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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

> Do you think the rest of the world is simply going to sit idly on the sidelines after watching the success?

I think Europe will. When it comes to business, they tend to eat their young.

Look, I don't want to be a Europe apologist because the continent does have it's problems, but having moved just to Stockholm, the startup scene here seems to be very much hitting its stride.

There have been relatively big exits in the past five years, there's more money than ever in the ecosystem and people seem to be willing to do more risky ventures than before.

I've got a friend in Berlin in the startup industry who's very bullish in their local ecosystem as well. Neither of these places is Silicon Valley nor will they ever be, but they're both doing pretty ok and you can easily start a company here and have it be pretty successful, even globally.

I think that outlook was more likely a few years ago. In the grand scheme of things it seems like places like Stockholm and Berlin have largely capped out. I think it is getting harder to see that there would be significant growth for these places in the future, especially without things like debt and real estate capturing much of that growth. They have largely been growing because there were excess potential, but failures to continue that trend means there isn't as much potential anymore. Maybe they will reinvent themselves, but that is yet to be seen.

What do you mean by eating the young?

Highly regulated environments are heavily biased toward huge and/or old companies because regulation is a regressive corporate tax.

And regulations often have grandfathering clauses which favor old companies!

Cost of entry is too high for new players

usually it refers to policies which (usually unintendedly, sometimes explicitly) take from the productivity of younger people to finance older people. Because it is difficult to predict the future, the fear is that the unintended consequence is that this may take so much from the young that it robs their future. There are very good reasons to at least consider this as a possibility, because policymakers seem to make state revenue projections that are consistently overoptimistic. Also, programmes that were instituted as temporary often wind up becoming permanent and then also get mission creep; some programs that wind up being generational are instituted without taking into account demographic shifts, especially in fertility rates, etc.)

The lost decade in Japan is often cited as such an example, but increasingly we are seeing things like wage stagnation among <30 in the US and Europe that may also be the result of this (of course plenty of mainstream explanations abound as well).

Great answer, thanks for taking the time!

In EU regulations, there is often a trend to not exclude small businesses from costly regulations. The GDPR is a recent example of this, with no carve outs for organizations under a certain size or revenue number.

In the US and other English speaking countries, there are often revenue, employee count and public vs private carve outs for various regulations.

By not excluding small business and startups from costly regulations, they often stunt potential new businesses from developing in the EU.

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