While it is true that securing funding for new ventures is much easier in the US compared to Europe, the question how much this contributes to the building of successful and sustainable companies is still unanswered.
The fact that European companies can't afford to burn through cash for decades might lead to better resource/talent allocation.
This is visible in the very healthy deep tech industry in Europe.
Right now European companies are very good at solving narrow but difficult problems, whereas American companies seem to be much better at creating consumer facing technology.
If the "deep tech industry in Europe" refers to bloated, bureaucratic legacy enterprise software like SAP, European tech is doomed.
They only continue to exist because of cronyism, forced sales to large organizations through personal connections; and expertise at navigating the stifling local bureaucracies of their countries.
Those places aren't good at solving narrow problems. They are at best mediocre at addressing the problems of 40 years ago, at a price point far higher than smaller and more innovative companies could do so. They innovate approximately nothing in terms of product design or value added.
Nokia is another cautionary tale of what goes wrong with that model.
Just a hunch, but you and GP are probably partly talking past each other: “tech” for some essentially means software/SaaS/cloud/mobile, but for others, it includes a lot more, like all sorts of physical-world technology engineering.
I agree with you but there's a reason Nokia died and SAP and Accenture live on despite both not doing innovation well.
Nokia activated in the cut-throat consumer space and had insane competition. SAP avoids both these traps and is in no threat of going away anythime soon like Nokia did.
>the question how much this contributes to the building of successful and sustainable companies is still unanswered.
Is it unanswered though? Out of TOP 100 companies by market cap[1], 80% of those are from the US, with the wealthiest being tech. EU only has few companies there ranging from oil, luxury goods, cosmetics, drugs, with only Siemens, SAP, Accenture(?!) and ASML being the only major EU tech companies a large and wealthy continent could muster, with SAP and Accenture not being known for much innovation.
The US's 7 largest tech companies alone, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, are worth more than Europe's entire tech sector combined including UK, Switzerland and Norway. It's not even a competition. It's like Muhammad Ali versus your kindergarten bully.
But hey, at least we get paid sick leave and free healthcare.
The word you’re looking for in narrow vs broad is scale.
The more heavily regulated and concentrated European capital markets and more challenging regulatory environments tend to make broad risks less attractive, leading directly to more entrepreneurs betting on readily available opportunities. This is simple incentive: the higher the risk the more you need a sure bet to take the risk or help just as importantly convince those with venture capital take the risk with you.
This risk management choke tends to encourage more specialized or “narrow focuses” as you have identified.
So, you see risk directly shaping the types of companies that are built, and the nature of the businesses that get created tends to be different.
Unfortunately, narrow, more certain companies tend to work better in specialized markets, limiting their scale, so while you end up with many leading companies you also tend to miss out on broad transformational events and ground floor opportunities.
This is my own theory and learning, so very open to criticism.
The American system tends to be messy, wasteful and speculative with a great deal of highs and lows and a lot of failures. The high lubrication of liberal employment laws, liberal bankruptcy policies, and a culture of small angel investors in many cities encourages experimentation. The downsides are obvious, but the huge amount of experimentation is what drives the economy, as there also exists a massive and ready acquisition pool of large companies and private equity ready to exit those founders.
That generally creates a virtuous cycle that is much larger than its equivalents in Europe, furthering the advantage of scale (just look at ycombinator: blank checks and plug-and-play support for good ideas is almost taken for granted in the US). The cost is a huge, wasteful and messy system that tends to deprioritize labor and financial stability for its workers on the whole for this system, but that’s one of the benefits.
Of course all of this is later stages, as the sources of funding for most startups in the world in the earliest stages are in fact banks and personal savings:
So I really think a lot of the effect is in the amplification of early stage experimentation that gets traction not necessarily in the support of early stage experiments prior to investment worthiness. This whole question deserves and even deeper comparison.
I do not mean to advocate for deregulation, just make an observation of what is working (and what is not).
I usually listen to podcasts for about 6 hours per week while working out. Mostly these podcasts offer a shallow introduction into a topic, often even point towards the literature behind it. Half of the books I read this year were about things for which podcasts have sparked my interest.
The trigger for the decision was not the recent Chernobyl series but the Fukushima incident combined with an important election. If Fukushima would have happened a month later, Germany probably wouldn't have decided to shut down it's unclear power plants.
On October 28th 2010 the German government (CDU & FPD) voted to prolong the usage of its existing power plants for another 8 years.
Fukushima happened on March 11th 2011. Put under pressure by an increasing poll numbers of the (anti-nuclear) Green Party and having a state election upcoming on March 27th the same government decided to close down the power plants.
Well, the German Greens (along with NGOs like Greenpeace) have always campaigned against nuclear in a way that very effectively shaped public opinion to allow Merkel to use the Fukushima scare as an opportunity to shut down nuclear power.
Note that Germany's newest nuclear power plants were built in 1982, before the Chernobyl incident and before the merger of the West German Greens with the East German progressive movement (which made the party more politically relevant). This resulted in lifetimes of existing nuclear plants continuously being extended, which in terms of safety was much worse than building new ones.
There are six plants currently still operating, half of which are scheduled to be shut down by the end of this year, the other half scheduled to be shut down by the end of next year.
Ironically, the nuclear scares have not resulted in a massive expansion of renewables but in a strengthening of fossil fuels and especially coal (which is heavily subsidized and has even led to land being expropriated "in the common interest" to allow energy companies to harvest lignite).
As of 2018 Germany has vague goals about abolishing coal power by 2038 due to public pressure but in the most optimistic scenarios this doesn't involve shutting down any coal plants before 2035. That this is being discussed by (conservative and centrist) government officials at all is only the result of the Fridays For Future protests and related spillover movements (XR and more specifically "Ende Gelände", a series of protests directly targeting the surface mining sites).
Sadly, it's not always that easy. A large amount of swiss property is owned by pension funds, which are legally limited in their possible investments. So increasing the supply of housing will also defund the pension funds.
I live in an European capital and a decent enough meal at an ok restaurant for both me and my gf costs about 25-27 euros (no wine, just sparkling water for me and in most cases some tea for my gf). I don’t find that terribly expensive, Europe is a big place.
Luxury housing, too, does create supply. Prohibiting the construction of luxury apartments will just end with rich people paying luxury money for standard apartments thus raising prices and people with less financial means will be priced out.
While smartphone camera sensors have come a long way, lens technology did not progress as much. You still have a fixed focal length and quite small fixed aperture.
This means that your cannot control one of your 3 parameters of the exposure triangle, which is a big limitation. Also it leads to the user not being able to control the depth of field. A smartphone camera sensor is still too weak/small to offer good low light performance and your lens isn't sharp enough to allow for radical cropping.
Those are things that amateurs/non-enthusiasts don't realize but lead to any old 35mm film camera being much more capable in the hands of a skilled photographer. That being said, research on computational photography is currently making big steps and could narrow that gap quite a bit.
There are large lenses for phonecams, if you are willing to use an eternal add-on. We've gotten rather demanding that all our technological magic fit in a 3x5x0.5inch box.
An employer can require you to inform him about side jobs but is legally not allowed to prohibit you from taking a side job unless you work against his interest (eg. negative impact on your performance or competing with your employer).
The fact that European companies can't afford to burn through cash for decades might lead to better resource/talent allocation. This is visible in the very healthy deep tech industry in Europe.
Right now European companies are very good at solving narrow but difficult problems, whereas American companies seem to be much better at creating consumer facing technology.