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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> I live in the EU! People raise millions and 10s of millions here for stuff that is nonsense

Is it purely private money? I've noticed a lot of nonsense European start-ups are basically consulting gigs with a public grant writer.

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Getting a grant isn't raising money from investors though. People assessing grant applications are looking for interesting, innovative (or not) ideas. They don't care about making a return. I would expect to see a wildly different set of projects getting grants than get VC money.

I am talking private money. Grants is a lot easier but are usually just tax breaks (you need to spend money first) so get vc money and then grants on top for the tax breaks.

How far does millions or 10’s of millions get you in the EU? In Silicon Valley… that’s not a lot.

It depends on the startup I guess, but for software/saas a few million seed gets you off and away: wages, bonuses etc are all a lot lower than what I see for sv. Especially if you hire in the south.

10 years ago the entry level SWE salary for FANG was about 160k USD.

Today, about 100K GBP or EUR are still "senior" SWE salaries at a lot of non-FANG tech companies around UK and Europe.

In that time, the currencies have also cratered against the USD.

The question is, which is it? Do engineers generate so much value that they should earn hundreds of thousands or are US engineers overpaid.

Given that most the FANGs generate over 1.5M per employee I'm inclined towards the former. Europe/UK is just poor. Our markets are smaller, our dreams are smaller and we settle for lower salaries while around us everything else gets more expensive, land healthcare education and energy.

Companies here might not be making fang money but they are underpaying. You have to push harder and people here tend not to do that here. Most I know value their free time above everything and so they want easy ok paying work, not millions while working their asses off. If they don’t appear in the office or take an ad hoc vacation they don’t want to be yelled at. Personally I have almost always made fang+ money as developer (since the early 90s) in Europe. I am good at what I do but I also have a big mouth and I mesh well with c levels; we become friends usually. Unfair for my colleagues but it’s not like don’t tell them to speak up and bluff; they don’t want to mostly because they think it encroaches on their freedom (not sure if it does; in my company it doesn’t; just less shares).

See how much more money you can raise from private investors in USA once you tell them you have a contract with the USA government.

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