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Reporting back: Your comment is utter nonsense. There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well! Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon fo

by thijsc 5y ago

Reporting back: Your comment is utter nonsense. There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well! Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free. Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over here. Overall many countries in Europe are amazing places to start a business in.

reader_mode 5y ago
> There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well! Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of the money and the rest was just EU grants to stimulate entrepreneurship. Do I need to say that their portfolio looks like a garbage bin of knockoff attempts and small businesses masquerading as startups.
- 238475235243 5y ago
  This is entirely accurate from my experience. It's cargo cult "tech scene".
- davidgatti 5y ago
  This description is UE startups in a nutshell :) Countries like Poland for example, get massive amount of money from the EU, and there are business that specialize only in getting grants for people, which then they use to make a "company" for a year or two, and when the money runs out they close it and reopen another one with the next grant. With no revenue stream idea what so ever. In this type of country's if you have a EU grant base company, you are a meme. Italy on the other hand, dose not use the grants, because here nobody have a clue what's the point of a company, what it means to work to build something successful, and if you talk to an Italian about the grind, or working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic - while complaining that they don't have money. Well... Either you grind or you meet every day with your friends for an Aperitivo, and live the Dolce Vita.
  - tcoff91 5y ago
    16 hours a day of work is crazy and you don’t have to work that much to have decent money.
  - Haemm0r 5y ago
    I'd prefer Dolce Vita over 16h/day anytime! :-)
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    >working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic As they should.
    - Dudeman112 5y ago
      I don't think op is gonna admit to being a lunatic, even if they do engage in such behaviors like thinking that working 16h per day isn't insanity
  - mattmanser 5y ago
    No offense, but that stuff's pocket change to the actual economies of the EU. It's a redistribution of wealth without having to admit that's what it really is, and if it scores a success, great. It's very easy to forget that there are only 3 countries worth talking about in the EU economically, previously 4, but the UK leaving basically took 20% of the EU's GDP. Now there's France, Germany and Italy, and everyone else is basically irrelevant, although you might just include Spain or Holland.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    If the benefits of companies touted elsewhere in the thread is providing employment, why don't you hire two people to work 8 hour days and get more done? If the answer is that you'd need to pay twice as much, then that's the equivalent of saying the person working 16 hours is getting half the going rate as well as not having any life outside work.
- thijsc 5y ago
  I totally agree with you that the EU's efforts to replicate a SV style startup ecosystem are misguided and ineffective. The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    That’s not “a thriving tech scene” then.
    - tmpz22 5y ago
      If VCs making money is your definition of a successful tech scene you sir or ma’am are utterly lost. You think Jobs or Gates were sweating over VC returns instead of drooling over the innovation and egregious wealth and cultural change they conceived?
  - Learning2-2 5y ago
    There is absolutely a thriving tech scene in Europe. Here is for example a list gaming companies in Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_companies_of_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_companies_o...
- bennybob 5y ago
  Also wages in tech in the EU are laughably bad compared to USA. I'm in the UK, same problem. Yet everyone seems to think that a couple weeks more holiday makes up for it.
  - tcoff91 5y ago
    Isn’t university for your children free in Germany? That’s like a 100-200 thousand dollar savings if you have two kids you want to put through college vs the USA.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Or the healthcare, saner rent prices, better traffic because of public transit?
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      The average college graduate in the US has $35,000 in debt. There are plenty of excellent, cheap public universities. If you don’t want to work in journalism, academia, management consulting or one of the other bastions of privilege and pedigree there’s little reason to pay the premium necessary to go to a top tier private university. And every single person who pays sticker price to go to a no name private college is wasting their money.
    - developer93 5y ago
      I believe you have to pay 500 EUR/year, it may have changed though.
      - anoncake 5y ago
        That's roughly correct, it depends on the university. Usually most of the cost is for the public transport ticket.
  - zingar 5y ago
    It's strange but true. I live in the UK and I think I could get paid 3-5x more in the US. But even though I'm annoyed by that pay gap, I will never work without healthcare and only two weeks of PTO. At least job satisfaction doesn't change, I work with startups that interest me and I get to hack on a stimulating open source project. I'm just healthy while I do it.
- Yoric 5y ago
  The lack of VC funding is a real problem. On the other hand, I've seen many EU start-ups with lots of potential, developing things way ahead of the wave. Having ideas and skills is not a problem. Keeping afloat long enough to make them reality is hard. There is also an important but unspoken cultural factor that really hurts EU initiatives: more-or-less subtle cultural imperialism. No, really, I mean it. As with many things, to succeed in the world of start-ups, you need to be validated by Silicon Valley pundits, to adopt the language of the Silicon Valley, the cultural codes of the Silicon Valley, and ultimately Silicon Valley money etc. That's really hard when you come from a culture that has different definitions of things as basic as "yes", "no" and "please", different definitions of what a good pitch is, different definitions of ethics, of the employer/employee relationship, etc. not to mention the need to live in a foreign language and, to a large extent, in a foreign timezone. In many cases, the EU start-up bashing I've seen feels like (a reduced form of) poor-bashing, attempting to explain to people who started with fewer chances that everything is their fault. Now, this doesn't mean that nothing should be done to improve the situation. But I've started to take EU start-up criticism with a pinch of salt.
- dukeyukey 5y ago
  Silicon Valley is top, we all know that. But in terms of startup funding, after the SFBA and Beijing comes London. In terms of startup-friendliness, London typically beats every US hub except the SFBA, and occasionally ties with NYC. I'll give you places like Stockholm and Amsterdam don't quite hit those heights, but still have healthy ecosystems going for them. But it's difficult to describe the 'EU' way of doing things because the EU is not a federal government; each country is a separate nation, with far more differentiating them than US states
  - reader_mode 5y ago
    London is not EU, even when they were a member they were a separate story.
    - midasuni 5y ago
      Pre covid U.K. was part of EU, very little has changed yet - same regulations and taxes as in 2019 Claiming “ahh U.K. is different” you might as well say “ahh Bay Area is different”.
      - reader_mode 5y ago
        But UK (and London especially) is different - that's why they left the EU and were always in tention with EU when they were a member, especially with regards to their financial sector. Bay Area, New York, Austin, US has a decent number of hubs, London is most comparable to New York from my experience (I've worked in a London based startup, NY agency and a SF startup) mostly focused on financial and not really into hard tech.
        midasuni 5y ago
        The U.K. left the EU because of left behind towns blaming the EU for their problems. London (like Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester) voted massively to stay in the EU. Other gentrified cities like Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge also voted to remain. Where is your evidence that leave was driven by London doing things differently?
emptysongglass 5y ago
Work for a tech company in Europe. GDPR compliance is costing us massive manpower hours and money spent on compliance consultants. Most of my salary gets obliterated before it reaches me and I make significantly less than tech workers in the US. There's a lot to like about the security but I'm starting to wonder if I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.
- thijsc 5y ago
  Not a fan of GDPR either. I'm really not sure the total tax load as an employee is much worse compared to California if you factor in state taxes and health care payments.
  - brtkdotse 5y ago
    And child care costs and college savings.
- ativzzz 5y ago
  > I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here. It's a different life model. The EU seems better aligned for enjoying life outside of work. The US seems better aligned for enjoying life as a result of work. You can't break out of working in the US either, until you save up a lot of money, which requires either a super high paying career, or a ton of sacrifices in terms of quality of life
- midasuni 5y ago
  What country, how much do you pay, why are you so concerned about personal information when you could simply not collect it? Im concerned you think functions like Infosec are a drain too (same principles as gdpr - ensure you are handling information securely), please tell me who it is so I don’t invest
  - emptysongglass 5y ago
    What a completely ignorant line of questioning. You have no idea what product I work on or if I have anything to do with compliance. And you appear to assume that the use of personal data is a binary switch you can just flip on or off, regardless of the product. Why would I be interested in answering any question you have given your evident distaste for myself, my job, and my industry?
andi999 5y ago
I wish there were thriving tech scene in Europe.
SOMA_BOFH 5y ago
>There is a thriving tech scene in Europe please explain
- thijsc 5y ago
  Hard to know where to start! Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here. This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58f6c4105228abf88 https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58... There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list. On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company. I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.
  - SOMA_BOFH 5y ago
    your anecdotal evidence is quite entertaining. please continue.
    - dang 5y ago
      Would you please stop posting flamewar and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account because we're trying for a different kind of site here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
      - SOMA_BOFH 5y ago
        will do. you are correct.
        5y ago
C19is20 5y ago
Firing isn't 'harder', it just has to be done correctly.
- marvin 5y ago
  Giving two written warnings two weeks apart for one of the five objective reasons that are grounds for firing, then firing with a three month notice period is by definition harder than saying "you're fired, please leave the building immediately".
  - midasuni 5y ago
    So employ people on fixed 3 month contracts, or even by day. You’ll have to pay more of course.
    - marvin 5y ago
      This was actually illegal in Norway until recently. It is legal now, though, and you're right that this is an option. For in-demand professions like software engineers, such a scheme actually requires salaries that are comparable to those of moderately high cost-of-living areas in the US. A typical annual fee would be ~$200.000 pre-tax for a full-time consulting gig, with 25% VAT paid by the employer on top of that. Contractor pays approximately 50% tax on their fee. It's a bit strange that few companies actually do this, although many will have part of their workforce employed like this indirectly, through a contracting agency. It's popular for roles that have a weak negotiating position, such as teachers, call center employees, nurses etc. Although rarely with contract lengths as short as 3 months.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - imtringued 5y ago
    I don't know what country you are talking about but if it was about Germany then what you just said is a lot of bullshit. What you can do in Germany is the following: "you're fired, please leave in x weeks" (x depends on the employment contract, usually two weeks). Those two weeks are just a matter of dignity. To give both the business and the employer time to part.

by thijsc 5y ago

reader_mode 5y ago

> There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well! Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of the money and the rest was just EU grants to stimulate entrepreneurship. Do I need to say that their portfolio looks like a garbage bin of knockoff attempts and small businesses masquerading as startups.

238475235243 5y ago
This is entirely accurate from my experience. It's cargo cult "tech scene".
davidgatti 5y ago
This description is UE startups in a nutshell :) Countries like Poland for example, get massive amount of money from the EU, and there are business that specialize only in getting grants for people, which then they use to make a "company" for a year or two, and when the money runs out they close it and reopen another one with the next grant. With no revenue stream idea what so ever. In this type of country's if you have a EU grant base company, you are a meme. Italy on the other hand, dose not use the grants, because here nobody have a clue what's the point of a company, what it means to work to build something successful, and if you talk to an Italian about the grind, or working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic - while complaining that they don't have money. Well... Either you grind or you meet every day with your friends for an Aperitivo, and live the Dolce Vita.
- tcoff91 5y ago
  16 hours a day of work is crazy and you don’t have to work that much to have decent money.
- Haemm0r 5y ago
  I'd prefer Dolce Vita over 16h/day anytime! :-)
- Hamuko 5y ago
  >working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic As they should.
  - Dudeman112 5y ago
    I don't think op is gonna admit to being a lunatic, even if they do engage in such behaviors like thinking that working 16h per day isn't insanity
- mattmanser 5y ago
  No offense, but that stuff's pocket change to the actual economies of the EU. It's a redistribution of wealth without having to admit that's what it really is, and if it scores a success, great. It's very easy to forget that there are only 3 countries worth talking about in the EU economically, previously 4, but the UK leaving basically took 20% of the EU's GDP. Now there's France, Germany and Italy, and everyone else is basically irrelevant, although you might just include Spain or Holland.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  If the benefits of companies touted elsewhere in the thread is providing employment, why don't you hire two people to work 8 hour days and get more done? If the answer is that you'd need to pay twice as much, then that's the equivalent of saying the person working 16 hours is getting half the going rate as well as not having any life outside work.
thijsc 5y ago
I totally agree with you that the EU's efforts to replicate a SV style startup ecosystem are misguided and ineffective. The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.
- kortilla 5y ago
  That’s not “a thriving tech scene” then.
  - tmpz22 5y ago
    If VCs making money is your definition of a successful tech scene you sir or ma’am are utterly lost. You think Jobs or Gates were sweating over VC returns instead of drooling over the innovation and egregious wealth and cultural change they conceived?
- Learning2-2 5y ago
  There is absolutely a thriving tech scene in Europe. Here is for example a list gaming companies in Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_companies_of_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_companies_o...
bennybob 5y ago
Also wages in tech in the EU are laughably bad compared to USA. I'm in the UK, same problem. Yet everyone seems to think that a couple weeks more holiday makes up for it.
- tcoff91 5y ago
  Isn’t university for your children free in Germany? That’s like a 100-200 thousand dollar savings if you have two kids you want to put through college vs the USA.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Or the healthcare, saner rent prices, better traffic because of public transit?
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    The average college graduate in the US has $35,000 in debt. There are plenty of excellent, cheap public universities. If you don’t want to work in journalism, academia, management consulting or one of the other bastions of privilege and pedigree there’s little reason to pay the premium necessary to go to a top tier private university. And every single person who pays sticker price to go to a no name private college is wasting their money.
  - developer93 5y ago
    I believe you have to pay 500 EUR/year, it may have changed though.
    - anoncake 5y ago
      That's roughly correct, it depends on the university. Usually most of the cost is for the public transport ticket.
- zingar 5y ago
  It's strange but true. I live in the UK and I think I could get paid 3-5x more in the US. But even though I'm annoyed by that pay gap, I will never work without healthcare and only two weeks of PTO. At least job satisfaction doesn't change, I work with startups that interest me and I get to hack on a stimulating open source project. I'm just healthy while I do it.
Yoric 5y ago
The lack of VC funding is a real problem. On the other hand, I've seen many EU start-ups with lots of potential, developing things way ahead of the wave. Having ideas and skills is not a problem. Keeping afloat long enough to make them reality is hard. There is also an important but unspoken cultural factor that really hurts EU initiatives: more-or-less subtle cultural imperialism. No, really, I mean it. As with many things, to succeed in the world of start-ups, you need to be validated by Silicon Valley pundits, to adopt the language of the Silicon Valley, the cultural codes of the Silicon Valley, and ultimately Silicon Valley money etc. That's really hard when you come from a culture that has different definitions of things as basic as "yes", "no" and "please", different definitions of what a good pitch is, different definitions of ethics, of the employer/employee relationship, etc. not to mention the need to live in a foreign language and, to a large extent, in a foreign timezone. In many cases, the EU start-up bashing I've seen feels like (a reduced form of) poor-bashing, attempting to explain to people who started with fewer chances that everything is their fault. Now, this doesn't mean that nothing should be done to improve the situation. But I've started to take EU start-up criticism with a pinch of salt.
dukeyukey 5y ago
Silicon Valley is top, we all know that. But in terms of startup funding, after the SFBA and Beijing comes London. In terms of startup-friendliness, London typically beats every US hub except the SFBA, and occasionally ties with NYC. I'll give you places like Stockholm and Amsterdam don't quite hit those heights, but still have healthy ecosystems going for them. But it's difficult to describe the 'EU' way of doing things because the EU is not a federal government; each country is a separate nation, with far more differentiating them than US states
- reader_mode 5y ago
  London is not EU, even when they were a member they were a separate story.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    Pre covid U.K. was part of EU, very little has changed yet - same regulations and taxes as in 2019 Claiming “ahh U.K. is different” you might as well say “ahh Bay Area is different”.
    - reader_mode 5y ago
      But UK (and London especially) is different - that's why they left the EU and were always in tention with EU when they were a member, especially with regards to their financial sector. Bay Area, New York, Austin, US has a decent number of hubs, London is most comparable to New York from my experience (I've worked in a London based startup, NY agency and a SF startup) mostly focused on financial and not really into hard tech.
      - midasuni 5y ago
        The U.K. left the EU because of left behind towns blaming the EU for their problems. London (like Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester) voted massively to stay in the EU. Other gentrified cities like Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge also voted to remain. Where is your evidence that leave was driven by London doing things differently?

emptysongglass 5y ago

Work for a tech company in Europe. GDPR compliance is costing us massive manpower hours and money spent on compliance consultants. Most of my salary gets obliterated before it reaches me and I make significantly less than tech workers in the US. There's a lot to like about the security but I'm starting to wonder if I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.

thijsc 5y ago
Not a fan of GDPR either. I'm really not sure the total tax load as an employee is much worse compared to California if you factor in state taxes and health care payments.
- brtkdotse 5y ago
  And child care costs and college savings.
ativzzz 5y ago
> I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here. It's a different life model. The EU seems better aligned for enjoying life outside of work. The US seems better aligned for enjoying life as a result of work. You can't break out of working in the US either, until you save up a lot of money, which requires either a super high paying career, or a ton of sacrifices in terms of quality of life
midasuni 5y ago
What country, how much do you pay, why are you so concerned about personal information when you could simply not collect it? Im concerned you think functions like Infosec are a drain too (same principles as gdpr - ensure you are handling information securely), please tell me who it is so I don’t invest
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  What a completely ignorant line of questioning. You have no idea what product I work on or if I have anything to do with compliance. And you appear to assume that the use of personal data is a binary switch you can just flip on or off, regardless of the product. Why would I be interested in answering any question you have given your evident distaste for myself, my job, and my industry?

andi999 5y ago

I wish there were thriving tech scene in Europe.

SOMA_BOFH 5y ago

>There is a thriving tech scene in Europe please explain

thijsc 5y ago
Hard to know where to start! Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here. This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58f6c4105228abf88 https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58... There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list. On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company. I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.
- SOMA_BOFH 5y ago
  your anecdotal evidence is quite entertaining. please continue.
  - dang 5y ago
    Would you please stop posting flamewar and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account because we're trying for a different kind of site here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    - SOMA_BOFH 5y ago
      will do. you are correct.
      - 5y ago

C19is20 5y ago

Firing isn't 'harder', it just has to be done correctly.

marvin 5y ago
Giving two written warnings two weeks apart for one of the five objective reasons that are grounds for firing, then firing with a three month notice period is by definition harder than saying "you're fired, please leave the building immediately".
- midasuni 5y ago
  So employ people on fixed 3 month contracts, or even by day. You’ll have to pay more of course.
  - marvin 5y ago
    This was actually illegal in Norway until recently. It is legal now, though, and you're right that this is an option. For in-demand professions like software engineers, such a scheme actually requires salaries that are comparable to those of moderately high cost-of-living areas in the US. A typical annual fee would be ~$200.000 pre-tax for a full-time consulting gig, with 25% VAT paid by the employer on top of that. Contractor pays approximately 50% tax on their fee. It's a bit strange that few companies actually do this, although many will have part of their workforce employed like this indirectly, through a contracting agency. It's popular for roles that have a weak negotiating position, such as teachers, call center employees, nurses etc. Although rarely with contract lengths as short as 3 months.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- imtringued 5y ago
  I don't know what country you are talking about but if it was about Germany then what you just said is a lot of bullshit. What you can do in Germany is the following: "you're fired, please leave in x weeks" (x depends on the employment contract, usually two weeks). Those two weeks are just a matter of dignity. To give both the business and the employer time to part.