[ews]

I am originally from Europe and I must ask : how many startups of global reach has Europe produced in the last 30 years compared to the US as a whole (or even just the SF Bay Area). What is Europe doing in AI compared to the US or China?

[plantwallshoe]

How has living in the same country as a crop of successful tech startups made the lives of an average American noticeably better?

[slowmovintarget]

That's a non-sequitur.

Achieving Euro-Big-Tech for social media and AI would not improve European's lives either, except for the few oligarchs that would run the equivalent corporate giants there.

I can't help hearing Bender's voice after getting kicked out of the Casino...

[ews]

I am making way more than 10x of what I was making in Europe, for exactly the same role. Cost of living is definitely not 10x.

[JumpCrisscross]

> How has living in the same country as a crop of successful tech startups made the lives of an average American noticeably better?

Average American is materially wealthier than the average European, with more influence over the latter than the latter has over the former. Go above the bottom 20% or so, and you have vastly higher living standards in most of America compared with most of Europe.

This is obscured by our terrible treatment of the bottom 10%, as well as by the burdens we put on our middle class. But the American middle class is wealthier and, I’d argue, more powerful than most European countries’, the exceptions being in the West and the North of the continent.

[mertbio]

Why do you think that Europe has to race with the US in number of startups? Shouldn’t we focus on the quality of life instead?

The rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe. People in Europe are also happier than the ones in the US. What those startups will bring?

[alexey-salmin]

> Why do you think that Europe has to race with the US in number of startups? Shouldn’t we focus on the quality of life instead?

For one thing I'm interested in quality of life for my kids, not only mine. The world is a big race: those who refuse to run become irrelevant and disappear.

[JumpCrisscross]

> rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe

Source?

[ramblerman]

I am originally from Europe as well. And still living there (not sure if that’s why you phrased it like that) but how many innovations from the us are really adding to the value of life vs just forcing eyeballs to screen.

Linux came from Europe. A lot of open source does, see blender.

I know VC money is sexy but does it add real value

[Esophagus4]

Huh?

That is a strange way to dismiss the innovation from the country that brought to market:

- the light bulb

- the mass produced car

- the airplane

- the artificial heart

- the gold standard in Covid vaccines

- the personal computer

- the smartphone

- the internet

- email

- GPS

- MRIs

- consumer grade LLMs

- the world’s largest public cloud providers

- TCP/IP and BGP

- the web browser

- the most popular search, social media, and e-commerce companies in the world

I know it feels good to say “but did they really make human kind better off?” and dismiss American innovation as another goofy VC-funded cash grab iPhone app; but the US is responsible for technology that has made the world better many times over.

This mentality is why Europe will never replicate the success of the US technology sector.

inb4 “but we don’t want that success!”

[surgical_fire]

Interestingly enough, I am not originally from Europe, but chose to move here over the US.

In no small part because I utterly despise the VC fueled hustle culture winner takes all disruptive bullshit from the US. I don't want to be anywhere near that particular toxic wasteland.

[arp242]

The entire notion that startups must have "global reach" to be relevant seems odd to me.

There are and have been plenty of startups throughout Europe, and the typical story is that they get bought by American companies and eye-watering amounts of VC capital.

Not saying that's the only issue; it's also true that getting meaningful funding is excruciatingly difficult in much of Europe. However, at the same time US companies have this "one little trick" to get a global reach: enormous huge stacks of cash.

[drcongo]

That's a bizarre metric to judge a continent on. I mean, I could throw it back at you with : how many people's lives are ruined because of bankruptcy from a routine medical procedure that millions of Europeans get for free?

[Ralfp]

Ask your uncle who lives in old country, what he values more. EU-developed startups or universal healthcare that cured his child without bankrupting his household?

[dietr1ch]

I think this is just because law and taxes are more forgiving in the US for companies to strive and gain advantage against companies in Europe.

Companies do well there, but only some people do. This difference is clear and large even when ignoring the homeless population. Higher-ups do extremely well, tech jobs are cushy, but people doing the more hands-on work tend to get the shorter end of the straw staff with low pay and long commutes.

[anthk]

How many startups in the US have actually been both sucessful and useful to the society?

The times of Bell Labs, C, Unix, Lisp/MIT machines... are long gone.

[lawn]

That's a weird statistic to single out.

I'd assume that general health or happiness would be much more important than the number of startups.

[deterministic]

Number of startups has nothing to do with quality of life.

[zmxz]

European here. You're spot on with your question. Europe is an extremely hostile place to start a business compared to USA.

USA embraced capitalism and is geared towards proving concepts FAST and enabling networking. I love that about USA and I miss that in Europe, when it comes to IT/Tech sector in particular.

I'm not aware if Europe produced anything of significance in the past 30 years, we're lagging heavily behind USA/China and that's a fact. One could argue that Linus Torvalds is European hence Linux === European but I won't resort to such petty claims.

We produced very little value. We're having issues due to language discrepancy. Even though a lot of people speak English, it's often the case that we Europeans aren't able to communicate as well using English as we can in our native tongue. The lack of unified language is visible. The diversity in culture drives people to favor their own, we're bad at teamplay (this is from my personal experience and I am guilty of this).

There's many valuable lessons we could have learned from USA but we failed to apply them. We have various freely available systems that are great at, say, education - but education means nothing when it's difficult to apply it once people are done with it.

I worked with plenty of people from USA and I had huge prejudices towards them, in terms of "they talk a lot" or "they are not as competent, they are really slow when it comes to pumping out code" but I learned I was wrong to the point it's not funny. If anything, USA is really good at starting and pushing projects out that actually work.

Ultimately, do we even have a microchip factory (we might, but I'm unaware of it)?

Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to explain my POV and agree with you.

Personally, I'd love to see movement in EU's tech sector. We're 30 years behind USA in tech. I won't touch upon quality of life or similar topics because I'm interested in exploring technology.

[deterministic]

Your mobile phone is most likely running a CPU invented in Europe (ARM). The next time you fly you are most likely going to fly on an airplane built in Europe (Airbus). When you buy your Ozempic you are buying a product invented in Europe. When you buy your prestige car you are buying a European car (Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari, BMW, Roles Royce etc.) When you buy toys for your kids your are typically buying a European product (LEGO). When you buy your furniture you are very likely to buy European products (IKEA). I could go on and on ...

[satyrun]

I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing.

As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.

[anthk]

Europe backs up tons of hardware design which without that the software companies in the US would crumble like dust.

[15155]

Invariably someone will roll in and say "ASML" (despite this being a US-financed venture.)

[IAmBroom]

I've worked for ASML.

The C-Suite are nearly all European.

The manufacturing is worldwide, but mostly Western. Only one facility in the US, employing about 100-200 people.

As for US-financed... it's a publicly-traded company that makes most of its revenue from selling to big chipmakers, so largely Taiwanese and Japanese "funded".

[jbverschoor]

Doesn't matter.. The US is financed by the rest of the world / China.

Silicon Valley is financed by China, Japan, and the Middle East