it's because Europe is a continent of 20+ different large languages and cultures. In Sweden everybody speaks Swedish and nobody uses cash. In Germany, nobody speaks Swedish and everyone uses cash. There is no homogenous market like in the US or China where you can blow up some product to 300+ million people.

That's the reason why there are fewer startups in Europe. Europe has plenty of large technology companies if one stops equating technology with "user facing smartphone application". They just happen to be export oriented, or pharmaceutical or manufacturing and transport companies.

Trying to copy the US or China in producing rapidly growing startup companies is in my opinion foolish and we shouldn't buy into the constant hype of just trying to emulate America, but rather aim to increase where European companies advantages lie, in integrating high technology into existing economic sectors that integrate with industrial production.

Not only is this much better suited to the economic and social European environment that simply isn't accepting of the "break the rules, worry about the problems later" mentality of internet statups, it's also arguably much more equitable and reaches a larger section of the labour market.

>it's because Europe is a continent of 20+ different large languages and cultures. In Sweden everybody speaks Swedish and nobody uses cash. In Germany, nobody speaks Swedish and everyone uses cash.

How much does that matter though? You could just release your app/site/whatever in English and instantly have access to the US market.

The same things that make it hard to make one app for all of the EU also make it hard to make an app for the USA from outside the USA.

Even if you hire a UK or Éire citizen for their English skills, you have all the cultural reasons that means Tesco isn’t a supermarket brand in the USA and Walmart isn’t a supermarket brand in the UK even though both are English speaking nations. The language issues are also substantial, even though the cultural output of Hollywood has made it easier for many EU citizens to learn English than each other’s languages.

Walmart owns ASDA, or at least they did until recently.

Yes, but irrelevant. The details of the Walmart brand are essentially unknown in the UK, and the very fact that Walmart are now trying to sell ASDA for almost the same nominal amount they bought it for 20 years ago demonstrates the exact difficulty I was referring to.

Because when I want to talk to someone for support, especially when it's a small business that might be slower to addressing my support concerns because of a lack of resources, I want to speak to a native English speaker I can understand with an 800 number.

US companies get that baked in. Everyone else has to grow to become that.

It does, the citizens of different countries don't care or know each other, anyone hardly knows how EU works or what people even do in Brussels. You have news stations that are literally for 300mil people. Same with every startup and product.

^ this, exactly. Europe is definitely not one big unique market, every country is a different one with its own specificity. They happen to share some regulation and to (almost all) use the same currency but they are quite different in their user behaviours and expectations.

Well I mean you also have smaller individual countries like Israel that don't seem to do too bad.

A typical EU startup:

- hey, we are startup, we can't pay you much, is that OK?

- well, we can't really compensate you with stock options, those are for founders

- oh no, your opinion doesn't matter, bosses are always right

- yes, you'll work crazy hours but we can only pay you for 40

In other words, EU startups have no mechanism in place to reward early employees that build the company from the scratch, it's all about making co-founders famous/wealthy. It's already bad in the US, imagine EU is 10x worse.

What? No! Where are you getting your information from?

Having worked with a multitude of startups over the years I can say that none of them have behaved in this way in the Nordics.

Did you get a competitive salary or ~1% of share of the company as an early employee? If not, you were used. The aforementioned is a typical Berlin startup. A favorite of mine is when a company tries to pay you with debt, i.e. instead of being just a developer, you become a banker for your future boss' idea. I wish I were joking...

Last time I was job hunting, one of the Berlin startups was offering €58k (iOS developer). Is that competitive? I find it hard to judge.

Depends your level, but if you have some experience, no it's not something I would consider competitive (talking about Berlin).

Last time is when? In 2019 the median seems to be 65k-70k, and 70k-75k is possible.

75k at a seed stage companies. Day rates are €1200 and total comp for real senior developers at established companies is €100k+

“Nobody in Berlin earns over €65k” should be a dead meme by now. Salaries are continuing to rise

Not hard at all, there is plenty of information about wages in IT. If you understand the root of the article, the US versus Europe comparison, take Silicon Valley numbers and compare to €58k and you will find it ridiculously low. Damn, you get more in Romania (Bucharest or Cluj), I am not kidding you.

No

What I see in Germany is that some of the startups are basically contracted by larger companies, tasked to develop complex solutions for a fraction of the price that an established company would require for the same task.

At least that's my experience so far.

I wouldn't really consider those startups since they're not trying to develop their own product for a market segment. Those are more like small development shops (there are a lot of those here in the US as well).

> I can say that none of them have behaved in this way in the Nordics.

The Nordic countries, particularly Sweden and Denmark, are among the few that actually have a pretty healthy startup scene. Maybe there's a link?

The parent comment rings true (in essence, despite its touch of hyperbole) with respect to France.

I have never met any company like this, startup or not. Are you stuck in some scam? There are so many companies offering amazing benefits in Europe's capitals that it's hard to pick one.

At least in Croatia, I would say people are still figuring out how to do the startup thing. Certain incentives and incubators have appeared in the past few years, the country has shown some interest with improving regulation and some people are trying it out. The biggest thing I would say is the culture where I would say people are very risk averse so they do not want to jump into debt for some crazy idea so they cannot afford paying people. Most startups I know in Croatia are started by friends where no one is getting payed and then later there's a squabble when it turns out the friend who started the company now owns it while the others are just employees. Other startups hire lots of college interns for 5€ net an hour and waste time with them learning how to code instead of paying actual professionals. I would say the scene is improving and each year there are 2x as many startups doing recruiting but it's all still in its infancy.

What you describe is not anything like a startup. Product quality and speed to market are very important, you cannot get these with students learning to code.

Depends. If there's nothing better in Croatia, you might still be the fastest to market in Croatia.

I see a lot of these hot deals in the US also. They eventually find someone. Likely not the most qualified someone.

While the government policies don't always help, in my experience they are merely a hurdle and not the underlying reason it is difficult for startups to succeed in Europe. The ambient culture that defines behavior and sets expectations in the relationships between founders, investors, employees, and society at large is much more adversarial and conservative than the US.

Being an excellent engineer, the backbone of all good tech companies, is rarely recognized, poorly compensated, and engenders much less social status than if you were on the US west coast. Ironically, even though there are many highly talented engineers in Europe, European executives and investors frequently hold American engineers working in Europe in much higher regard and treat them differently than engineers from their own countries. I've seen it many times.

This is not an environment that incentivizes the world-class native engineering talent that exists in Europe to perform up to their abilities in a high-risk startup. Good engineers correctly view themselves as being undervalued, so there is no point in taking the risk. Nothing will change until Europe places more value -- economic, social, and cultural -- on being an exceptional engineer instead of treating them as a modern day factory worker subservient to the managerial class. This is not something you can easily change with government initiatives.

Agree with this. Where people gravitate to in terms of career choices is very much driven by compensation patterns, and somehow, in (Western) Europe, being on the technical side of tech/IT just does not pay.

Large companies (those that are not tech-centric, e.g. financial services, etc) still tend to see it as a back office function and often outsources majority of operations to India (or fly and settle temporary employees locally). Companies that places tech at the center of their business recruit and hire a lot of tech talent from outside of Western Europe. There are also local developers, but their pay, compared to jobs in, say, marketing, sales, and other rather fluffy business functions, is low, low, low. Someone mentioned Bookings before. Their pay is on-par with the market average here, which is 50-80K. And that is very low compared to how a similar position is valued in SV.

Startups here in general also underpay their tech workers compared to counterparts in the US, since they point to the large companies locally (which already underpay tech roles), and say, "well, we can't afford corporate pay, we are just a startup". So you are kind of double-underpaid, even though the job descriptions are usually copy and pasted SV-speak with rainbows and unicorns.

Wrong list, check this one. Booking, Zalando, Spotify, Bet365, Yandex.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_com...

Isn't Booking a US corporation and Yandex is a Russian one. Generally when people say "Europe" in this context they are mostly referring to the EU and the "satellites".

Regardless, the EU alone has 50% more population than the US, while the population is about as educated, yet it's only a small fraction of the US on this list.

Booking is headquartered in Amsterdam (and not just for some sort of tax shenanigans).

I don't necessarily dispute that Europe is a worse environments for startups to succeed, I just don't see why taxing equity incentives has anything to do with that. And I think taxing equity incentives is fair.

it's because the market is heavily fragmented and to reach sufficient numbers you need to cover the whole European market. a startup here needs an accountant of the bat to handle the tax mess, a lawyer because incorporation is all but easy in most countries with few exceptions, a gdpr specialist, etc.

that's why there are comparatively few steps, the entry cost are massive and discouraging, and that's on top of the internationalisation requirements of course.

This is ridiculous. No, you don't need staff lawyer, accountant or "GDPR specialist" to start in Europe. One company I worked at didn't employ an accountant until pushing to €10M turnover. They still don't have a lawyer.

It's probably a misunderstanding of the GDPR's requirement for a designated representative. https://searchnewscentral.com/blog/2019/08/23/does-gdpr-requ... Still a barrier to entry for startups.

Having a designated representative is for companies outside the EU anyway. If you're inside there's no need...

This is incorrect - if you have more than 10 employees that handle data, and that basically means everyone sitting behind a computer, your company has to designate someone as data privacy officer who has to make sure that things get handled according to GDPR.

These rules arent strictly enforced yet, but when you run into issues and it can be shown that you didn´t take steps to implement it, it has consequences.

No, you need people be handling personal data, not any data.

That's not what the GDPR says. There's no bright line for the number of employees handling data.

A DPO should be assigned if:

>(a) the processing is carried out by a public authority or body, except for courts acting in their judicial capacity;

>(b) the core activities of the controller or the processor consist of processing operations which, by virtue of their nature, their scope and/or their purposes, require regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale; or

>(c) the core activities of the controller or the processor consist of processing on a large scale of special categories of data pursuant to Article 9 and personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences referred to in Article 10.

(Article 37)

And in any case a data protection officer is different from a representative, as the title of Article 27 indicates ("Representatives of controllers or processors not established in the Union").

Sure, you can get by without one, just like you can speed without getting a ticket. But that doesn't mean it's the type of situation that normally occurs. For example, if nobody in your company knows how GDPR works, how would you know that you're complying with it? The same goes for tax laws.

You just have to lower the blinds and stay quiet when the GDPR Gestapo comes near your office.

such bullshit. someone has to fill in the relevant taxes paperwork and handle the invoices. who does that is the accountant, even if it has founder, owner or some other label attached, and the time it takes to handle the paperwork is not free, whether you pay for it in money or work hours.

I co-owned one company and presently a board member on another.

Noone said that accounting needs not be done, just that you don't have to employ anyone you listed in a startup. You do as with any other non-essential work like cleaning, catering and so on: buy external services on the need to have basis.

This is also not something in any way unique to Europe. American start-ups also need to file taxes, incorporate and so on.

did I say employ? no I said needs. everyone here so fast at replying but have you tried reading what's written? and however you want to spin it is a cost, and that is a barrier to entry which is actually quite tall if you trying to bootstrap something outside the angel/vc scene which is pretty dull anyway in Europe.

and Europe tax return are far more convoluted than the average Delaware company, especially because of bullshit like vatmoss schemes that are a specific result of the European market fragmentation, which was the main point to begin with

If you call yourself not an accountant despite doing the bookkeeping I’m pretty sure other accountants wouldn’t bat an eye at that language. It happens all the time in startups. Yes the work isn’t “free” but everyone wears many hats in a startup and often works for free.

Sure, the time cost it's not free, but it's not large enough to be a meaningful barrier of entry. For me, filing basic company taxes took like a couple hours per year.

Right. It's exactly the same barrier to entry a kebab restaurant or a bike repair shop has. If that's enough to detract one from starting a company, perhaps it's for the better.

Or, as with everything these days, pay another company to deal with it. I've been seeing ad's for Pilot.com all over recently which claims to do this work for you, in exchange for a fee, naturally.

Where are the talented people in Europe? I was looking for some for 14 years when I had my startup (in the most liveable city in the world apparently), but nobody came. What I learnt is that - naturally - nearly all highly talented people go to the USA (or sometimes UK) to maximise their chances. Also, the 2 most talented/intelligent people in IT I know since they were kids live in the US permanently now. One is at Google.

Keep believing that you'll find "huge numbers of highly talented people" here, you won't - unless perhaps you mean in the arts...

>> I was looking for some for 14 years when I had my startup ... but nobody came

did anyone show up, and if they did in what aspects were they lacking? Genuinely curious.

You didn't offer enough money.

The people who came wouldn't suddenly have become more talented if I offered more.

If you offered more suddenly more talented people would appear at your door. People with the know how quickly realise the range. If the top of the range is too low they don't come knocking even.

They are not evenly distributed. If you mean Vienna under the city - software engineers do not tend to stay there - low salaries, no software product jobs, only basically IT departments - so you are seen as spends there.

It depends where you are looking for them. They are plenty, but don't walk on the streets wearing a big sign.

> but nobody came.

)-,;