While it is true that a startup culture is very valuable in the IT-section, it's not that true that one needs a startup culture.<p>I am an engaged computer gamer and we Germans have many successful e-sport stars, E-Sports are not officially recognized in Germany.<p>Same goes for startups, I can list you 20 Industry leading Game startups and multiple hundred exceptional well doing tech startups in Germany.<p>Whatever people think about you does not matter as long as you have a great product to sell.<p>Also the author has a slight notion of american exceptionalism, that something works in the USA is by no means a measurement to go by and say: "Hey you should do this also, it will be working great!"
Some detailed research about markets, employees, laws and how to adapt them would do every European government better than simply trying to copy America.
Although there are many start-ups in Berlin it's pretty tough to navigate all the laws and regulations and more often than not it involves money. So when you try to start a garage business you will discover obstacle after obstacle. It is pretty hard to "just try" a business idea because with all the crap you have to do and pay it HAS to work. I still after 5 years discover some regulations that I completely missed and I always hope that there's no big one hiding behind the bushes. There is a saying in Germany: if you own a business you got one foot in prison.
The major problem is that some of the best Europeans leave to US to start or join startup companies (e.g. Stripe). And if you look at the best US companies you will typically see a large amounts of Europeans in them. So Europeans are very capable of starting and joining startups - they just don't do it in Europe.<p>What Europe needs is a better way to keep the talent at home.
At least for me, there are 2 main problems: taxes and language.<p>Taxes: here in Germany you pay 19% VAT on all transactions. Then, income tax, which quickly reaches 42%, then solidarity tax, basically almost half of your earnings evaporate<p>Language: it's tough to address a decently large market, the biggest market (German speaking) is about 100M people, that's 4 times less than the USA market<p>You can easily see that those 2 points quickly add up and create "corollary" problems. With those taxes + social security, to give a strong employee a strong salary you go towards a cost of +150k. To pay that much to employees you would need a big market to address to get revenues, but the market is small-ish, or you might look for VC money, but people with money are too scattered across too many languages and countries.
I think we're doing alright in London? Pop over to Silicon Roundabout and every bar man will want to tell you about his App. There's start-ups and incubators everywhere. The one thing we don't have the same structure of is VCs - the US kills us there. It's growing though, and the government is really pushing to grow it further.
Is this really a problem ?<p>I was under the impression that the vast majority of start-ups 1. fail or 2. require employees to expend huge effort while the lion's share of the revenue gain is made by the C-level officers.<p>Why would an European labor force want to expose itself to the "start-up" platform ?
Tell that to the many startups in Berlin, where it is cheap to live and there are a lot of great tech companies. Berlin is like the Los Angeles (aka cultural melting pot) of much of Europe.
OT, but the only times I've encountered the word "foster", it is in the context of the European Commission, specifically in the context of what they want to achieve with grants.<p>Is it my limited exposure to English, or has the European Commission appropriated this word, and has by the way infected WSJ to use it?
Yawn.<p>The only major thing we're lacking in Europe is venture capital.<p>All the other cultural differences (which aren't "European" but vary wildly from country to country), are red herrings Americans and European self-haters like to emphasize. But in reality we a) learned to work with them a long time ago, otherwise we would never have been economically successful, and b) those differences are strengths as well as weaknesses in equal measure.<p>Yes, the lack of a barrier-free "single market" is also a bit of a pain, but the biggest issue here is <i>language and culture</i>, not laws and regulations, and that's not going to change any time soon. So there's no point on dwelling on it, it's like complaining that the climate in Norway isn't suited for growing bananas.<p>In reality there are lively start-up scenes all over Europe, with more than enough entrepreneurs willing to take risks, more than enough smart people with innovative ideas, and more than enough people willing to work for them.<p>The one and only thing that is truly missing is funding, funding and funding. The investment culture is the only place where there is a suffocating risk-averse attitude.<p>(And most of those anecdotes about how stuffy and risk-averse European culture is are bullshit outliers. I can dig up a ton of totally true anecdotes about the US and make American culture look completely fucking insane. It has nothing to do with the day to day reality of living and doing business on either continent.)
In regards to hardware startups, I would think Europe should have the leading edge in comparison to America due to their proximity to China- in America, if I want to start sourcing parts from china, or go into production, It's a significant endeavor. If I'm just a hobbyist screwing around at a workbench, I can pay a huge markup on parts from American vendors, or I can wait 3 weeks to get the same thing from China.<p>I can't speak from experience in regards to hardware startups, I've just made a handful of one-off boards, but after reading Bunnie's blog in regards to his trips to China and such, the importance of location near it becomes apparent.
On the other hand... who gives a flygin f' about a startup ecosystem? If to get a strong startup scene I have to live in a society that loves risk (and loves to tell you that taking it is a character quality)... no thanks. I'll happily take degrowth instead.
Not only culture, but regulations and taxes also effect the ability to create a startup.<p>Here is an explanation of French law: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-its-impossible-to-fire-someone-in-France" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-its-impossible-to-fire-...</a><p>As it says in the first comment, it almost becomes easier to try to get the person to quit with 6 month severance than go through all the hoops that you need to go through to actually fire someone.
It's funny, I guess, to read about the WSJ referring to <i>European culture</i>. There is no <i>European culture</i> that I know of. Maybe if you look across from the other side of the ocean, contrast your own culture with Europe as a whole, you note the differences and contrasts and then conclude that what you are looking at is tight-knit enough to be called <i>a culture</i>. Maybe like someone travelling from one part of Eurasia to another side, noting how people look and behave and contrast them with the things that are different to their own, and then concluding "this is a distinct culture/group".<p>Now watch a European disagree with me just to be contrarian.
The difference isn't that Europeans are risk-averse. It's that, if you come from a relatively privileged background and have connections in Silicon Valley, you can launch a startup <i>without</i> taking any real risk.<p>Speaking for my fellow Americans, we're as terrified of being broke as anyone else. (In fact, we have more to fear, because we don't have universal health care.) That said, these kids who become founders straight out of Stanford aren't taking any real risk. They <i>say</i> they are, to justify getting 100 times more equity than their employees, but their backers have enough pull to ensure a "managed outcome" (acqui-hire into a middle-management role) even if the worst should happen.<p>We are just as risk-averse as Europeans. On both sides of the Atlantic, there are a few people who naturally tend toward creative risk (who are usually socially rejected, there and here) and a much larger set of people who climb the ladder that's put in front of them, follow the rules, and get into positions of power or influence the old-fashioned way (two parts schmoozing, one part birth, two parts luck). The major difference is in the window dressing. In Europe or New York, that ladder tends to be banking or consulting. In Palo Alto, it's programmer or PM to executive to founder to angel investor to VC... but if you go to the right schools, you can skip a couple of the bottom rungs. The actual willingness of <i>the people</i> to take risks isn't any different in one place or the other.<p>Of course, when it comes to risk attitudes around <i>capital</i>, it's a different environment entirely. Europe is too conservative and cynical for its own good, and California is too optimistic (and thus prone to "capital evaporation" by socially well connected types) and far too trusting of the wrong sorts of people.