Certainly, it helps the architect to know the constraints of concrete and bricks, but you don’t really have to know every level of down to the chemistry.
Sure there are. Both Mollie and Adyen are API-first. Mollie developer experience has always been on par with Stripe in my experience. And they existed 6 years earlier.
People will blame the EU’s nightmarish fragmentation and regulatory headaches (all true)…but ultimately all factors ladder up to one thing: the availability of risk capital to invest in new ventures.
When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company.
Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in.
Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance.
If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
Ireland is also a tech hub, although those facts probably don't have any bearing on each other.
Irelands success comes entirely from low corporation tax, EU infrastructure funding, investment in workforce education, and the fact that we speak English. This combination of factors resulted in a massive tech boom, with lots of American tech firms setting up in Dublin, mostly for tax reasons but ultimately creating an actual tech industry where development happens.
The fact that stripe exists at all is because the Collision brothers grew up in and around that industry, with Patrick doing coding lessons in university of Limerick which had a massive computer science dept built to feed that industry. Without that he might not have been in tech at all. But looking at the history, his first payments company was turned down funding by Enterprise Ireland, sending him abroad where a Canadian company bought it and gave him the footing and confidence to go on to found Stripe, which had lots of SV investment. sadly I don't think that would have been forthcoming here.
It's a textbook case of the European tech industry problem, which I'm sure is mirrored in other EU countries (regardless of if they were in the wars or not). We invest heavily in education and workforce and encourage tech to be here, but we won't take the risk of investing in it. It's all European developers working hard for American firms, or small European firms trying to compete.
Maybe that's about to change with EU governments wanting to reduce reliance on American fimrs, like swapping Stripe for Adyen. There might finally be money to go with the talent. Maybe the next Collison will found their firm here
> Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
The Spanish Civil War was arguably just a proxy opening of WW2 between the USSR and Germany. Doesn’t change your point, just came to mind while reading your comment.
Very true, I preemptively assumed someone would reply 'What about Spain?' but then whether you consider the civil war part of WW2 or not is irrelevant given it had the same effect.
Ultimately, a company like Stripe sits on top of a fragile patchwork of societal/technological abstractions that are a byproduct of generations of compounded wealth.
Humans battling in the marketplace builds this compounded value, humans battling in warfare destroys it and makes you start from zero.
Just as the industrial revolution started decades before humans began leaving the farm en masse, the digital revolution started decades before anyone had a personal computer on their desk.
Europe was busy rebuilding firebombed cities and industrial capacity, while Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one). This early lead compounded. Moral of story: don't get in wars on your soil.
> Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one)
The "on your own soil part" is even more complex than this implies. America spent decades waging wars across the world to reduce the chance that Russia could do the same.
EU has plenty of VC, maybe not enough to sustain crazy rounds rounds like those we see often in the US, but capital is not the biggest blocker to founding your company in Europe, law is.
US has a very advanced corporate law, which is crucial in protecting investors, founders, employees and shareholders.
In Italy and most of Europe, if I create a startup, there is *no* legal way to give people stock options. I am bound to give it upfront, or the employees are bound to believe they will receive some. Even a legal contract signed at a notary cannot enforce stock options mechanisms 100%.
And this is a problem also for raising equity by the way. There's no C-Corp equivalent for low capitalized companies (e.g. any young startup) and emitting shares at small scale is borderline, as is cancelling shares after a buy back (which is why they are uncommon in European stock markets, it's feasible but very complicated).
This has been the killer of a startup of some friends of mine. They split a company in 3 and then one of the 3 left after some months and retained all of the equity and benefits without doing nothing and effectively held the company hostage for years pretending a huge exit. They had troubles raising equity because of him as well.
On top of that, in Italy, worker's protection is such that if you hire the wrong person and that person stops working after the brief period you can cancel the contract (generally 3 months) it's your problem and it's up to you to prove you had a valid cause. Even when you have and provide carrots for your employees and coworkers, there's no stick. You're at the mercy of lucking into the right people.
And, on top of that, you have taxes. Just to make an example. In Italy, it costs a business 70k euros to give 30k net to an employee. How am I supposed to compete for international talent if, even if I had the money to pay them very well and compete with higher cost of living countries, I then get hit by a truck of taxes? And that's not even mentioning corporate taxes.
And, bureaucracy is another issue. Let that sink in: it's easier for me in Italy to create a C-Corp in Delaware than create a basic ltd in my own country. And that bureaucracy scales at every level of your operations.
And, last but not least, the EU is still a fragmented market where regulations change dramatically as you cross borders. Scaling in the EU is hard in virtually every business, the unified market is just not there.
But every country and government will repeat populist propaganda that "we do our own way and protect only our interest, we won't delegate to Bruxelles".
UK is the only feasible place in Europe to make a startup, but even UK does not have as strong and mature corporate law as US does.
Pre Trump, if I had to found a company I would've just went with a Delaware C-Corp, even if I didn't need venture capital, let alone if I did.
Nowadays being a US company is increasingly risky, so I would probably look at Malta or UK.
> If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
And in absolute terms, the UK has the #1 number of unicorns in Europe, 4th globally.
It’s the whole system. It takes many characteristics for something to happen in a specific manner.
Even the global empire of the USA extracting competent people from all over the globe, depriving the source countries of that talent, is one of the characteristics of this particular system. It is a double edged sword, in different ways, but one of those is that it not only deprives the vassal territories of the empire of its most competent people, it also undermines and sabotages the competent people of the empires own people because it’s easier, faster, more profitable. In many ways it’s a similar voracious and parasitic mindset of private equity using leveraged buyout type methods to extract everything and give/provide nothing, a parasitism.
So the founders are Irish, but the Irish or even European system was probably not ready to super something like Stripe for all the apparent and obscure reasons, and America was a good host for it for many apparent and obscure reasons all the same.
But that’s what this “American Empire” relies on in many ways, both extracting talent and capable “human resources” from its vassals and at the same time suppress its own people internally.
It’s why even all these years after slavery and continued “immigration” narrative that did the same to provide profits and support of a decadent lifestyle to the ruling class, we still import brown people in a different way for the same reason, while we also still import competent Europeans around the “immigration” propaganda story of the type that led to two Irish brother “immigrants” founding Stripe and not doing so in Europe.
It’s one of those things narcissistic systems are really good at doing, making you support it even against your own best interests, and then aggressively supporting and defending it doing so; usually because of some emotional delusion or a compromising benefit. For example, how could someone aspiring to achieve something like the Stripe protests not support “immigration” when they have dollars in their eyes? It’s not a coincidence that there is only an emoji with $ in its eyes, not any other currency .
And that’s only one tiny aspect of what you asked about. You have to free yourself of the narcissistic system that is Americas primary source of power if you want to change that or even understand it. It’s a conundrum, understanding enough and then being able to free oneself of the narcissistic system, all while the narcissistic system/people will try to lure you back into the narcissistic system they use to dominate people. One of the hardest aspects of that is being able to say “no” to one of the most powerful forces of a narcissistic system, flattery and facilitation.
Don’t you smart, good, wonderful, intelligent, saintly… far better than Americans… immigrants not also want to come to America to empower and enrich the American ruling class and thereby undermine and deprive your own societies and cultures??? Well come on in, America is open for business to enrich the American ruling class and expand its global empire with your help!!! Uncle Empire needs you!
Quite to the contrary: all a company is (at least as originally conceptualised) is the formalisation of a group of people, usually working together towards a shared goal. It’s in the name - just like you have a troupe of actors, you may have a company of engineers and accountants (though to keep in the vein of live stage production, you also have a theatre company).
This is why we tend to use collective pronouns when referring to a company - Meta just announced that theyare planing share dilution (though to weaken my own case, one can also use singular nouns, likely due to the increased modern perception of a company as a single entity due to the increased anonymity afforded by the internet)
This is why I love Apple's Hide My Email. I use it ALL the time and the unsubscribe button is always there. It's not the most polished interface, but it works perfectly.
Also, for any subscription for which I don't use HME, I will immediately "mark as spam" any minimally-spammy email I get. The ones described in the article would be insta-marked due to the lack of Unsubscribe button.
I’m not sure why you think protectionism (by the local government) can’t kill an industry. It happened to American steel as well: the American steel industry was “protected” while foreign steel companies innovated their production processes.
The timeline goes like this:
1. Government gets pressured by industry to protect domestic industry from outside competition
2. Domestic industry stagnates as it has no reason to make competitive products
3. Time passes, quality/value gulf becomes so large that it becomes impossible to catch up to competition. It becomes impossible to export your goods and even domestic customers look elsewhere.
If the USA dropped tariffs and bans against Chinese car companies, American car companies would need to improve rapidly to survive. Instead, they’re selling us $50,000 decade old dinosaur designs like the Chrysler Pacifica.
This literally already happened to them with Japanese cars. And let me tell you, you don’t want to drive a Chevrolet from before Honda and Toyota sold cars in the United States.
Not protectionism related, but look at the MacBook Neo competitors shown off by Dell and HP at Computex. Competition drives innovation and cost reduction for consumers. Apple forced HP and Dell to make an affordable aluminum chassis computer for the masses and consumers are the winner in the situation.
It's also said to be one of the ironic long term impacts of the Jones Act (of 1920) in the US. The Jones Act among other things requires all US flagged ships at sea to be manufactured in the US in a hope to protect US manufacturing of ships, but instead in practice just became that most non-military ships just aren't officially flagged as US ships ever. For instance there's generally only one or two US flagged cruise ships in existence in a given year, they get US flagged through manufacturing loopholes (primarily constructed where other cruise ships are, but with enough "finishing touches" in the US to count as US manufactured), are smaller than the average cruise ship, and mostly only exist for Hawaiian island hopping cruises. (This is due to another quirk in the Jones Act that ships traveling directly between two US ports need to be US flagged. Most cruises can easily stop at a non-US port in between US ports, such as various Canadian, Mexican, and many Caribbean island ports, but from Hawaii the next non-US ports can be quite a bit more travel time and traveling to Tahiti and back just to see two different Hawaiian islands can be a bit much.)
Since the closure of Jeffboat in 2018 (among others), there's no non-military ship manufacturers in the US for anything even resembling cruise ship size (and even before that manufacturers like Jeffboat were mostly only making cargo barges) and the US military contractors have basically shrunk to a duopoly. Probably not the 100+ years later expectations of the Jones Act authors.
Correct, protectionism still saved the industry for years, it did its job perfectly.
Look at the car makers in Europe, they had decades to produce affordable electric cars, even lawmakers pushed their own population to buy electric cars with timelines and incentives, and they still failed miserably. How?
Tariffs are a last-ditch effort to buy more time. If you fail to use this time effectively, you will close shop. If you don't have tariffs, you close shop today.
Europe sells gasoline shitboxes for €30K when China could easily sell EVs for €20K, Europe (and the US) already lost.
> protectionism still saved the industry for years, it did its job perfectly.
This is under an assumption that the alternative would have been eradication of the industry, as in, “if we don’t protect the industry it will go out of business.” In reality, leading an industry to be more competitive is a lot better than protecting them from outside competition in the long term.
What was the economic value of protecting US steel for half a lifetime and then letting it turn into a dead industry? Wouldn’t it have been better for that protectionism to be more in the form of encouraging competition so that US steel companies were still thriving today? If the end result is going to be a dead industry why invest in protectionism at all?
It’s funny that you’re talking a bunch of smack about European electric cars without looking up sales numbers. The Volkswagen group EVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The top selling EV in Europe is a Skoda. VW and BMW are the top two EV companies globally besides Tesla and 4 Chinese brands.
and it's not just the end product, it's the process. China has built almost entirely automated car factories. They're already 10+ years ahead of what's happening in the US/Europe.
I'm occasionally offline outside planes and the amount of times I pull out my phone to "google something really quick" is high.
You can already disallow apps without an MDM, but I'm curious what else you can do with it. I generally uninstall apps like Instagram so it takes a minute to even download it again, but it gives me a way to download it, post something and delete it once a week or so.
I found an incredibly simple solution for this. Screen time in iOS can block specific websites and apps installed on your device.
Set harmless time limits - 5 min for instagram. 2 mins for Reddit.com etc.
Ask your spouse or a friend you trust to set screen time passcode. You can’t bypass it and you’re not going cold turkey either or losing an important utility like Safari.
Doom scroll all you want in 2 mins then it’s locked for the day.
I'm so addicted I'd find a way around. It's incredible how many times I type x[enter] in my browser even if I'm met with a login screen. Being logged out stops me from mindlessly scrolling, but won't stop me from going on auto-pilot and opening X three times in a row.
I thought so too, but I went in with the mentality that most things I just quickly look up are probably not all that important and nothing of value would be lost if I couldn’t do that anymore. The few things for which that isn’t true can probably wait until I am sitting in front of a computer.
That part honestly worked out pretty great. The first few days were excruciatingly boring, but I quickly adjusted and learned to spend more time with my thoughts.
I ended up reinstalling a browser because there were too many establishments that expected me to have a phone with a browser.
With mdm you can really control the phone top to bottom. Whitelist domains, global http proxy, allowed Wi-Fi connections, fully disable cameras, airdrop, the list goes on.
Most of it isn’t super interesting to manage doomscrolling habits.
What drew me to it is that you can’t change the setup without connecting to the Mac, a solution I find much more comfortable than having a friend type in a pin, as well as easily restricting domains and apps including system apps.
For example something I still do is disabling all mail clients including the system one. I don’t need email on my phone. It’s an inherently asynchronous communication medium and it can definitely wait until I’m home.
Only the highest and lowest level jobs are available. Someone needs to report to shareholders and plan. If a PM can just write tickets and they get done, then you just need one PM.
Maybe this isn't practical today, but in 2, 5, 10 years? I still have to work 30-40 years before I retire, what do I do?
One argument may be that ownership is the last role for a human in a business. The firm exists to show ownership of an AI and provides a mechanism for managing its proceeds.
It helps to understand the constraints of a medium, but you really don't need to know every level down to the electrons moving through the silicon.
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