I sometimes wonder why there are so few European unicorns. Unicorn is a startup that is valued at over 1 Billion dollars, in European context, maybe it should be considered 1 Billion Euros? but usually on those scales 50 million doesn’t really matter that much.
In general there are very few European startups when you compare with the US or China. Not only that, there almost no European tech giants.
This doesn’t really surprise me, I’m sure there are so many levels to this issue but I only talk about a few of them.
Regulations in Europe cripples startups and small businesses, this is about to be exacerbated by new so called upload filters, which makes internet companies responsible for any copyrighted material uploaded on their platform. This alone scares away thousands of hopeful entrepreneurs that don’t have the resources to satisfy the old digitally illiterate bureaucrats.
The other issue, which is an advantage when you are an employee are the labour laws. Any company that hires an employee is going to have a hard time firing them.
The laws are limited for companies offering stock options, therefore employees rarely have skin in the game and hence you don’t see the same level of enthusiasm.
There are many more, I might update this post in the future, but I’ll stop here.