I'm a European, living in Europe, developing software. Lack of imagination is not our problem. It's so good that we supply our best talent to the US where it does extremely well revolutionizing AI, designing hardware for Apple, developing games, stream online music, etc. E.g. Amazon's CTO is Dutch. Basically the person that has been running AWS. The people and the education system are fine.
Europe does have a few issues that make it unnecessarily hard to build successful startups here. People do start companies here but more often than not success is followed by US investment and before you know it the company is headquartered in the US. There are many reasons for that but a big one has to be that raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard. Investors drag their heels, founders have to take on more risk, etc.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
That's much less of a thing in the US (though it is a bit of a thing there too between states). And that's before you consider language and cultural differences. Simply put, the same company in the EU will have a very hard time growing compared to doing that in the US. Being successful in the US market, means having the deep pockets to go international. Doing the same from a small country means you barely have enough to expand to another small country. Going international is hard work. Not something you do with your MVP. It's not very scalable either: you need to worry about cultural differences, bureaucracy, localization, understanding the local market, ramping up sales, marketing, etc. Especially with SAAS companies this is super expensive.
I moved roughly 10 years ago to the US from europe. In my experience, raising small amounts of money is possible in Europe and not too hard. Once you need more money, it becomes extremely difficult or nearly impossible, unless you can spend all your time networking, which is not going to happen if you are busy building a product.
I would say that banking in Europe is much better developed than in the US. In the US, we still have checks and you need to pay for wire transfers (what???). Doing taxes in the US is 10 times more complicated than it is in Europe, and CPAs are only interested to doing them for you if you are a cookie cutter case and easy to make money off. Otherwise, good luck getting a call back. That doesn't happen in Europe. You hire an accountant, he does his job.
Entrepreneurship in the US is not easier than it is in Europe, IMHO. Raising money or scaling might be easier.
In my experience, I've been dealing with constant discrimination in the US. It is claimed that where you are from or what your social status is, doesn't matter, in silicon valley (or California in general). People are nice, they smile, but it's mostly fake. You remain a foreigner, who should still work for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy league school, even though you have the same credentials and graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy league degree on top of that).
Raising money in the US? No different than in Europe, at least in my experience. Again, no network = no raise. And you will need to overcome the above discrimination or at least the idea that you might "go back" any time, even if you are a permanent resident.
All this sounds brutal, and maybe hard to take, but I just say it like it is, and I prefer to be honest and straightforward and share my first hand experience.
> You remain a foreigner, who should still work for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy league school, even though you have the same credentials and graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy league degree on top of that).
Bingo. There's a set of something like ten schools from which Silicon Valley companies hire.
If you're not from one of those, you will be cordially invited to eat shit.
May be true for hiring for entry level roles in same cases, but it is certainly untrue when you are hiring for positions with more than a couple years experience. I have literally never looked at anyone's college credentials unless I'm interviewing for an entry level role. I do not know, or care, where any of my coworkers went to school and I don't know anyone who does.
To be fair, we aren't a SV startup, but we've always had an equal engineering presence there (probably 120 engineers there now vs maybe 30 in 2018).
In my experience, at the FAANG I worked at, there was definitely an "approved" schools list for US candidates.
It completely blew my mind, to be honest (and I do see similar weirdnesses in the way US colleagues review CV's, so I don't think it's only a FAANG thing).
I'm in my 40s and have an ivy league degree from the bay area. I still get discriminated, and I have multiple succesfull products in the market and I'm a semi-celebrity in my niche. And I am still discriminated against.
I might be an outlier but I went to a tiny middle America liberal arts university that you probably never heard of, and work for a SV startup. And I haven't heard the topic of where people went to school come up a single time.
Even if that's true (it is), I have almost never had a meaningful conversation with a coworker about where we got our degrees from. Maybe that's because the conversation usually stops after I share my no-name institution. And in my current role I don't remember degree pedigree coming up once in any conversation.
If there's any lesson to learn from this thread I guess it's that no amount or level of credentials can overcome cultural biases, racism, and discrimination.
I believe the article means "lack of imagination from business", for which I'll strongly agree as a European who migrated a while ago. In my personal experience you have either wannapreneurs trying to break through with minimal budgets, or large investments in established companies. They don't seem to mix though, business people go for safer things than trying to build the next Google. Raising money for a prototype, even if it's making some money, is almost impossible or at the very best will land you with very bad terms.
In Europe, everybody wants to be a manager because mere developers is not high enough status. In the US, a 45yo DB engineer is akin to highly skilled wizard.
True, this was also my experience before I moved to the US.
Generally speaking, in Europe, the technical career track
simply don't exist. You are eventually forced to take the
management career path. Eng are seen as the ones scrapping
the floors.
In US, at big tech companies, you can stay on the tech career
path and get to Principal, Architect, Distinguished Eng etc.
At these levels, your voice is heard as much, if not more, as
managers.
IC contributors and managers job titles are mapped to an internal company level.
For instance, a Principal Eng usually map to a Director. You can easily tell where you are in the career ladder, regardless on the specific track you are on.
Yes, but depending on your yearly income there is another tax separate from the normal income tax (inkomskatt), if you earn more than 523 300 SEK you also need to pay "statlig inkomstskatt" at 20% for everything above that rate.
And previous year 2020 was the first tax year without värnskatt, an extra 5%, ie 25% total, for everything above 703 000 SEK. It was abolished 2019.
In the UK you pay 60% on anything between 100K and 125K, then it goes back to 40%. Above 150K it goes to 45%. This is only the income tax. National insurance would be 2% at those income levels.
In the UK you don’t pay taxes on the first 12500£ you earn in a tax year. This is the income tax allowance.
For each 2£ you earn above 100K, your income tax allowance is reduced by 1£. At 125K, your allowance reaches 0. The result is that between 100K and 125K your marginal tax rate is 60%. At 125K it goes back to 40%.
The only "good" part is that even managers in the Nordics have the same work-life expectations as the workers. Of course there are some managers who take work home more than others but unless you are in the C-level you can tell anyone who tries to make you work more than the usual 37,5-40h a week to kindly fuck off.
Tbh this isn't my experience in the UK. Manager is just one path people take; others aim for tech lead, or principal engineer. I really don't see how 'status' comes into this.
Principal engineers practically didn’t exist in the UK until a few years ago. Even now, a principal engineer would unlikely get any further promotions and pay rises, while an engineering manager could potentially become the CTO.
Yep.. you get paid shit as a dev here unless you run your own business.. has always been like that, will always be like that. Europe will never be big in software.
We have nice livable cities, and we have old cultures, that’s about all what’s good here
After the Bay Area, NYC and Beijing, London has the most startup funding of any city in the world, and the UK as a whole has the 3rd highest number of unicorns, after the US and China.
Parts of Europe are doing badly, others are doing ok (but could do better!).
Hope you moved as if I were you (reading all your comments here) I would not want to live here, and then in NL no less where I was born and people seem to like internationally. But if you dislike it so much I am not sure why you did not move to the US yet? Or even the UK which is a stepping stone but easier to get to.
Yeah I moved to Asia from Europe, and I dont think it's the lack of imagination that make us so slow, inefficient, unable to compete abroad etc. Or else here in China we'd still be cutting wood and milking cow: there's very little "imagination".
But the systems are built differently, usually turned specifically to succeed fast and loud at the cost of individual comfort. For instance, where I come from in France, you would keep a useless, even toxic, employee for months for fear of the firing trial, but where I am now we can all be dismissed arbitrarily with a month notice, and that makes the hiring very different: people have a strict behavior feedback loop, where they need to change to stay somewhere, companies have no pressure on lowering hiring because of legal issues, employees can always always find better.
This turns a population of mild puppies into a fastly rotating workforce cross pollinating at light speed and I admit I think Europe can never win against people who built such systems. It's just not the same game anymore.
My favorite European tech company is Atmel (Norway), which developed the AVR-8 microcontroller which is in the original Arduino (Italian).
Particularly, Atmel made the last 8-bit microprocessor which was just a bit more carefully thought out than everything else on the market and carefully positioned to give a lot of bang per buck.
Atmel got bought by Microchip (San Jose, USA)
Today when I think of Europe I think of those annoying popups which (I think) were a "normalization of deviance" for annoying and harassing UI elements on web sites... I mean, this one is required, virtuous, etc. so it is OK to nag people to get their email address, open a new window every time you click on a search result (Bing) so you'll accidentally click on an ad when handling way too many tabs
There was something anti-user about the GDPR popup that "broke the dam" for other bad practices, as well meaning as it is. It might pour sand into the wheels of the data economy, but it made it impossible to be an advocate of the user in most organizations. (e.g. if you can't reject that one, what can you reject?)
> Atmel Corporation was founded in 1984 by George Perlegos, a Greek-American computer scientist. Atmel was an acronym for “advanced technology for memory and logic”.
> In 1996, Atmel formed a design team in Trondheim, Norway to develop the Atmel AVR line of RISC microcontrollers. This team combined technology of former students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with Atmel's expertise in flash memory. ..The AVR chip is the basis of most Arduino open-source development boards.
The law is very straightforward and can be quite easily implemented by anyone. Notable exceptions are finance institutions where GDPR is superseded by relevant financial laws of each country.
There are explainers, compliance checklists, whatever you want to implement it. It was three years before it went in effect, and it's been 3 years since it went into effect. If you don't understand it by now, you definitely don't deserve to be handling personal data.
The only straightforward thing about this law is how ignorant were its creators.
The cost of implementing it was in the billions. The human time cost paid for all those damn cookie popups we keep having to click on is probably already in the thousands of life-times wasted, and it keeps on growing.
> The cost of implementing it was in the billions.
Cry me a river. If you was careless with users' data, who cares?
> The human time cost paid for all those damn cookie popups we keep having to click on is probably already in the thousands of life-times wasted, and it keeps on growing.
Ah yes, and the problem is the law that protects users' data, and not the companies who couldn't care less about privacy.
The one on https://gdpr.eu/ is very well done. It does not break the law.
It's an example of excellence others should follow. Unintrusive. As easy to opt out as to opt in. Clear buttons, simple language. Clear text. If you prefer to ignore the banner that's fine too. On desktop it's unintrusive and you can just ignore it. I tried scrolling, it just stays out of the way. Each button is clear: "Ok", "No", "Privacy policy". Perfect. (It could be better on mobile for size, but it's still easy to click away.)
No dark patterns, dirty tricks, misleading controls, no "yes means no" controls, no "visit our 1000 partner sites to opt out" insanity, no other dirty tricks. You will not "accidentally" end up tracked when you didn't want to be. You will not be misled into believing a 70% screen size, deliberately slow panel is required.
Panels on other sites are deliberately slow and harder to opt out of. They want you to be annoyed. That's because they want you to believe the GDPR requires stupid, slow, large, intrusive, complicated banners. So that you will tell everyone how bad the GDPR is. But the GDPR doesn't require those things. In fact, when you see a banner that says "due to the GDPR we must..." it is often a straight up lie, and parts of the banner are against the law, not required by it.
https://gdpr.eu/ - thanks for highlighting that great example. I will take that as inspiration next time I need a good quality, sleek, fast, easy, compliant and user-friendly banner.
Such banners are not required, though. My sites don't have cookie banners and that's fine. They don't track users against the expectations of the users. My sites do have optional logins, user identification, and use cookies for those things, but logins don't require cookie banners because people expect their identity to be tracked by the act of logging in. And, importantly, their identity used only for what users would expect. My sites do have basic request logging and monitoring too, as you would expect for security and ops, but again those don't require cookie banners if they are done respectfully.
No it's required for all types of tracking including but not exclusively cookies. Only days collection that is absolutely required to provide the service may be collected without consent and for that purpose only.
If a law is realistically unenforceable then it’s unreasonable. A law that requires some agency in Europe to police all of the websites around the world is pretty fucking stupid.
> If a law is realistically unenforceable then it’s unreasonable.
It is enforceable, and there have already been fines.
> A law that requires some agency in Europe to police all of the websites
No, they are not going to police every website in the world.
Once again, if it 6 years later you still couldn't read and understand a rather reasonably written law with multiple explanations and examples, you are a part of the problem.
> Once again, if it 6 years later you still couldn't read and understand a rather reasonably written law with multiple explanations and examples, you are a part of the problem.
It’s not reasonable if it’s written in a way that’s so easy to misinterpret.
People still don’t understand - shit law.
OR
People do understand and implement bad pop-ups and EU doesn’t enforce - shit law.
A law that is not enforced or has been written in a way that isn’t reasonable to enforce is absolutely a shitty law. Pie in the sky laws that have no teeth are worse than no law at all. It just gives room for lots of selective enforcement which is a great way to encourage corruption and shakedown schemes.
After 6 years, Google itself (which has all the lawyers and engineers it needs) has resorted to the same f-ing ugly cookie popup everyone else is using.
> Google itself (which has all the lawyers and engineers it needs) has resorted to the same f-ing ugly cookie popup
Because Google is in the business of dark patterns and wholesale data collection. They couldn't care less about user privacy.
Besides, their entire system is built on the premise of wholesale data collection. Their own engineers admit that they don't know how and where the data is collected and de-google their phones. [1]
> Everybody except those who created the problem in the first place.
For over a decade there have been laws in each country protecting people's private data. Companies kept on ignoring those laws. The countries came together and created a single law for the entirety of the EU.
The essence of the law:
- if you need some data for the functionality of your service, you can collect it
- if you don't need some data for the functionality of your service, you can't collect it unless you explicitly ask the person. And "opt out" has to be the default option, and cannot stop the person from using the service
How is that a problem?
Those popups? Yes, they are annoying, but they also show how every single website sells the data they don't need to hundreds of companies without your consent. And they keep trying to trick you into providing that data. Now this is a problem.
However, you think that it's all fine, everyone should just hoover up all the data they can possibly get their hands on.
> Are they gonna sue every single website who had to put up a cookie popup just because they run analytics?
Yes, theoretically they have the authority to do that. However, no, they are not going to do that. And no, that doesn't mean that the law is bad.
Look at the bottom of the page. It's a cookie banner. It was their law. They had 6 years to implement it on their own website. This is the result. The law is broken.
This is pretty much how it's supposed to work under GDPR. Offering a clear choice without bias. GDPR isn't about banning cookies. It's about giving the user control of their data.
Well then - cookie popups that must be clicked every time you visit a website until you accept them, must be ok with you, since "this is how it's supposed to work under GDPR".
Sorry, but I don't agree. I consider them a scourge on today's Internet. And I find them a horribly steep price for the "privacy" (really just a lousy IP address obfuscation) you gain in their stead.
The choice can be perfectly well saved in a cookie because it's a cookie necessary for site operations. They don't even need approval. Only unnecessary ones do.
To put that slightly differently: warnings/popups are never needed unless you're taking data from your visitor which has nothing to do with the function(s) your offering the visitor.
The GDPR spells out when you're allowed to collect data; asking for consent is basically its emergency escape hatch. You only need to do that if there is absolutely no (functional) reason to get that data, but you want it anyway.
GDPR doesn't spell out anything. It's the most vague f-ing BS I have ever seen. There are no definitions, no guidelines.
6 years later there is no consensus on simple questions like website analytics which is probably the most common usage scenario for the kind of data GDPR covers.
Consent should be given by a clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s agreement to the processing of personal data
...
Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent.
=== end quote ===
> there is no consensus on simple questions like website analytics which is probably the most common usage scenario for the kind of data GDPR covers.
The consensus is there. And it's spelled clearly in the law.
> Please tell me the consensus and guideline for website analytics.
Literally described in one of the links.
> Please tell me the consensus and guideline on how to store the rejection for using cookies
You can use a cookie for that. If it's for a logged-in user, you can store that in the user profile.
> Please tell me the consensus and guideline on what "legitimate purposes" are.
Text in one of the links literally contains a link to further reading on legitimate interest.
> And most of all, please tell me the consensus and guideline for cookie banners and popups
Literally described in both links.
Once again. It's painfully clear that you never bothered to read and understand anything about the law in the past 6 years. Your clueless questions about "why does gdpr and europa sites have cookie banners" only serve as further proof.
The https://gdpr.eu/ website is not official. Its description of "analytics cookies" cannot be found anywhere in the actual GDPR & Co regulations.
> You can use a cookie for that.
Use a cookie to store the literal "No cookies" preference? Great example of the contradictory and irrational text of the GDPR.
> Text in one of the links literally contains a link to further reading on legitimate interest.
More vague and contradictory BS.
> Literally described in both links.
Too bad that description is not actually valid and if you'll actually check the GDPR text (not the non-official gdpr.eu website) you'll find no such descriptions.
Moreover, the cookie banner on both websites is actually illegal under GDPR. Check out https://ico.org.uk/ for a correct (but horrifying) implementation.
You are correct, I am not an every-day GDPR expert. I only encounter it when implementing on various websites and there only for analytics - no ads or anything more.
But its requirements were always for the worse. Because of its vague and contradictory definitions everybody (including me) adopted the safest implementation and thus the current web of cookie banners and popups was born. I hope you are happy with it, it solves nothing but it makes everybody's life worse.
There's the law, you complain that it's badly written, that it's impossible to understand, that it's impossible to implement. Even though it has multiple recitals to explain things. Because you've never read it and never tried to understand it.
There are multiple guides and explanations for the law. You complain that those are not official.
One thing is definitely clear: 6 years later it's not a problem with the law. It's the problem with you and other people like you who diss GDPR without taking a single step to understand it.
I'm working for a thriving startup in a European country of 11 million people. We had 100% growth per year until we had basically everybody in our own country and then it got massively harder. If we had started in the USA, we would have reached that point being 30x bigger, making billions of dollars, and much better prepared to conquer foreign markets.
So maybe Israel is doing quite well, but I know from experience that it would also do massively better if it had the size of the USA.
Most of the super successful companies in Israel are either doing things for the state or working for American corporations (or the American government).
Yeah, in general any successful EU/Europe startups target the American market, because Americans are typically richer, and the market is huuuuuuuggggge (relative to European countries, at least).
As an Australian coming from a risk-averse culture like that in Europe, I would suggest that Israel differs in three ways. I observed these on an official Australian Ministerial trade mission to Israel.
1. The culture is risk taking, with failure an opportunity to try something else. There is no (or little) negative social or professional connotation with failure, unlike say Europe.
2. Thinking is global market first rather than local or regional market. The local market is tiny and there is no regional market.
3. Out-of-the box thinking is the norm and excellent. It’s in-the-box thinking that is problematic in Israel. In Europe the reverse is generally the case.
Israel is a bit special because of the strong military and economic ties it has with the US and the shared strategic goals in the region. Simply put, that Iron Dome we saw in action a few weeks ago involved a lot of US built hardware and support, lots of high tech stuff from Israeli companies also selling to the US, etc. There are many billions involved with that stuff. That means Israeli companies tend to be extremely well funded (with US and Israeli defense money) and produce many equally well funded spin offs. A lot of these startups bootstrap straight out of the IDF even.
Also, Israel has a large jewish community in the US involved with the financial sector that wields quite a bit of political power. And Israel uses English as a second language inside Israel, and is culturally closely aligned with the US.
Perhaps not in developers, but it is where it matters: most upper and middle managers. There's an incredibly conservative, risk-averse attitude. If you're risk-averse, all you see are cost centres, not investment opportunities, pivots and new revenue sources. This has a knock-on effect on the requirements for SaaS vendors.
You have a point about a heterogeneous markets and legal systems. What you're possibly also missing is Europe has a huge public sector compared to the US. That sector doesn't tend to focus on innovation at all, unless it's part of the war machine.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
Seems like this would be a really cool idea for a startup (that might already exist?). Stripe stripe/shopify for EU?
It goes far beyond that. If you are in Italy and want to expand to Germany you need to hire german speaking people and that means opening a Sales Office in Germany, and dealing with different labour regulations etc.
Our software essentially is for registering and sending some official forms to the government. We're based in Norway but couldn't get access to Danish governmental systems for testing our because we had no physical presence in Denmark.
We couldn't just set up a PO box and get an org. number, apparently that wasn't enough.
So far one of our customers have been kind enough to lend us their credentials for testing, but yeah would have been nice to have our own.
In Sweden we spent almost two years after being done getting our software released there, as the officials required that the main UI was approved by them and it involved a ton of back-and-forth.
Not just that, but each major version change that altered the main UI would also have to be approved...
The Finnish are quite decent at spending money on their government IT systems it seems, so they're more up to date. However not all documentation is in English and while your average Norwegian can read Danish and Swedish just fine, Finnish is something else entirely.
And of course all the Scandinavian governments have completely different systems for this, even though the forms are essentially the same across the countries, so zero code sharing there. Heck the Danish even have two completely different systems depending on which form you send.
We're just dealing with the Scandinavian countries, I'm sure it's similar in the other EU countries.
If you need a Finnish-speaking person in Norway to help you with the Finnish documentation, shoot me a reply. I'm on the lookout for things on the side to do along with my main job.
And just to add to this, from a certain level (revenue) that's not that high (and depends on idividual states) you need a presence (VAT registration) and a business bank account in the country you're selling your services/goods in, even if you're not actually located there. E.g. a medium sized online shop based in the Czech Republic that is shipping to Hungary. Now imagine this if you're shipping to many EU states... not great.
Might have been true at some point, but nowdays even smaller payments are easy to send between EU banks. VAT payment is done in your home country, and you can deduct the VAT. The social aspect is harder; the amount of work to get a consistent revenue stream from another EU country can be enormous compared to doing buisness in another city in your own country.
There are people who specialize in sales between EU states, but for a small team without capital it was hard. That said most of the 100+ tech companies I know of have offices around EU to get talent from other countries.
Plain incorrect for consumer VAT. You have to charge VAT based on the origin of your customer. Different percentages, different ways to figure out the origin of your customer. For businesses you can do reverse VAT, and you’ll have to ask and check that.
Bank payments are easy yes, but credit cards are not ubiquitous, online payments are different in all countries, direct debit is not always supported across countries.
When trading between EU countries, although you have to calculate and charge VAT based on the location of your consumer customers, if your business only does a small amount[1] of goods trade with various EU countries, or if it's supplying services[2], or if it's supplying online services[3], or if it's supplying goods or services to other businesses[4], it isn't necessary to have a company presence in each individual country.
So for businesses expanding into new EU countries it's not as onerous as needing a local presence would be.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an accountant and may be wrong. I'll take it on the chin if so. This is just my understanding, having needed to look this stuff up occasionally.)
I do not see these things as a big problem though, payments are is a service we buy for our own country as well. The same service provider doesn't work everywhere but for us that is not a problem.
That's how our accountant handles it I'm no expert so I guess there is devils in the details. My view is that it's getting a lot easier, even if the progress is slow.
> you need a presence (VAT registration) and a business bank account in the country you're selling your services/goods in, even if you're not actually located there. E.g. a medium sized online shop based in the Czech Republic that is shipping to Hungary.
Alza (CZ) is slightly bigger than a medium sized online shop and they are using CZ VAT ID intentionally for intracomunitary B2B sales, even though they do have physical presence in other countries.
As EUropean living in a different country for work, is not that easy at all. Try to do your taxes in Swedish or German or French.. Or try to have a social life with people that while could speak English will probably switch to their own language when in more than 2-3 person. Yes of course you can learn the language, but dont think you can be proficient in a couple of year, especially if working 40h/week, and still you will be proficient in a country at max
> will probably switch to their own language when in more than 2-3 person.
That's just rude and why would you want to socialise with such people. I had some great experiences and even when I was the only person not speaking the local language, everyone spoke English in my presence. There is plenty of people that have standards and if you cannot find them at a given time, just focus on something else.
That's certainly an option, but moving to a different nation is a lot to ask for an employee. Despite both countries being in the EU it's still a massive change on an individual level.
True. But I think the problems are more nuanced. It is just harder to scale across EU than US. You'll need localization, marketing, customer support separately set up for different languages/countries.
As a data point, per user support costs (financial and other) are often much larger for European customers compared to the US or Asia. In my experience, it tends to be lower bump for consumer. Once you get into B2B or enterprise, European customers are significantly costlier to support than US equivalent.
It's a combination of requirements specific to markets (EU mandates like GDPR are easier train a support team on and build an escalation process), cultural expectations around handholding, not wanting to hear no for an answer unless it is delivered by an exec (and EU support teams inconsistently delivering the same message that a US would because they fear the response), and general language barriers.
In some ways, it is better to deliver arguably lower-quality support via the US with special treatment for a few key customers just to avoid having to setup support in Europe. Once you invest, you have to go all-in.
as a european, this has not been my experience at all.
> It's a combination of requirements specific to markets (EU mandates like GDPR are easier train a support team on and build an escalation process), cultural expectations around handholding, not wanting to hear no for an answer unless it is delivered by an exec.
in my opinion, very little european teams (mostly italian, czech and german teams) care about hearing the answer from an executive. Also, what do you mean about handholding?
Probably it is harder to scale startups in Europe vs the US. But is that something nations should optimize for?
And if so, what priority should be given to "ease of rapid growth for startups" vs many other issues that determine economic growth and a population's well being?
Also, how much of the problem is due to the issues you raise vs other factors such amount of money spent in R&D? The US has a huge amount of "defense spending" but in fact a lot of that is dedicated to funding research in Universities and direct job creation. Maybe Europe just needs more research Universities, more labs and more state investment into technology. The recent Moderna breakthrough was in part due to a $25 million DARPA investment into the RNA vaccine idea.
As for the issues you mention; solving bureaucratic issues would make things more efficient, and it is definitely desirable. However, I would argue that a heterogeneous market (in terms of language and culture) is more of an advantage than a liability.
Having many cultures and languages could be akin to having biodiversity. Different outlooks in life, different ways of expressing ideas, different ways of thinking can contribute to the development of culture and technology. Look at the Galapago effect that languages had in early computing. The Japanese were able to develop their own vision of "computing" and came up with their own innovations due in part that early western computers couldn't handle Japanese.
Languages and cultures can serve as natural protectionist barriers that allow for each region to develop their own home industries, allowing them to catch up to the world while retaining significant chunks of new wealth creation for their own. Yes, wealth creation is good, but its also important to look at how wealth is distributed. Very unequal societies can break down and lose their cohesion. Cohesion and trust are important features of rich countries. Perhaps many of the issues the US dealing with is because of the huge level of inequalities it has.
Finally, is translation and localization really that hard? Is it that expensive to hire some sales & marketing staff in new markets where you could be making tons of money? I bet translation costs and such are less than a percentage of what Google spent expanding its search engine.
> Finally, is translation and localization really that hard? Is it that expensive to hire some sales & marketing staff in new markets where you could be making tons of money?
Generally, successful technology businesses have low marginal cost to serve new customers. You pay some amount X, to setup in a market and then can scale out relatively cheaply.
The US is great because you pay X once, and then scale quite a lot. Each European country requires that you pay X (or maybe X/4), but it essentially acts as a tax which reduces margins.
Europe does have a few issues that make it unnecessarily hard to build successful startups here. People do start companies here but more often than not success is followed by US investment and before you know it the company is headquartered in the US. There are many reasons for that but a big one has to be that raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard. Investors drag their heels, founders have to take on more risk, etc.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
That's much less of a thing in the US (though it is a bit of a thing there too between states). And that's before you consider language and cultural differences. Simply put, the same company in the EU will have a very hard time growing compared to doing that in the US. Being successful in the US market, means having the deep pockets to go international. Doing the same from a small country means you barely have enough to expand to another small country. Going international is hard work. Not something you do with your MVP. It's not very scalable either: you need to worry about cultural differences, bureaucracy, localization, understanding the local market, ramping up sales, marketing, etc. Especially with SAAS companies this is super expensive.