> Checkout.com, Klarna, Revolut, Transferwise, Mollie, Deliveroo, Spotify, Hopin, Trustly.

No offense to Europeans, but I've only heard of Spotify.

Not hearing about Klarna and Deliveroo is surprising. Klarna is everywhere I turn in the US.

Transferwise/wise too. I use it to pay employees in Europe. I remember going to Clearwater and seeing their logo on i4 all the time. It is a known company. Revolut also known but still doesn’t work well for US costumers.

Klarna is like a layaway program? I'm like the GP never heard of these companies other than Spotify and the Klarna website isn't very helpful

It’s kind of like a payday loan type of micro-lending that integrates with merchants similarly to PayPal. I’ve never understood the appeal, it feels super predatory. But most creditors do, I guess. I first heard of it a few years ago when they did a huge ad campaign with a lot of the popular queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

It’s frequently way less predatory: merchants pays the finance charges and payoff time is much shorter.

I don't know, perhaps they're not predatory in usuary rate sense but I feel like using celebrities like A$AP Rocky and Keke Palmer to appeal to Gen Z to load up on consumer debt feels a bit questionable.

Layaway is the opposite: pay now, buy later.

I realize Spotify was started in Europe but they opened an office in the US in 2010. That's 8 years before they went public. And within a year they had a mega office. They were regularly in the NYC real estate news for the next couple of years after as well for adding and outgrowing existing office space. Statista shows the US presence has almost double the Swedish employees.[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/813906/spotify-number-em...

Agreed, Spotify is a Swedish company in a pretty limited capacity. I know so many ex-Spotify people in NYC.

So that's the full list of successful startups for a developed economy polity with twice the population of America over the past 25 years... Not exactly impressive.

But possible.