One thing that confuses me, though - if having a strong safety net to fall back on is important to enable entrepreneurship, why does it seem like Europe is so bad at it?
Maybe the lack of VC to scale - a lot of money sloshing around in SF. Maybe there's less of an culture of thinking "my way is the best" that Americans have more than others[0], maybe the smaller cultural market (there are 350 million Americans, only 30 million Spaniards). Maybe could be Americans are more into Consumer Ethnocentrism and less likely to buy into foreign things than Europeans too (the number of American flags waving around in the states is shocking). I wouldn't expect to see "Designed in Finland" if I bought a nokia phone. The US market has always been far harder for europeans - even Brits - to crack than the other way round.
[0] https://infographic.tv/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Map-Who-th...
I think a lot of Americans may be driven to entrepreneurship because, short of the lottery, it may seem to them the only way to climb the ladder.
Countries where life is a little more ... comfortable? ... may have fewer people willing to roll the dice (so to speak).
This means that if you ask for investment in something like Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/YouTube/Reddit/whatever you're almost certain to be turned down by European investors, because they're seen as too risky compared to say, a shop saying office software to ad agencies. But these high risk businesses are also ones with a high pay off if they do well.
There's also the fact European investors seem to have a relatively 'stingy' standard when it comes to how much money is worth investing in a startup. While over there in the US it seems like unproven companies are getting tens of millions of dollars on a whim, over here it seems like £50-100K is seen as a 'reasonable' investment amount, with some offering even less than that.
That money is not gonna be enough to hire Google level software engineers, have all the fancy buildings and facilities that many young folks expect, pay for high end hosting platforms, pay for a massive marketing/ad campaign, etc.
So even if you did get funding, you'd likely be outcompeted by US based companies flush with cash and resources that have years of runway compared to your 6 months or so worth.
Although, I'm hoping to bootstrap something here in Europe for my next gig. Public healthcare, insanely cheap houses (compared to California) and cheaper devs should help with runways.