I don't think it's regulation, btw. Starting and running my company in the UK pre Brexit was way easier than doing it in the US. Keeping the IRS happy is no joke.
Society seems to rely on a tiny pool of overly-motivated people to do most of the work. There has historically been a healthy pipeline and many good reasons to convince them to leave Europe. And apparently sufficient safeguards to stop them building too much if they stay, based on the lack of success the EU has had in tech.
Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally.
Hardly anything to do with "entrepreneurship" and more about the insidious nature of US imperialism and how damaging neoliberalism is to the world.
Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.
It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.
That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).
Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.
And yet I can’t name a single entrepreneur that I know personally outside of tech.
These are completely irrelevant to this thread, so I'm perplexed that you're perplexed. Read the thread, see that it's about differences between the US and the EU, and then realize what is meant by entrepeneur _in context_. Europe isn't very different from the US when it comes to plumbing company owners.
Maybe you just live in an echo chamber such as reddit where you believe entrepreneurship means making millions of dollars in the tech industry.
Reject it? They pay hundreds of billions for it. Every year. For decades now.
Europe runs on American tech, using American and Chinese hardware, powered by American energy, and protected by American defense.
Surely you're confused here, because Europe didn't reject these things, they offshored them and then teased Americans about working so hard. Europe's economic situation right now is borderline catastrophic, mostly because they built a society on someone else's support in the uncannily calm times after the wall fell.
Once you get off the ground though, you get most of the same benefits as Europeans, while taking home much more income. Especially in tech, the benefits and pay can be extravagant (Netflix famously had a year of maternity leave). Although you will likely work more time overall.
Keep in mind that generally social media is full of young American people. Once people get into their career, they don't spend much time on doomer social media. It's also socially taboo to not jump on the "conditions are so hard now" bandwagon.
If you can get into the top 40% in America, you will have what you need to live a pretty decent life.
The US sucks if you don't have very valuable skills, there aren't many guarantees.
But if you do have valuable skills, it's very hard to make a case for living in Europe. Once you reach the top 30-40% of Americans, you're living like the top 10% of Europeans.
That's why the US has been draining EU tech workers for a few decades now. The value prop from the US is much better if you're a strong player.
But I'm also not supposed to be saying any of this, because like a good little medium 6 figure household, I'm supposed to be wearing the mask of "difficult economic times" so as to appear virtuous and sensitive to others.