throwaway55671's comments

They shouldn't get exceptions. There shouldn't be so many laws and regulations that result in EU being so behind economy-, success- and investment-wise.

No, that's not true. There are plenty of stable market capitalization, dividend-generating public companies. Their cap-to-EBITDA ratio is much smaller, but that doesn't change the fact.

Of course everybody expects the company to take advantage of opportunities - but it has to make economical sense. Nobody wants their company to try to grow so hard the whole company crashes.

Microsoft has massive government contracts in literally every EU country. US is an ally, not antagonist/enemy.

The EU doesn't invest, the EU provides subsidies with many strings attached. One of the strings usually is "can't be used to pay shareholders" (as in wages, not just dividends). Also, the subsidies are usually provided after the fact (e.g. a project is completed) and you need a loan to actually do the project. That's a risk, and banks don't like providing loans to small companies without predictable cashflow; they would do it only if a shareholder with enough assets personally underwrites it - another huge risk, now a startup can destroy your whole life.

If you meant the investors of EU - please show me where you got the data, because the official EU data suggest otherwise. People simply aren't that rich around here, which is a downstream effect of the much slower, smaller economy.

Who said infinite? Startup founders that got investments have designed the exit points based on market conditions, and nobody would trust "infinite". It's just like stock investments (unless you "invest" based on feelings, of course) - you calculate the risk, the potential, and then you decide. Nobody reasonable puts "infinite growth" into their Excel sheets.

And yes, growing until that exit point is a lot of work - so it makes total sense people want an exit at some point.

The US investors just have so much more disposable cash they can risk. EU investors are looking for safety because losing 100M EUR means they lost literally everything. Their "risky volatile investments" part of the portfolio is 1-5M EUR in total, usually even less - and split that between at least 3-10 startups. And there's much less people with money overall, so you can't raise large enough VC funds.

The usual EU investor is simply going to buy some real estate instead of participating in VC funds - still great returns, very low risk. The more progressive ones will maybe try some real estate development projects. No need to think about this software thing. The angel investors I met with that had portfolios of 5-20M EUR wanted to invest 20-50K EUR into our startup, definitely not more.

Because sustaining is a job, and it's a very hard job. The shareholders might not like that job or want to do a different one, or they just can't do it. Or the market is going down, but someone could use the IP/assets/team.

385M USD is way too much for EU investors. They usually invest 10x-100x less. So the alternative without US investors would be to have no startup of this kind - great job, that will really help EU grow!

Few million dollars split by how many people? A small startup that provided a decent exit for me was sold for 50M EUR. I got 100K from that - the company had over 1000 shareholders. That's not really life changing amount of money, was barely enough to get a mortgage for my small apartment (30% of the price).

BTW the company was failing. If we didn't sell we'd have 0 very soon. It's really not as easy as "well let's just grow I guess".

Perhaps the founders want to remain there and grow, perhaps they want to focus on something else or retire. Perhaps the plan always was to sell after X years - I don't see anything wrong about that, still better to innovate&sell than just buy stock&sell IMHO.

You can't attract investors if they can't sell in case the investment is successful. This is severely limiting and a terrible situation to be in - especially if you already have investors, who might demand their money back from you - way before your profits could cover it.

And the worst thing that might happen - you design a startup to be acquired by Microsoft/Apple/Google and then EU comes and says no. WTF?

> PHP is used by 76.5% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.

Emphasis mine. Other runtimes/frameworks don't announce themselves like PHP does.

Doing all the work and taking all the stress only to have the EU remove a chance of growth and exit is a problem that I never want to have. I went through some failed startups, and at least that was our own fault, but still I never want to do that again. I don't know what I'd do in this situation.

Well, I'm talking about the 180 million ChatGPT users. A bubble, but a large one.

On the contrary, I think that's exactly what people think (except maybe people on this site). See the loads of GPT "prompt hacking" and "jailbreaking" guides...