While the EU has a very well integrated market for industry goods, for services (where I would include software) the market is less than perfect.
The language barrier is the biggest strangle for EU software entrepreneurship / platform business in my opinion.
The second-biggest obstacle imho is funding. If you want to grow really fast, it is hard to get enough money.
Third, I would rank ecosystem in general, besides money.
I think over regulation is not as bad as it is often said. All developed countries have regulations in place, some more some less.
I get that home markets may not be big and provide a springboard perhaps to other markets but even the big countries there don’t seem to dominate the small countries in terms of Software.
By the time US companies reach the EU they are already big, worth billions.
That being said I believe the main issue in EU is funding.
IMO language is big barrier as just testing different text in UI is a lot of hassle when starting out - not to mentions laws, cultures difference, dealing with business partners etc. is much harder due to that.
IMO common law/company to easily hire people across EU would help.
Hypothesis: A lot of people read English well enough to use apps and websites even before automatic translation was built into e.g. Chrome and Safari; but translation into your mother tongue is much easier than transition into a second language.
I believe it’s just the lack of massive capital and the power law of VC investments. Start 1000s companies with smart people and a tiny fraction will get insanely big.
We’re starting to see this in Europe too now.
On the other hand, people in Sweden are positive about hiring (and sometimes being hired as a) freelancer. But that's not a company, right?
That doesn't explain why Israel doesn't have this problem, they have an even smaller home market. They just sell internationally.
The US has a very mature and developed tech VC scene. Where's Europes isn't as mature. Also clustering is a thing -- why didn't Silicon Valley happen in New York either -- many of the conditions were there just like California but it didn't materialize and Europe was simply a mess in the aftermath of WWII there weren't going to be many tech revolutions taking place there.
In fact ironically enough there was such a congregation of talent in Berlin in the 1930s that some have predicted a second "Renaissance" was inevitable were it not for WWII.
I'll much rather build and run software for free in my spare time than start a business since the latter would mean having to spend dozens of hours every week dealing with all manner of bureaucracy.
I have the capacity and funds to start a business, but I just don't think it's worth the hassle.
Doing international business is always difficult and the additional hassle when you deal with American customers says absolutely nothing about the overhead of starting a domestic company.
Thus the reality is that you run from left to right with your attention chopped up over 1000 things simultaneously while in theory you have to write down all time spend on each business related activity. Almost everything counts as long as you document it. If the description is to generic it is rejected.
Of course there are exceptions too! In the [corona] period 1 January 2021 tot 1 Juli 2021, if you were unable to do work, you may count 24 hours per week. It might be attractive to write things down anyway as it might add up to more than 24.
Now [say] some former employer asks you to do some work for a few months. He wants to pay you a salary as usual but you prefer freelance while the work is unrelated to your company. Do you start an extra company for it???? Will you fail to make enough hours cleaning your office and organizing your desktop??? How much will it cost you if you don't reach the magic 1225 number???
Or say the business is a moderate success, some money comes in, you might be able to survive, the feature set is complete and you ran out of bugs to fix. How spend your time now? You want to get a job but if you spend more time doing that it costs money.
In the EU, there's a lot of this "what the regulator currently will accept". By the letter of the law, in the worst case, our business in the EU could not have existed. But it did exist and thrive.
The standardization in the US makes it easy. But if I ever have to figure out something for Germany again, I'll slit my throat and feed lizards with my blood first.
Compare this with the cut throat competition in Sillicon Valley or the international arena.
That's how you end up with non existent tech offerings in Europe.
Europe is also doing pretty well in several fields and you don't explain at all how tech in particular is affected by public spending.
Why take on a risky career path like being a doctor if best case you're half a million in debt and that's assuming you don't get weeded out at any point? It's no surprise we have shortages of engineers, doctors, nurses, teachers, etc.
Even a bachelor's degree is on average 32k for in-state at public colleges assuming you graduate in 4 years. Contrast that with my German peers who didn't pay anything and yeah, maybe I wouldn't have been a software engineer if everything else wasn't so volatile. I certainly don't feel as essential as doctors or nurses, especially now.
Sure it's cheaper to start a LLC in the US and you can hire/fire on a whim practically, but 63% of Americans don't have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency. Doesn't exactly leave a lot of wiggle room unless your parents have a basement for your MVP and some seed money.
Would you rather get the public health and education, or keep the 20k euro and find a solution for yourself?
I reckon that my health expenditures are 1000 per year, and I am self-taught, so I don't need the government for anything.
What we need is to make the public services Opt-in/Opt-out, so people who find it competitive like yourself can keep enjoying it.
Also, EU governments provide retirement benefits while the US's doesn't. This is the main expenditure for these governments.
Not saying that your argument has not some truth in it, but it's definitively wrong in the case of healthcare.
The US population not taking care of themselves is a public health problem not a medical care quality issue.
It's not in the top 5 by number of patients treated. Anecdotally I met people who went to Germany, Israel, India and Thailand for treatment, I never heard of anyone even discussing going to the US. The visas alone are a nightmare.
The U.S. has the largest concentration of the best research hospitals in the world.
I see someone shifting the goalposts here, first we were saying that US healthcare is not worse in any metric, then we started measuring it's success by medical tourism, now are down to some special rare diseases.
Let's come back to where we were before, measures per unit of money spent, US healthcare delivers worse outcomes that any other developed nation. Measured in average health of its citizen, the outcomes aren't great. Life expectancy, and other metrics aren't particularly amazing.
Of course, if you have the money to fly to the US, stay in the US and pay out-of-pocket for a medical procedure in the US, then yes, the US is a good destination. Which translates into: if you're rich, medicine in the US is great.
However, not all of us are rich. And definitely not all Americans are rich.
Sifted goalposts
> The average American pays more for healthcare over their live than the average European, and the outcomes are objectively worse.
remains true. No matter how you want to spin it and pretend that medical tourism affects this in any way.
Edit:
For 2015, https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/c...
- Medical tourism to US: between 100k and 200k per year
- Medical tourism from US to other countries: 150k to 350k per year
Europe is ~500 million people
US is ~ 360 million people
Medical tourism is a drop in the bucket.
>Americans cite cost savings as the most common reason to go abroad for health treatment, as medical procedures in foreign hospitals can cost thousands of dollars less than in the United States. This is especially true for those without health insurance—for an uninsured person, a knee replacement can cost $30,000 in the United States, compared to $12,000 in India. Many health travelers also go abroad for elective procedures such as cosmetic surgery that regular policies may not cover.
In other words, they largely go outside the US to save money on either cosmetic or routine procedures that, for one reason or other, US insurance won't cover.[1] Not same thing as the earlier discussion of rare or difficult conditions.
[1] Or they've chosen to not get health insurance. Post-Obamacare, this means that they are willingly paying the tax penalty for not having insurance. 91% of Americans have health insurance.
There was no earlier discussion of "rare or difficult conditions".
> 91% of Americans have health insurance.
That health insurance is often tied to the employer and wildly varies in what it offers. And you have to fight insurance tooth and nail to get what you need. Even on a good insurance.
Also, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
--- start quote ---
In 2020, 8.6 percent of people, or 28.0 million, did not have health insurance at any point during the year.
The percentage of people with health insurance coverage for all or part of 2020 was 91.4.
More children under the age of 19 in poverty were uninsured in 2020 than in 2018. Uninsured rates for children under the age of 19 in poverty rose 1.6 percentage points to 9.3 percent.
--- end quote ---
I can't imagine a European saying "yeah, we have 28 million uninsured, many of them kids, it's their own fault".
Stop inventing arguments for other people, and then bravely fighting these arguments.
> found that the 91% figure is indeed accurate, so could only come up with the above as riposte.
Yes. It's a valid riposte: I cannot imagine a European proudly "debunking" something by saying "yeah, we have 28 million people uninsured, it's their own fault"
> The US mixed system of public and private healthcare coverage is quite similar to the system used in Germany, Switzerland, and other countries
It's not.
> Before Obamacare, about 85% of Americans had health insurance.
Before, during, and after Obamacare 100% Europeans (well, not entirely true [1]) have insurance
> or a German who changes jobs and neglects to transfer coverage to a provider that serves his new industry.
Your medical insurance is not tied to your job in Germany (or anywhere in Europe).
> Yes, 85%. Again, contrary to what Reddit told you.
You keep inventing arguments for your opponent and bravely debunking them. The only numbers I provided are taken directly from US Census.
[1] some (8 in 2016, 4 in 2020) countries in the EU have lower insurance rates. However:
- these countries keep increasing coverage or implementing reforms to bring universal healthcare (Cyprus an Ireland)
- even "uninsured" still have free access to emergency care and care during pregnancy (e.g. Romania)
The US is a country of 330 million. I can say that out of 80 million Germans at least 2-3 million (3%) are without health insurance. Is that something to be "proud" of? Or, as I said, are such gaps inevitable in any health-insurance system that a) requires some sort of membership (i.e., almost all developed countries outside the UK NHS), plus b) the US's unique situation of another 3-4% without health insurance inherent from having 10 million illegal aliens within its borders?
>> The US mixed system of public and private healthcare coverage is quite similar to the system used in Germany, Switzerland, and other countries
>It's not.
In what way are the systems greatly different? In both the US and Germany/Switzerland/etc., people obtain insurance from either a variety of private sources (in the US, nonprofit or for-profit) or public (in the US, Medicare, Medicaid, military Tricare, Indian Health Service). Post-Obamacare, the US also mandates that those without insurance obtain it from some source, whether public or private.
Now, you may quibble and say that the hundreds of German sickness funds are not really "private" because they are nonprofit, but they are independent from the government like their US counterparts, both nonprofit (example: Kaiser) and profit (example: Aetna). Both countries' systems differ from, say, the UK NHS (which handles both payment and delivery), the Canadian single-payer system (which handles payment, with no alternative allowed by law), or the Australian system (single-payer, but with a heavy emphasis on encouraging people to move to private plans).
>Your medical insurance is not tied to your job in Germany (or anywhere in Europe).
I didn't say that insurance in Germany is tied to one's job. However, German coverage offerings, providers, and types of providers (public or private) differ depending on whether one is an ordinary private-sector employee, a government employee, or student. Also, German employers pay for part of employees' premiums, as in the US.
>- even "uninsured" still have free access to emergency care and care during pregnancy (e.g. Romania)
This is true as well in the US; the EMTALA law prohibits turning away anyone from hospitals regardless of ability to pay.
The US:
- insurance is largely tied to employer
- insurance providers go out of their way to not cover, well, a lot
- even having good insurance still often means you need to spend a significant amount of time fighting the bills
- you have to navigate the maze of "this doctor at this hospital is out of network"
- yes, you won't be turned away at the hospital even if you're uninsured, but you will be saddled with the bill
Rando on the Internet: how is this different?
> Now, you may quibble and say that
You may keep pretending that you you can invent the arguments for me.
I will not engage in this thread any longer. Adieu.
- German public insurance is priced according to income, not health condition. Preconditions aren't a thing°
- You know that the treatment is covered before it begins. There are no surprise costs. There are rarely any costs at all, except for a 5-10€ deductible that cannot go above a certain monthly amount.
- It covers your dependents for free.
- It covers students for very cheap.
- It covers you in all of the EU, by law. This includes internships abroad.
Basically, you can trust your insurance to fully cover all necessary care, with no exceptions.
OP, this is a good intro to German health insurance. It's written for foreigners. https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance
So you throw an accusation that you literally pulled out of your rear and will not dignify the point that your interlocutor made with any response?
I think this has gone well past reasonable discourse and we can no longer assume good faith from you.
The total societal outcome -- spending vs outcome -- and therefore the average outcome too, for the USA as compared to most other developed countries... Pretty much sucks.
My US government provided pension will be something like $3500/month when I reach retirement age. This is in addition to any personal retirement savings.
People migrate to the US before the EU. Besides, US lifestyle (also a high tax country btw) is not the only possible alternative to european style quasi socialism (56% on the way there)
Incidentally I'd say most western countries are way too close to socialism, I'd rather see more private entities taking over security, healthcare and law making.
It's just that there is no money, so private EU companies suck so there is no money. The lack of strong companies doesn't imply socialism. Most people in Europe has most of their trade interactions with other individuals and private businesses.
How does that work?
I have never understood why countries slap so much red tape and so many fees on this. The UK has got it right, IMHO: make it as cheap and simple as possible, there are only upsides [Edit: for society/the state] to people starting up a business.
The last time I incorporated a company in the UK it took a grand total of 35 minutes from start to actually having an incorporated company.
that is not true at all. The majority of business ventures fail and a lot of small businesses aren't productive, and at the end of the day someone needs to pick the tab up. Even Thiel used to say, don't start a business until you have a very good reason to.
What you actually want is to incentivize the kind of people to start a business who have a high chance of driving innovation and bringing about large, productive firms, you don't really want an army of self-employed people with low capital formation in a developed country.
(I have edited my previous comment to clarify)
the state takes a pretty big amount of risk and costs. Who pays healthcare, who pays maternity leave and social security in a fast and loose labor market like that? The answer in the US often is, nobody or the federal government.
In a country like Germany, France or in Scandinavia running a business is harder because there's an expectation that businesses can take care of their workers. A lot of red tape exists to make sure that a business can shoulder these things. In fact in Scandinavia eliminating unproductive firms through measures like wage compression was deliberately part of their social model to drive concentration and creation of productive firms.
There really are a lot of implications to creating the sort of environment that the US or to a lesser extent the UK has, and it doesn't work well with the economic model of most of Europe.
Are you from Scandinavia? Because the state pays these things (except maternity leave) in Denmark, whether you're in a job or not, so no there really isn't a risk to the state. The only thing the business is paying for is your salary, pension (if they offer it) and other "bonuses" (if they offer them).
That's not true. Red tape is red tape, it serves no other purpose that perpetuating itself (and since we're on this topic there is much less red tape in the UK than in France or Germany.
If you're a business an hire someone then you have to pay their salary and any taxes to finance healthcare and other benefits. OK. There is no need for red tape for this or to make it difficult upfront to incorporate a company, just make it clear and simple to know what to pay and how to pay it when or if you hire someone.
Only if they have debt. Some companies never take on debt and then fail.
Even when there are local apps available, many small businesses (and larger ones) will stick with services from big, well-known tech companies. Why? I guess because of inertia, or simply because those products feel safe and familiar.
Where are the pan-European equivalents to eBay, Etsy, KickStarter, AirBnB, Shopify, AbeBooks, etc? Europeans use these services entensively. You'll probably find local equilavents in each European country, but they are not pan-European or global in scope.
Global expansion is not an issue; every american company can easily reach the whole of EU. And there are many many european startups whose main market is america. Unless you mean that, products are so tailored to their home market that they don't have global appeal.
Because people in Europe still largely believe that a business should be an actual business. You know, operating and bringing profit.
Unlike the US where nearly every single "unicorn" can lose billions of dollars a year for over a decade, never see a profit, and still be lauded as a successful business.
I can feel it myself. I am very reluctant to create a money losing business. It is a deep-seated fear (I'm creating a new business at the moment). Where I got this from, parents, culture, common sense, whatever, doesn't really matter. I would not personally feel successful if I had created Uber, I'd just feel stressed and kind of a fraud. End of story.
So for my new business I'm not getting VC funding even though I know some VCs and they made it clear I could get money from them. I want to build a real business that is actually sustainable on its own terms. This will inevitably limit my reach and likely means I won't create a "tech company", but I've made my peace with that.
The question is what happens if/when it stops being sustainable. It's not so easy to adjust from those sorts of salaries downwards. The endless flow of VC money into absurd startups with no business plan worth a damn is caused by groupthink and extremely bad monetary policy by supposedly "independent" central banks. They aren't really independent of course, they're creatures of government and politicians can reign them in any time they want.
Why would they do so? Inflation. Bubbles. The sort of problems that have occurred repeatedly throughout history. And what happens when they respond by raising interest rates and ceasing to buy up all the low risk debt instruments? Well, suddenly boring but profitable businesses become useful to invest in again because they pay out dividends and the like. That in turn leads to a sucking sound as money flows out of the venture and equity markets, which makes it harder for those businesses to buy up all the talent, trashes the returns offered by VC funds and makes "sell $1 for $0.90" type business models unsustainable.
Fundamentally, the salaries we earn now from US firms may not be reflective of the value we're actually creating. They may be partially an artifact of money printing. Of course, the Eurozone prints money up the wazoo too so I'm not saying that in relative terms EU/US programmer salaries will get closer just that the very high salaries and proliferation of zombie fake businesses may go away.
> Of course, the Eurozone prints money up the wazoo too
I disagree that the ECB prints as much money as you say. Sure we have had ridiculous amounts of "quantitative easing", but this has been nowhere near as bad as it has been in the US. The frugal EU countries (Germany, Netherlands, Austria, etc.) always keep a leash on the ECB.
However, Uber as a company has so far lost over 20 billion dollars and only turned a profit once. Yup. A very successful and sustainable business.
I don’t understand - what do you think is the problem with this? What exactly is wrong there?
They aren’t spending your money, or tax payer money. They’re doing nothing but pumping money into workers’ hands and the economy, creating thousands of skilled jobs. It’s currently a massive wealth-redistribution system.
Why are you sarcastically turning your nose up at it, based on some accounting metric, that doesn’t even involve or effect you? Why don’t we want this in Europe?
They are not really pumping that money into workers and economy given how they don't want to spend any money on drivers.
> Why are you sarcastically turning your nose up at it, based on some accounting metric
It's not "some accounting metric". The measure of a successful business is whether it can support itself. And not if it can siphon unlimited investor money for a decade.
> Why don’t we want this in Europe?
Because those 20 billion dollars are better spent on actual businesses.
Uber pays thousands of engineers hundreds of thousands of dollars. They all live and spend in their local communities.
> The measure of a successful business is whether it can support itself.
Well this is the major difference - in the US they’re happy to invest and work for the long term, not short-term profits.
> Because those 20 billion dollars are better spent on actual businesses.
Why do you care or have an opinion on where someone else invests their money?
I’ve had to work my whole career for North American companies because European ones can’t even begin to compete. It’s madness to say Europe is better off with our bargain basement tech sector.
It's not even close to "thousands of engineers". It's ~23k employees, not engineers.
The absolute vast majority of its employees are not engineers. And their salaries are of course laughable. It's barely median U.S. salary for employees, and below median for drivers [1]
So much for "investing in economy", "pumping money into workers’ hands" and other bullshit. It's a yet another unbelievably unprofitable American "unicorn" driving wages down and passing all costs onto its employees.
> Well this is the major difference - in the US they’re happy to invest and work for the long term, not short-term profits.
10 years and loss of 20 billion dollars is not "working for the long term".
> Why do you care or have an opinion on where someone else invests their money?
Ah yes. I'm not allowed to have an opinion. It's not as good of an argument as you think it is
> I’ve had to work my whole career for North American companies
Good for you. It's still not as good as argument as you think it is.
Uber was up to 2000 engineers as early as 2016.
Also, there's less of an entrepreneurial mindset in europe. DO a good job, get paid, work life balance. Very different set of goals from america
If you can sock back a retirement working for big tech for 10-12 years (counting equity), it frees you up massively to do whatever you like, whether funding as an angel, or self-funding your own start-ups. It's not uncommon for people you know in tech in Silicon Valley to pitch in on early small funding rounds if you've started something new and are rounding up some early funds. Multiply that wide process by the scale of the US tech industry - at the small and large ends - and all the wealth that has been created in it over the past 30 years.
1.3 million software developers with a median salary of $110,000 is a lot of money just from the software developer worker bees every year (save N% per year of that pile, now it's available for investment in one form or another; and that's ignoring the equity value they're yielding).
Public housing is a nightmare in all of Europe, and being homeless is as much a risk as in the US.
China knew that America will try to crush them. It's a real, literal, life or death situation for them to come up with a Chinese Google. They have pumped trillions into the tech industry over decades.
Ok I perhaps misspoke because we would want them, if they came without costs. And by cost I mean law and regulatory environment necessary for such companies.
In EU generally speaking law is in favor of the people (individuals) a lot more than in USA (there are huge exceptions to this like defamations (or anything to do with banks), but I still believe its true.).
There are stories about EU fining USA corporations and how that is unfair. But they fine local ones as well, so breaking things (as in breaking/ignoring law ) and moving fast ends up with law breaking you long before you are successful enough that you can shrug it off.
It's not hard to start business in EU, but it's hard to get hokey stick growth. There are plenty of small to mid level companies in EU that pay well to founders and it's employers.
But if you are trying to get hokey stick growth, EU is not optimal, so why even bother starting there since you can go straight to USA most of the time ?
And honestly speaking if we would have to import American style laws/ regulatory environment in order to get them here, I would rather choose not to have them
in short, because time exists and effects all else in our reality.
1. The USA has a culture of granting equity to early employees. Equity grants are highly motivating. Such grants are expected and standardized. Rest of the world doesn't. Even as late as 2006, the Zürich tax authorities were needing extra time and special procedures to figure out what to do about Googler's equity and stock grants because a US firm setting up shop there was the first time they'd had to deal with this kind of compensation structure.
Evidence: one of the very few tech firms to get big in Europe (ARM) did grant equity to early employees.
2. USA is a large internal free market and this is a big deal.
ARM is a descendent of a computer company called Acorn. In the 1980s the UK was able to hold its own against US tech companies, in fact, Acorn RISC machines were in some ways technologically quite superior to the the US machines. I remember when I was a little kid, the teachers were constantly asking me to fix the school computers in various ways. The Acorn machines simply did not break, ever (well, maybe there were occasional issues with the printers). They were also easy to use and had a consistent UI, some great apps. Feeling kinda nostalgic to remember them really. The IBM PCs were just broken dreck that the schools put up with because they got them cheap via some subsidized scheme and had some unique apps, and Macs were nowhere to be seen.
Within a decade that situation had reversed and the Acorns were being pulled out. Why? Well, Acorn hit financial problems, partly because they were unable to sell into Europe due to bureaucracy and paperwork, and partly due to a failed attempt to expand into the USA, stymied partly by the same problems. The US firms didn't face this problem because of the ease of interstate commerce, so they were able to get big enough quickly enough that they could invest more into their tech and also hire the big legal/logistics teams necessary to move into foreign markets. The complexity of this is a large fixed cost, but the size you can get to before you have to tackle it isn't.
So, Acorn died off and ARM ended up taking on the low end microcontroller market. ARM grew quietly, getting big enough in a boring market that it could sell and hire internationally, and then the smartphone revolution hit and it grew very quickly. Why was it able to grow so quickly? Partly because by then it'd reached a size where it could do things like ... hire chip design teams in the USA. The UK is a country with 1/5th the population, after all.
All these silly fees you mention are marginal. It would actually be much cheaper to hire devs from Europe, so cost is not the issue at all. It is simply a lack of capital altogether. Nor is there the risk taking that is required.
Europe has no VC.
The biggest problem is funding due to the risk aversion of EU institutions and limited alternative sources. You have to be incredibly qualified to acquire the funding need to drive a startup forward in the way that happens in the US. This ranges from the small angel investors through to the first series of VC funding.
In the EU, if you are a business like a biotech or pharma you may be able to navigate this because those are well trodden paths with high risk adversity baked in. A software company has many unknowns, so you encounter problems with expectations. You can't fail in the EU because you only have one shot and won't get back again with another company/idea. In reality, it's very likely you'll stumble a lot initially and won't have the leeway that you have in the US. If you compared bankruptcy on both sides of the Atlantic you'd notice similar patterns.
Developers can have a very idea idea of cost management and what is valuable. They may be either blowing their employer's money on inefficient AWS solutions, or they are building their own k8s cluster on cheap VPSes because they felt that the managed solutions were expensive. It's an easy trap to fall into. You need to have a balance that is sustainable and productive. It was much easier to understand the whole space when we were building on LAMP or Ruby-on-Rails than it is now.
It's best to have a partner who is very business-savvy to help with navigating these options. If you only look at it from the tech perspective you'll fail quickly.
And also European companies are moving to the US to start and/or grow their businesses there. Why is Spotify even listed on the NY stock exchange?
So what makes you think that "popping new software ventures" is a good thing for society? Isn't there enough software already? The problem is the mediocre quality of it, and decline (hello Adobe). Popping new software ventures is hardly a solution.
The US had way more wealth compared to Europe, thanks to unbridled capitalism in the past centuries and not hosting a World War.
That wealth trickle down and converted in various shapes until the current VC class.
Two.
It is beyond insanity. And should you succeed in France/Belgium/Spain you'd be seen as the evil capitalist responsible for all that is wrong in the EU.
The whole mentality is rotten.
The EU has one big software company and it's... SAP. SAP is a drop in the bucket compared to the big US or Chinese tech firms (I don't think SAP is worth even 1/10th of any GNAFAM). But there's worse: I think SAP's market cap is worth basically as much as the next 50 or next 100 (or maybe basically all the others) EU software companies. Something crazy like that.
So one successful software company (thankfully we have Germany in the EU and SAP if, of course, German).
It's a failure whose level of failure cannot be understated.
A complete, total and utter failure.
I feel that the ability to bootstrap projects in all the large EU countries is way harder than the US, or smaller euro ones (like the Netherlands or Estonia).
In Spain for example, the cost of something similar of an LLC is way higher than in the US, not to mention that you have to pay almost 400€/month (at minimum) just for owning the company as Social Security fee, even if I'm also working for someone else paying my social security through my salary.
It's a huge burden if you're in my situation, which is having an average salary, not a lot of savings and you don't have a family that bails you out.
Also, this listing lacks a few more that I listed here: https://iagovar.com/mapas/european-web-hosting-alternatives