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The thing about Europe: it's the actual land of the free now

(www.economist.com)
160 points cruzcampo | 2 comments | 11 Apr 25 08:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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palata ◴[11 Apr 25 08:15 UTC] No.43651526[source]▶
> There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation.

There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.

As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.

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1. rcarmo ◴[11 Apr 25 08:51 UTC] No.43651764[source]▶
There were quite a few unicorns that (until now) quickly moved to establish a US foothold and hired some of their new C-levels there, because that's where the lobbying and money typically are.

Europe tends to have more established, "old" companies that do their own bit of innovation, and a few outliers like ASML that are crucial to many industries (besides silicon, there's pharma, media, retail, and of course a lot of manufacturing, each with their own innovation ecosystems, because many established companies have long figured out that it would be easier to sponsor local startups and then incorporate them than rebuild their orgs at random).

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2. pjc50 ◴[11 Apr 25 09:00 UTC] No.43651835[source]▶
I've just realized that this describes almost half of my career: ten years at a UK startup that almost immediately set itself up with a Delaware corp and a San Francisco office, so it could eventually sell out to Cadence; then several more years at a UK university chip design spinoff that also got bought out by a US multinational.

Hard to compete with the power of the dollar. I guess the Trump plan to push the value of the dollar down may finally make US acquisitions of European companies impossible and US salaries uncompetitive.