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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

I think the article forgets one reason why Scandinavian countries do well in IT start ups: Allmost all Scandinavians speak English quite well. Given that most new technology and research is communicated in English, a decent level of English is necessary to adapt new technology. This gives Scandinavians and Dutch entrepreneurs an edge compared to most other European entrepreneurs, except obviously the Irish and British entrepreneurs.

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Moreover, trying to study CS in a language other than English leads to lots of misinterpretations and misunderstandings.

English, fluent reading at least, is absolutely must have for a CS person.

There is a huge difference between, say, Indian guys being taught in English and Russian being taught in Russian.)

And, of course, never read any serious books, like TAOCP or SCIP in translation.) Master your English first and then enjoy non-distorted flow of author's thoughts in his own wording.

> This gives Scandinavians and Dutch entrepreneurs an edge compared to most other European entrepreneurs

how? the world's ranking of english proficiency is dominated by Europeans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index#2... I am pretty sure among the IT branch the scores are much higher although you don't need perfect language skills to understand technical concepts.

You do notice that all of the countries listed as "Very High Proficiency" are Scandinavian or Dutch, just like he said, right? And many of the continental European countries, like France, Italy, and Spain are listed at only "Moderate Proficiency."

While you don't need perfect language skills to understand technical concepts, not being at full proficiency can be a barrier. I know that when I help people out on StackOverflow, one of the main barriers to answering some people's questions is that they can't formulate it in English in a way that I can understand. Proficiency is a two-way thing; besides being able to read English, you need to be able to speak and write it well to fully interact with the technical community.

> You do notice that all of the countries listed as "Very High Proficiency" are Scandinavian or Dutch, just like he said, right?

You do notice they aren't recently startup-famous in any way, right?

You do need language skills for the marketing :)

A related factor is that it's very common for even the first iteration of a product to be in English, which means it can start to get international appeal. This is possible partly because even the domestic market is fairly open to English-language products/services, so you don't need to make something in Swedish in order to sell it to Swedish people.

It depends on your target audience. We did our app in english and it didn't catch on in Sweden before we translated it to Swedish.

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