The problem though is financing, French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed.
France has decided to build the “French Silicon Valley” multiple times by grouping schools and companies together, providing facilities and so on. But it always fails because there is no VC money pool.
If you start a company here, better think about profitability from the get go.
Which is mostly real-estate
Isn't that...normal? Where did the attitude come from - that startups are somehow entitled to funding worth of several lifetime median incomes, for their half-baked business ideas that are unlikely to ever turn profit? That if the country doesn't shower the founders with angel investor money just for showing up, they are somehow unreasonably risk-averse and stingy.
As an example - Docker, arguably the most influential software of the past decade, was developed in France. HN has derided French investors for not investing in it, leading to the company relocation to US. Afaik, Docker is still burning money, with no end in sight, and will continue to do so indefinitely unless a buyout at ridiculous valuation happens. Looks like...the stingy French investors were right after all...
I definitely think that there is some middle ground to find between not being able to rise money for any project, and being able to get 100M funding for a juicer.
How is this a bad thing? Compare this requirement to, say, Uber, who has been losing billions, and has used investor money to engage in price dumping to corner the market.
However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds then you will be bogged down by doing contract work to hopefully fund your idea one day. It will slow you down and also quite possibly tangle you in support contracts in products you don't actually want to maintain.
My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind.
> However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds
This has always been the case. Until unlimited US money perverted the incentives to become "waste billions to corner the market by barely legal means" or "wasted billions until someone buys you".
Let's take a look at YC companies, which is representative to the kind of startups we're talking about here. Do you think the majority of them get the funding to burn and subsidize the 10%?
Doordash losses: 204 million in 2018, 667 million in 2019, 461 million in 2020. 1.2 billion dollars in losses over three years. [1]
Cruise: Hard to find any data (the name doesn't help). Raised billions while producing zilch. Was acquired by GM, and is now generating only losses to the tune of 200-300 million dollars per quarter. That is, losses of around 1 billion dollars per year [2]
Instacart: Doesn't publish profitability (suprised Fry face). Had it's first profitable year in 7 years in 2020. In 2019 lost 300 million dollars. Previous data unavailable.
Should I go on?
Even the proftable darlings are usually profitable if you look at them right.
AirBnB: up and down, up and down. Sometimes down with losses up to 674 million dollars a year: [4]
Dropbox: became profitable only last year. Prior to that? Well, losses up to 484 million dollars of losses per year [5]
And so on.
The vast majority is fuelled by litrerally endless investor money with only two modes of operation: corner the market (that is, outlive other competitors who don't have such an unlimited amount of money) or get sold.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/doordash-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1077077/gm-cruise-operat...
[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/instacart-statistics/
If I were to identify one big flaw, it would be that EU governments don't recognize that small businesses can't do regulatory compliance as much, so they should be exempted. Or you get no small business formation that can turn into large businesses.
The cost/effort of running a tiny deadbeat company in Europe can be very marginal (I run one). That's how all plumbers and carpenters and car mechanics run their businesses: if they can you can too.
Sounds like you could easily justify soviet bureaucracy with that logic.
> It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low
You're not wrong about this specifically. But why would I open in a difficult country if I can open in an easy country?
And let's face it - the sort of businesses that HN readers want to start up are rarely that simple. Most people here are dealing with equity, vesting, cliffs, angel investors, VC money, cross-state and international taxation etc. We're not put off by something being a bit harder. Why should other people be?
So, while you're right that there might be fewer businesses, the EU doesn't actually stop people starting if they really want to.
It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low. There are going to be much harder challenges ahead even where company formation is complicated.
It's also worth noting that some parts of the EU make it a lot easier to start even than the US. Estonia's e-residency programme makes it incredibly easy to register for limited citizenship and start a digital business based there.