worked. They had a single production location that shipped nationally across the United States. They thought they could do the same in Europe, immediately running into problems as they quickly found they would need a distributor in each country which would take a rather large chunk out of their margin. They still proceeded and found that everyone had different tastes, the Italian's liked something flamboyant, the French preferred something classy, the English wanted something Iconic and the German's wanted something Minimalist. In the US, everyone wanted the same thing. In short, the company went bankrupt in both regions due to the errors made in Europe. There are language differences, cultural differences, tax and regulation differences, additional costs of multiple companies to be setup during expansion and the list keeps going on. Startups stuggle to scale in Europe for very clear reasons, it's much harder to do so. With a small team and little resources, a company can address the entire United States, in Europe they simply can't (of course there are a few lucky exceptions). So as a European, what has Europe needed for the last two decades to be competitive? Quite obviously, it is to level the playing field and remove those barriers to zero. Until that happens, European Startups will never be able to scale to the size or with the speed of their US competitors. While I think European founders are as smart as American founders, by the points above, does that even matter? Easier translation such as http://www.reverbeo.com (Friends of mine) will take care of the language barriers on web businesses.
Higher levels of customisation on both software and hardware will take care of the stylisic differences.
But the regulation challenges require EU intervention and we've been waiting a long time for them to do anything. |
My favourites are by Tom Hulme, Rob Fitzpatrick, Mikko Jarvenpaa, Paulina Bozek, Mike Butcher and Florian Heinemann.