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Comment by _b8r0 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I'm amazed. You're tarring the whole of European culture with the same brush based on experiences in Slovenia. The experience may or may not be typical of your part of Europe but Europe has no 'countrymen', we're all very different from each other with different corporate cultures.

I find your post insulting on two levels - one the idea that Europe is a monoculture, and two that somehow 'being more like the USA' means that we'd be more dynamic risk takers. There are risk takers all over Europe. The main man behind Ycombinator is English for crying out loud!

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While it's interesting to note pg is English, for some reason he chose CA to set up in. I'm English too, but based in NYC. As I told everyone when I started my humble startup :

If I tried hard and succeeded in the US people would want to emulate me, in the UK they would wonder who I had to screw over to get there. If I tried hard but failed in the UK people would remember me as a failure, in the US people recognize someone who tried...

You go where the best chance for what you're trying to achieve is. For pg it was silicon valley, for you it's NYC, for investment funds in Europe it's going to be London, for engineering in Europe it's going to be Germany.

I don't think your analogy is that accurate, we have plenty of successes here (James Dyson, Theo Paphitis, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson) as well as the many smaller ones noone knows about. Also, failure is relative. In the industry I work in, there are people that I know well who have exited on good terms, my main business makes a fraction of what they made, but I enjoy the freedom more and (to the best of my knowledge) so do the guys that work for me.

I do agree about the difference in the cost of failure though. Personally I blame Del Boy Trotter for a lot of that.

Actually, I didn't come up with my 'upside vs downside analysis' here on HN : it's how I've been explaining why I'm in the US to anyone who asks. I've had far more nods of understanding from the people back home (in the UK) than anywhere else.

More than anything it gives me hope to here that. I've been relying on last.fm to count as the defacto startup of choice for too long. I hope it all works out for you, whatever you're doing. If you need an upvote somewhere or a celebration of what you're trying to achieve, please send me an email.

Even treating the UK as homogeneous is silly - even within somewhere as small as Scotland there is a huge amount of difference in how people view entrepreneurship depending on which region you are in:

- Post-industrial Glasgow

- Finance and government based Edinburgh

- Oil oriented Aberdeen

- Farming/fishing/tourism of the Highlands

In fact the very first time I heard anyone talking about trying to get finance for a business was a school friend of mine when we were 20 - he was trying to raise enough money to buy his own fishing trawler.

I grew up in an environment in the North of Scotland where there were no large employers and a lot of small independent businesses - starting your own business wasn't seem as a big deal.

Of course the UK isn't homogeneous - there's obviously an enduring entrepreneurial spirit everywhere. My only point was that (as a social convention) people with aspirations behave differently there than they would in (say) New York.

But there is no single "there" - that's my point.

Point taken. Some parts of Europe have better corporate culture than others and Slovenia is probably not the best representative of the entire continent (although it's not the worst either). But you misunderstood me: I'm not saying that Europeans are not risk takers -- I know quite a few of them that are -- I'm merely saying that the corporate culture in Europe discourages risk taking far more than the corporate culture in the States, which is why there is no shortage of successful European entrepreneurs on the US market.

It's not at all representative!

Why do you believe that all Europeans have got the same corporate culture?

Firstly Western Europe is still nothing like ex-communist block countries. Hell, parts of Russia lies with Europe.

Then even looking at individual countries France != Germany != UK != Holland, etc.

We all have wildly different histories. Different labour laws. Different business laws. Different tax rates. Different GDPs. Different natural resources.

There's no common corporate culture as the business climate is so varied.

Perhaps the best example of this is Britain and France. Britain and France are separated by 23 miles of water. In France, egalité reigns supreme. Many places are union driven. The unions are all powerful. People aren't permitted to work more than 35 hours per week and get a large amount of holidays relative to their cousins 23 miles away.

Meanwhile, in the UK there's an opt out to allow people to work more than 40 hours a week, people get 25 days holiday on average and unions have little power in most cases, or act in ways that often damage peoples' jobs in others.

The differences between doing business in England and France are much more vast than the 23 miles that separate them. They're a product of France executing their aristocracy and the British not. A product of the French considering work 'travail' (toiling, or otherwise arduous activity) and the English not. And of course of the English being part of the industrial revolution early, meaning that the English could be more productive than everyone else with less resources, and of the French having to compete at a disadvantage. Add to that the other differences in French history and it's no wonder that many Brits (I wouldn't want to claim to speak for all as even we on a tiny island aren't a monoculture) generally feel closer to Anglophonic and former imperial countries than our European friends.

Please don't use English & British interchangeably.

Sorry for that. The reason I switched from British to English is because of the distance over the channel being 23 miles, not a suggestion that Britain is essentially England or that it's a monoculture. Please don't think otherwise.

> I'm merely saying that the corporate culture in Europe discourages risk taking far more than the corporate culture in the States

But do you really think that 2 anecdotes are enough to warrant that conclusion?

Not at all. The conclusion that US corporate culture is more risk-tolerant than European wasn't made by me. It's been talked about in media for years, especially lately. My anecdotes are hardly the only ones that argue in its favor. As a European, I'd honestly like to read anecdotes that prove the opposite.

As an Englishman, I'd love to see anecdotes that establish you as a European (and us all as such) instead of something that subverts your slovenian identity.

Don't get me wrong, I thnk slovenia is a wonderful country but I think you cheapen your point by suggesting that a man in ljubjana should have the same world view as a man in London or Berlin.

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