People attribute differences in the enterpreneurial landscape between the US and European countries to cultural factors (aka some "abnormal" risk aversion) but consider the possibility the difference is actually the rational stance on the face of persistent realities.
First, there is the issue of the absence of scale. As a Briton once said (and Brexit famously demonstrated), there is no such thing as Europe. This is particularly true in the financial domain that the author knows well. Every crisis, whether economic, natural or purely political leads to fragmentation and retrenchement back to national borders. Terms such as banking union or capital markets union are the sorry markers of an ambition that was never fulfilled. Alas none of the European countries is big enough for the emerging planet scale economic forces that are being unleashed.
Secondly, most European countries are quite statist, the central government plays a very, ahem, central role in economic life. This is not necessarily without merit - a different discussion altogether, but it does imply that the success or failure of potentially disruptive private sector initiatives hinges on political connections and access.
Markets are now "de-globalizing" in real time but that is less relevant for startups. Any entity that is now a "global" multi-national had to grow into that status at some point in their lifecycle. That trajectory is much easier (depending on sector) if the starting point is within a larger country. There are multiple factors: easier access to capital, more human talent, larger customer bases, a single regulatory framework etc. etc.
These factors don't just act linearly, but in a combinatorial fashion that helps beat the genuinely low odds. Changing the world (which is what the formation of a major new enterprise effectively does) is not a trivial occurrence. Overcoming those obstacles is occasionally possible but it is very complex and costly. For the European economies the writing is on the wall.
In transactional financial markets "friends" is not the right word, but there is something to be said about more or less effective alignment of interests and that is purely a matter of design.
There is more than enough money sloshing around, it all boils down to designing contracts and suitable information exchanges between parties. So anybody thinking that the current system is sub-obtimal can try their hand at disrupting the VC system and making history :-)
An arrangement that better utilizes the majority of the entrepreneurial crowd's energy and time is likely to at least carve a niche, if not dominate. It may not even be that hard. The chasing of planet-scale returns (with the corresponding discounting of the rest 99.99%) is a recent phenomenon and may be just an aberration.
To carve any niche in a space like this, one needs extensive personal connections, money of their own to apply and put in the game, time to spend on it, and the belief that this is the best use of all of it.
It may well be that far better arrangements exist, but how would a slumdog or a small time farmer or a stay at home parent ever get the ball rolling? Who would play ball with them?
It would pretty much require that an existing VC or an empowered member of their ecosystem have the idea and see a path to it enriching themselves in order for them to spend time on it.
This is a major issue with pure market maximalism like the above: not everyone has agency within and access to every market, and no agent within a market would just let it change unless they personally stand to gain. Many potential solutions pass through empowerment or enrichment of different groups than those currently holding the reins, and this may mean those solutions are impossible to explore.
Goodwill is like dark matter; they have to account for value increases or decreases when doing double entry bookkeeping so they invented goodwill for that.
The trivial necessity of valuing the intangible of being well-liked by one’s customers and partners has nothing to do with positing definitionally unobservable mass.
The cost and effort and intellectual integrity burnt on linking that mass to bosonic super partners even after a six sigma result at CERN on scalar field excitation at 125 GeV was found exactly as everyone knew it would be without a squark in sight is very on brand for what passes as rigor around here these days.
I do not know who Jason lemkins is but he seems like a random small fry saying bullshit to gain some clout.
I have worked with bigger vc firms such as matrix partners and they genuinely care about you and want your startup to succeed if they are interested.
Trick is to make something which is genuinely cool and matches with the thesis and talk to vcs who are respectable.
Yc is a great help in this regard. They help you understand which vcs are respectable and which vcs you should treat like mushrooms: feed them shit and keep them in the dark.
This thinking links to how corporate debt has being valued theoretically, starting with the work of Merton [1], by looking at debt as an option with non-linear payoff. The borrower can put the busted assets to the lender.
In practice there are countless important complications that make a naive option theoretic analysis very incomplete, e.g., getting into debt makes a lot of sense if you can count on a bailout if things go pear shaped.
Constraints (to the degree they are not debilitating) can trigger creativity, unlock efficiency and sharpen problem solving skills.
Abundance is better than scarcity but it can lead to bloat and waste. With strong discipline and a value system that promotes lean approaches one might be able to have the best of the two worlds.
the worse is better vs The Right Thing™ dichotomy encompasses more than availability of resources. It's perfectionism vs "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" 80/20 expediency
An interesting question is how much of ancient greek music might be still with us (without being explicitly identified as such).
With the collapse of the ancient world and the spread of Christianity in the Eastern Med various elements of the Grecoroman civilization were actively supressed, but evidently not all (e.g. the language survived and evolved).
Some terminology around musical modes that developed in medieval Europe is attributed to ancient Greece but its not clear how close the musical connection between these two worlds.
On the other hand, Byzantine chant and a rich collection of folk musics are still practiced in the broader region and may be echoes of that earlier musical universe.
Something that will surely play a role in the continuation of C++ as a key mainstream language is the degree to which is can selectively adopt features that made newer languages more attractive. Its not so much about deep design features or any of the (ultimately subjective) preferences for programming paradigms, but more the usability and convenience of developing good stuff, both as individuals and in teams, small and large.
If you think about the diverse domains where C++ has deep roots, from games development (check out Godot) to live coding (check out Supercollider) to scientific computing (vast universe, check out CERN's ROOT) and everything in-between (including machine learning and finance mentioned in the post), this particular "game" is really for C++ to lose.
It may eventually fade (one of the factors is that C++ users and communities are extremely dispersed, there are few visible champions). But it won't be a quick thing.
Maybe its all relative (i.e., versus what other central banks have done in response to the same shocks).
In any case the post-pandemic interest rate hikes are recent. There seems to be a much longer term (decades long) dollar strengthening pattern that is not really touched upon in the article.
Indeed the definition is somewhat of an extrapolation. Product complexity defined in this way probably misses on intricate supply chain dependencies too. E.g., EUV lithography is essential for modern chips, but it is produced by ASML in NL - which is otherwise in steady economic complexity decline for decades (from rank 15 in 1995 to rank 26 in 2021). Small country specialization might not be normalized adequately.
Eyeballing the rankings the methodology is probably biased towards manufacturing materials supply chain complexity rather than "knowledge economy" complexity.
Nevertheless its probably directionally correct at more aggregate levels.
Personal computing has stagnated for such a long time, it creates substantial uncertainty about what state it might evolve to if and when the next step actually happens.
In this respect local LLM's are simply the tip of the iceberg, pointing out the vast amount of personal information processing that is available in principle but does not actually happen.
One could argue that personal computing (desktop) software piracy lead to web-based SaaS subscription licensing. In theory, mobile app stores solved device software piracy, at the cost of high distribution fees, policy restrictions and telemetry.
Thanks to Linux being used at scale in Android and WSL, it's now maintained and capable on the desktop, as a hypothetical foundation for personal computing innovation. But even there, native GUI toolkits took a backseat to web and CLI. Remember Chandler? http://www.osafoundation.org/
Investors poured small fortunes into cauldrons of smart devices, wearables and AR/VR, with little to show as nascent ecosystems failed to achieve escape velocity, due to closed hardware and software that forestalled the experimentation which birthed personal computing.
Apple Silicon has reinvigorated walled laptops. Hopefully next month's derivative Qualcomm SoC from PC OEMs can offer good price/performance/watt for Apple-competitive-yet-open Arm laptops and tablets that can run any Linux distro, with retail SSDs and RAM, plus AI silicon roadmap.
A modular Framework Arm laptop would be a good start to rebooting PC innovation.
How does slightly improved laptop hardware relate to re-invigorating desktop software? Surely desktop computing has stagnated because most users are primarily or exclusively mobile users.
In Mac land Apple has been progressively dumbing down their interfaces, in Windows land Microsoft is more focused on extracting maximum value from their users than trying to meaningfully improve their platform. In Linux land there are some interesting things happening with Nix/Guix around declarative system configurations, and around Fedora with its layered images+Flatpak distros for making systems more reliable, and System76 may be doing something novel interface-wise with Cosmic marrying powerful tiling/tabbing window layouts with intuitive controls and the niceties of an all-in-one desktop environment. From my perspective desktop computing is definitely advancing, but only for hobbyists, not for mainstream desktop operating systems.
> How does slightly improved laptop hardware relate to re-invigorating desktop software?
If Arm SystemReady laptops with good performance/watt have an open security foundation (declarative, immutable OS at EL2) to support multiple competing "app store" equivalents on Linux, the resulting revenue and competitive market can reward innovative desktop software - open, closed or hybrid. Without an Apple tax on storage and memory, funds can be redirected to a competitive market of smaller ISVs.
> the resulting revenue and competitive market can reward innovative desktop software - open, closed or hybrid.
Outside of Steam, not a single software distributor (including Canonical) has been able to do this. Linux succeeds in spite of everything you mentioned and none of it would particularly enable the sort of experience you're describing.
Unfortunately so far Qualcomm was hard at work avoiding making an open platform ARM-based laptop/tablet - to the point of squeezing around MS rules on that through special drivers etc to make Windows think it's dealing with EFI-compliant hardware.
The main issue is that what's upstreamed is essentially drivers for the SoCs - but the firmware of Qualcomm-powered laptops tends to be not fully compliant.
So it's easy to make a device powered by one when you control how linux is booted on it, but for whatever reason things like EFI NVRAM interface on windows qualcomm powered laptops was done non-standard and the only reason windows works is because there are drivers shipped which work around it - and I seriously doubt its intended by Microsoft, because Microsoft actually benefits from devices following their official, documented, hardware-interface specs - it makes for easy upgrades, reinstalls, etc. etc.
First, there is the issue of the absence of scale. As a Briton once said (and Brexit famously demonstrated), there is no such thing as Europe. This is particularly true in the financial domain that the author knows well. Every crisis, whether economic, natural or purely political leads to fragmentation and retrenchement back to national borders. Terms such as banking union or capital markets union are the sorry markers of an ambition that was never fulfilled. Alas none of the European countries is big enough for the emerging planet scale economic forces that are being unleashed.
Secondly, most European countries are quite statist, the central government plays a very, ahem, central role in economic life. This is not necessarily without merit - a different discussion altogether, but it does imply that the success or failure of potentially disruptive private sector initiatives hinges on political connections and access.
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