Looking into the linked data,[1] it looks like a lot of these "unicorns" are blockchain technology companies. I might be biased here as a shitcoin sceptic, but I would love to see in 10 years what happened to these "unicorns"
Kayak, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bloom Energy and Integra Telecom (Electric Lightwave) are still doing well, Groupon and Zynga are significantly diminished and Living Social, Gilt Group and Better Place are dead.
So the answer appears to be 50/50 and social commerce was a huge fad.
A billion dollars today and a billion 10 years ago are not the same thing. It's not just a question of inflation either; there is more money sloshing around in VC (or similar non-retail funding sources) than ever.
Look at other forms of dodgy fintech, like some hedge funds. There seems to be an infinite amount of money available to move money so you can move money.
I increasingly feel like a total sucker for trying to do useful work. I could get rich by moving money around and accomplishing nothing but here I am trying to actually create useful things.
I think what you meant to say is I'll be curious to see what happens to "America". We're behind the ball on crypto companies due to the regulatory environment. Here's hoping that changes but lots of crypto people are offshore at the moment.
Yes, there are shitcoins but there are real things being built as well.
Many so called "shitcoins" generate more revenue, get more transactions and offer more utility (loans, market makers etc) than your beloved bitcoin, so let's be humble.
Europe might not be one country, but in Europe, you have many very high level education systems and no restrictions on travel and work(within the EU). This leads to mind and culture share between some very bright people, European start ups are the companies I have worked with which had the most efficient and impressive work flows, coordination and motivation.
I think this is an advantage compared to the unified systems like China.
I can't speak for Chinese companies, but I have peeked around on job review sites to get some insights and what i have seen is....different.
I have also worked at some of the largest us companies, they are very good, but also a bit different.
All of them can lead to success, i don't think one is better than the other.
Though the fact that EU is a group of 27 different countries creates barrier to easy scaling. You need to have website in 20 something languages, customer service in those languages, and be knowledgable of cultural differences.
This is the reason many companies first scale nationally and then go to the USA (at least that's the story I heard a lot).
Edit: Also I forgot national law. Even though a lot of law is centralized on EU level, still every country has a national law different from neighbours
Just wanted to add national law to the list, when noticed your update. IMHO this is the biggest challenge: if you do your org and tech setup right, localizing websites and CS is relatively easy and can become a SOP, but adjusting the processes and even just understanding how you should work in new legal environment is a real problem (I have experience of scaling healthtech from Germany to 9 more EU countries in less than a year).
I don't think Europe has a problem with brains. But European governments seem to want to crush companies that begin to dominate the market, regardless of whether this dominance is based on a better product or anticompetitive practices.
It's kind of strange to compare companies strictly based on their valuation. Saudi Aramco valuation today is higher than that of Apple but these are very different companies and I wouldn't claim that one is better than the other.
It's also strange to compare two economies that have vastly different economic strategies, especially by measuring one of the areas where they diverge most strongly.
Are we comparing, country, population, size of region?
We often compare USA with China, but when it comes to european countries, it has to be EU?
This is an honest question, I couldn't care less about either region or gain anything financially or care about emotional internet points. I am not rooting for anyone, though I think predominantly western centric super powers is a bad idea.
But why this line of thinking and comparison, isn't it apple to oranges? Its a genuine question, despite being downvoted for whatever reason.
I feel it would be apples and oranges to compare (sub-)continent spanning multi-ethnic countries like the USA or China with individual EU countries. The point of the EU is to form one economical union. Sure there's still deficits in unification on other fronts, but economically the EU is pretty much one uniform bloc of comparable size.
There are so many other trading blocs out there, why not compare them? Eu itself has some of the largest economies of the world. It does seem almost unfair.
China's large size and huge population not necessarily an automatic recipe for success. As a matter of fact, other than USA, almost of all large countries with huge population are generally economic and quality of life failures.
On the top of my minds I can think of, Russia, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Mexico all doing pretty shitty job, relatively speaking.
I don’t think so. The EU is, as you say, an economic union and is considered the largest economy in the world (last time I checked, which has been awhile tbh.)
It wouldn’t make sense to compare individual European nations to China.
The UK is part of Europe - no democracy of voting system can change tectonic plates.
But I'm aware many transpose the two terms as the same. Either way - what is not known is how those ventures were funded and whilst a company may startup in EUrope, it don't mean all that financing came from within that domain.
Europe and other continents are not actually based on the tectonic plates. They are arbitrary based on historical and cultural reasons. Continents were determined prior to knowledge about tectonic plates.
The EEA, the Eurozone and the EU are all things that aren't equivalent to "Europe".
Great Britain was in Europe millions of years ago and will still be in Europe a million years from now. It doesn't matter whether the subject at hand is economy or geography. Some parts of the former Soviet union or Turkey could be debated whether they are in Europe and it could even be dependent on context, but great britain will never be outside europe even if Nigel Farage paddles for the rest of his life.
Why is having more unicorns a thing to brag about? Maybe China has fewer unicorns because there's a healthier startup ecosystem with more places for VC dollars to go.
I mean first of all "great weather and culture", debatable as that is, isn't diversity. Diversity =/= good. It means different. Again I'd debate that the states even has the best weather (what is the best weather anyway?), culture, pay (certainly not from many of the horror stories sometimes told on here, but I guess if your upper middle class theres no need to worry about that), entertainment and food, but that's just subjective.
There's also this idea that europe is just one big country, which it obviously isn't. It's 44 countries, all with very different cultures. I don't really know how you'd define culture, it seems to be very loosely measured, but one easy way of doing so is language, in which europe has 24 official languages, and the states has 1. Switzerland alone has 3 official languages.
I don't hate the states or anything, if you enjoy living there then good for you, but yeh, theres a difference between "I like the culture here" and "here is the worlds greatest culture"
I wanted to make a funny comment about how you missed German being in the same boat. But then I remembered that what the Swiss call German is... special
> but one easy way of doing so is language, in which europe has 24 official languages, and the states has 1.
The US has no official language at the federal level, but some states have official languages other than English, e.g. Spanish, Hawaiian or some other native language (Alaska has quite a few).
>where every city looks pretty much like the others.
If you're going to make a criticism of the US, this is easy to flip around - every city in Europe looks exactly like the other. A city centre with narrow streets and a central church or cathedral surrounded by blocks of flats. The specific architectural styles change but the idea is almost the same throughout.
Well, except for Paris, Berlin, Venice, Madrid, etc etc
"Has big streets" or "car dominant" isn't the monoculture of the US that people from Europe notice. It is the exact same chain of shops, restaurants, same style of clothes, same TV shows, same music, same brands of cars. If I go to a nearby city all this stuff is the same.
If I'm in Belgium and drive 3 hours I end up with different language, food, styles of dress, music. Apart from a few token multinationals the shops and restaurants are all different. Architecture is different. And the same story if I'm in Vienna, or Zurich, or Berlin, or Lisbon. Language, food, restaurants, shops, work culture, all different.
No. You have octagonal blocks of Barcelona, wide streets of Haussman's Paris and canals of Venice. And that's not even touching the postcommunist part of continent.
Sounds like you've never been. I think you're wrong on just about every point. Even if you like the California sunshine I'd still prefer weather in Mediterranean Europe any time.
No part of the world combines the economic strength of California with a similar generally agreeable weather. None.
Mediterranean Europe has a slew of economies teetering on the edge of collapse or ones that have been destroyed by centuries of economic strife. What use is good weather if you can't make a living there?
Personally I dont like LA sunshine every day of the year but agreed lots of people do and there are few places in the world with a climate like that. Yes there are a bunch of high paying jobs but with the current house prices and income taxes I'm not convinced much of the economic strength filters down to people.
Given Europe’s[0] GDP is slightly higher than that of China, I don’t think it really needs much explanation as to why. If anything, the previous state of affairs warranted an explanation.
[0] Continental Europe GDP $22.9 trillion vs. China $16.64 trillion (Wikipedia); this article appears to include the UK in “Europe”, so it isn’t just about the EU, which was ~= GDP to China before the UK left.
Context. Normally I don’t (I don’t know enough about China!), but when the context is “how many enconomic thingies does this group of people have?” I think comparing groups with roughly equal GDP is probably less wrong than comparing groups with roughly the same number of nations (or people).
But I’m neither an economist nor politically trained, so if someone who is either wants to (politely) tell me I’m grossly oversimplifying, I’ll listen.
Centuries of headstarts ? What we hear sometimes, China had 3000 years worth of knowledge and wisdom before Europe started barely organizing.
And China's epansion over the last 6000 years is way more spectacular than the short lived colonies of some european countries !
The EU isn't even a country yet while China had unified its warring kingdoms long ago...
China is not the thirld world country westerners like you think it is ! If we re behind the EU its by our own might, not their "headstart" :D
Headstart, smh, and what of the US, they have a headstart too? They barely started and are already telling us what to do - that says more abt us than them. Headstart...
>Centuries of headstarts ? What we hear sometimes, China had 3000 years worth of knowledge and wisdom before Europe started barely organizing.
Well, for most of those time, China was the most advanced economy on the planet. It dropped from the top spot around 1600 or so, and it took it several centuries to recover.
See, China didn't discover the Americas, plundered its gold and resources for centuries, and murdered millions in the process. Nor did it came to hold 2/3rds of the world as subjects in its colonies.
On the contrary, it was colonized itself, force to the whims of the British and so on.
20 of the 72 created unicorns in 2021 are located in the UK. That's about a quarter with 15% of the population. Which means that the UK is over-represented, but that's a strange definition of 'all' or implying the EU is not already competitive.
There is a bit of a card trick being played with VCs and their pet unicorns.
I can register a company with just 1 share, then issue another 1 billion shares at any time. If I then sell just on e these shares for a dollar, I am a unicorn post-money.
This folk is what they are doing. Nothing more (just the numbers of shares and amounts change a bit)
The value - I guess - is to bring enough credentials and big names to this dog-and-pony show to get people to suspend disbelief long enough to offload it.
But when western governments are printing mountains of cash that would make a Zimbabwean treasury official blush, expect more of this.
What is far ticker is a billion dollars of distributable post-tax profit.
[1] https://app.dealroom.co/unicorns/f/slug_locations/anyof_euro...