alt.hn

5/19/2025 at 4:05:52 PM

European Investment Bank to inject €70B in European tech

 https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/european-investment-bank-to-inject-70-billion-in-european-tech

by saubeidl

5/19/2025 at 7:03:50 PM

There is a lot of discussion here trashing EU programs for startups and not a lot of specific details, which is disappointing. I will try to provide a more substantive critique.

My personal experience, having been involved with many startups in both the EU and US, is that EU government funding is completely useless for almost all startups. Why? First of all, you have to be part of the existing networks. If your business does not have university affiliations with people that get existing grants, or connections to EU bureaucracy, then you can forget about getting a dime. Then there is the risk aspect: if you are doing anything even remotely novel, or with any amount of risk, forget about it. This is not just my opinion, Mario Draghi, previous president of the ECB and Italian PM, said that the EU does not take enough risk to produce real innovation. And finally there's the timelines: from researching funding to cash in your bank account is always measured in years.

So, my expectation is that these funds will be distributed to members of the bureaucratic class and their network, for low-risk, low-reward projects, on a timescale too slow for most startups. I hope to be proven wrong, but the results of previous decades of EU funding programs do not make me optimistic.

by owenversteeg

5/19/2025 at 9:23:10 PM

Wow it’s so refreshing to know that other people can see this.

There is simply not enough private capital investment in Europe. The public money is inevitably passed through academic hands or other public sector bureaucrats. And it is simply an ineffective way to allocate capital. The money should be returned to private hands where it belongs and those individuals should be the ones to decide how to invest their own capital.

Why do so few Europeans get this? It’s like they just can’t stand the idea of a wealthy person investing their own money.

by loxodrome

5/19/2025 at 10:39:06 PM

Funny enough, I don't actually think the money is quite the problem that people think it is.

Look at the early days of YC. Single digit millions a year was enough to stimulate the growth of a whole ecosystem of startups! Some startups are inherently capital-intensive but most don't need that much money to get to the point of basic viability. There are plenty of private individuals in Europe who could support a $10M a year incubator by themselves, not to mention the many institutions that could do this. And yet... there is no European YC and there never was.

I think it's cultural. Go talk to the top students at the top universities in the US and Europe and you will notice plenty of talent on both sides of the Atlantic - yet far different levels of ambition. Now run an experiment; pay ten of those students a hundred EUR/USD to tell everyone that they're dropping out and starting a startup. Watch the parents' reaction. Watch the professors' reaction. Watch the reaction from their doctor, their baker, their crush, their garbageman.

You already know the result, of course, it's obvious. That's your problem; and by comparison, the money hardly matters.

by owenversteeg

5/19/2025 at 11:30:38 PM

> I think it's cultural.

Oh yes. Being a failed entrepreneur is a stigma. Being a very successful entrepreneur is a stigma too. Only being a struggling or moderately successful entrepreneur is acceptable.

by Mofpofjis

5/20/2025 at 9:16:34 AM

But if you look to the Hofstede's Six Cultural Dimensions, you can see that European cultures are geared toward Long-Term Orientation (compared to the Short-Term from USA). In long-term thinking, why can you not wait two years before dropping out of university and start a startup afterwards?

Do you believe short-term thinking is essential for successful startups?

by whazor

5/21/2025 at 6:10:56 AM

> why can you not wait two years before dropping out of university and start a startup afterwards?

because someone else over in the USA dropped out two years earlier than you to do this very same startup, and thus they get a head start.

Unless your novel idea is so completely novel, that nobody else but you could've done it. Most ideas are not this novel, and first mover advantage is real.

Not to mention that to make long term work out, the short term must also work out. It's a stair case - each short term period adds up and turns into long term. It is almost impossible to have a long term plan work out, if the short term is so unsuccessful that you need more funding every year.

by chii

5/21/2025 at 1:09:34 PM

> two years earlier than you to do this very same startup, and thus they get a head start.

So work on the next idea?

by maest

5/20/2025 at 6:03:32 PM

YC became valuable because of the ecosystem. YC enables so many varieties of exit options and inherently lowers the risk for the investors across various stages in the lifecycle of the startup company. If the only options are such that the companies have to become profitable in isolation or go IPO, starved off private capital otherwise then the risk is much higher. That’s why it may very well be impossible to create another YC that’s successful., unless you can replicate the entire ecosystem along with it.

by crznthndr

5/19/2025 at 11:27:55 PM

The "pioneer spirit" is so core to the American identity and hard to replicate in Europe

Americans just have a borderline delusional self-belief that other cultures really have a hard time matching

The Gulf Arabs are another group with a similar mentality but they don't have the population, freedom or education (yet) to do the same things

by bobxmax

5/20/2025 at 5:07:14 AM

> The Gulf Arabs are another group with a similar mentality but they don't have the population, freedom or education (yet) to do the same things

Correction, the Gulf Arabs don't. Their autocratic leadership is though. A frequent point of contention between government and public is the private sector - the government wants them all to join the private sector and even provides locals with seed funding for most kinds of businesses. But the locals are rather risk averse and would rather stay in the cushy public sector. The few who are entrepreneurial tend to be extremely entrepreneurial though, and they have a lot of the risk-enabling capital structure in place in Abu Dhabi and Dubai

by fakedang

5/20/2025 at 12:21:05 PM

Yes you're right. The broader population doesn't have that mentality and are, in fact, I would say on average quite lazy. It's a certain group among the elite (especially those foreign educated) who seem to really want to push the needle.

by bobxmax

5/20/2025 at 1:04:06 AM

>The "pioneer spirit" is so core to the American identity and hard to replicate in Europe

Consider that the European frontier is either

- west: Americas (already done)

- south: Africa (not gonna happen again)

- north/east: drang nach osten (again, not to be repeated)

- up / down? Perhaps Europe needs to focus on space and mining tech?

Russia has a frontier, and they are pretty strong in engineering, but I doubt that a SV style ecosystem is likely to form, given the… ahem… unique cultural aspects.

All said, I disagree that a frontier experience is necessary: the UK, Germany and Austria-Hungary were massive industrial modernizers while the US was still going through its westward colonization.

Is tech an exceptional field, or just the current SotA in industrial development?

by mikrl

5/20/2025 at 8:58:58 AM

There's different frontiers. Good farmland used to be the big thing. And trade routes, like natural harbors or navigable rivers. So in many parts of the world, most of the best places were already taken and the "frontier" was worse land. But not so in Americas, because there was available land for reasons. You could have "fertile frontier".

Over time when farming technology improved, people could live self-sufficiently in worse places. Transportation technology changed as well. Railways, highways. And now remote working and data centers. So there have been frontiers also in the old world in that sense. The king of Sweden in the 1500s declared some eastern frontier areas as tax free for some time, as he wanted people to settle there to control those areas (in accords, some of it might have been Russia...). Many places have waxed and waned over the centuries. When Estonia gained independence for the second time, some Finnish farmers went there as there was excellent farmland that was very underutilized.

With modern knowledge you could even build up a great place to live almost anywhere. Good policies and cheap energy. Maybe fresh water is the hardest physical requirement.

by Gravityloss

5/20/2025 at 3:13:12 AM

When it comes to tech startup capital, its not America its Silicon Valley and nobody else. Sure there are deals closing in other regions but the structure isnt the same.

Silicon Beach/Alley/Gulf/Islands within America cannot replicate it either

Without a culture of paying it forward as a reckless angel investor sometimes dressed up as a fund, already within the people that made it, none of these ecosystems get off the ground

Notably, Silicon Valley’s earliest winners were from a government funded initiative

by yieldcrv

5/19/2025 at 11:33:35 PM

> The public money is inevitably passed through [...] public sector bureaucrats

I'd phrase it a bit differently -- local (country) regulations, taxes and fees stifle startups in the crib.

by Mofpofjis

5/19/2025 at 9:26:55 PM

Instead of giving it all to a few people to spend buying real estate and mineral rights, you could tell the funding agencies that they're allowed to take risks, or give it to people's retirement accounts and let companies seek public investment.

by whatshisface

5/19/2025 at 10:07:41 PM

> The money should be returned to private hands where it belongs and those individuals should be the ones to decide how to invest their own capital

This is not a meaningful statement

‘Returning money in private hands’ does not result in more startup investment, it’s not in the culture to do this.

The money will be put into real estate, bonds, or whatever.

Look at London - it has as much wealth as NewYork or LA but all the money just piles up in real estate or Fintech.

But outside those niches? Good luck getting a farm-tech startup funded, no-one will take a punt.

So it falls to the government to try and kickstart something. As flawed as it may be.

Then they put together a competition for funding that basically feels like a school exam

by ClumsyPilot

5/21/2025 at 6:15:43 AM

> So it falls to the government to try and kickstart something.

why should it fall to the gov't? They're one of the worst funders of startups imho.

In these scenarios, the gov't isn't funding the business via equity, but grants - aka free money. This makes all the wrong incentives. Taxpayers don't feel the loss (not truly, like a private investor would), if the startup fails.

by chii

5/19/2025 at 11:40:50 PM

> Good luck getting a farm-tech startup funded, no-one will take a punt.

There are so, so many examples of British agtech companies getting funded:

https://www.lettusgrow.com/blog/2020/1/9/press-release-uk-ag...

https://edinburgh-innovations.ed.ac.uk/news/roslin-technolog...

https://fischerfarms.co.uk/fischer-farms-secures-26m-funding...

https://tropic.bio/tropic-biosciences-raises-28-5-million-se...

by rowanajmarshall

5/20/2025 at 12:09:16 AM

That's what I am saying - look at the size of deals in UK fintech - Revolut, $577 million, Monzo $374 million, checkout.com $333 million

Uber's Series C was $361M, that's the kind of money you need to put a company on the global map.

by ClumsyPilot

5/20/2025 at 12:33:13 AM

Then you should also look at Wayve (self-driving cars, $1 billion Series C), Lighthouse (travel and rental data, $370 million Series C), Highview Power (novel energy storage, £300 million). Lots more too. I won't deny that the UK specialises in fintech, but there's a lot more going on than that.

by rowanajmarshall

5/19/2025 at 10:16:28 PM

Bullshit. All the big VC firms in the USA are funded by private investors (rich people). They fund risky tech startups because big, fast gains are possible and the marginal capital gains tax rate is 20%. In the UK it's 39%! But 24% for residential property, hence the focus on real-estate that you mention.

Tax less, and prosperity follows!

by loxodrome

5/19/2025 at 11:06:14 PM

> All the big VC firms in the USA are funded by private investors (rich people)

They are also funded by large public investors like pension funds (American and European) and sovereign wealth funds.

There is just a lot of capital sloshing around in the US, and it's fairly easy to start a firm here. The same isn't true in much of the EU.

by alephnerd

5/20/2025 at 8:58:03 AM

The funny part about this is that lots of the capital comes from European savers.

by disgruntledphd2

5/20/2025 at 8:56:55 AM

This is incorrect, except possibly at pre seed levels. Most of the money for VC comes from pension funds and insurance companies.

by disgruntledphd2

5/19/2025 at 11:06:07 PM

Prosperity for whom?

by michaelteter

5/19/2025 at 11:07:05 PM

The HDI of European states is on par with that of the United States [0].

The US has issues, but using American issues as an excuse to ignore European issues (which in reality are a result of soverignity tussles) is ridiculous.

[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

by alephnerd

5/19/2025 at 11:29:59 PM

The US is the place to be for ambitious and highly talented people

For average/unambitious or unfortunate/poor people, places like Europe or Canada are much better standard of living

by bobxmax

5/19/2025 at 11:35:52 PM

I've lived in Canada as a kid and have family in Europe - at a macro level the differences in QoL aren't that significant, as HDI (an aggregate benchmark of developmental indicators) highlights.

I guess the question becomes, which "Europe" and which "America" are you comparing. And even then, developmentally, the US isn't much different than Western or Northern Europe.

> For average/unambitious or unfortunate/poor people

I mean, youth and normal unemployment remains significantly higher in much of the Europe compared to the US [0][1] and median income after tax remains roughly on par [2], even factoring for purchasing power parity [3].

As a whole, it appears that the US is roughly on par with much of it's peers in Western and Northern Europe, and American problems appear to be overreported and European ones underreported

I personally think there is a lot of glamorization of Europe because more Americans visit Western and Northern Europe as tourists than the other way around, and attribute their tourism experience as that of a normal European, which is an unrealistic assumption.

And it's not like ambitious risk takers don't exist in Europe - look at the startup and dev scene in Sweden, Czechia, Romania, and Poland. It's clearly an institutional problem.

[0] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/youth-unemploym...

[1] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/unemployment-ra...

[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-l...

[3] - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPEX@WEO/USA

by alephnerd

5/20/2025 at 12:09:07 AM

These places are so large and diverse it doesn't make much sense comparing them. You really want to be comparing many-to-many American states to European countries. You can't generalize about "The USA" quality of life. Massachusetts is going to be vastly different from Mississippi in terms of basically every quality of life attribute you can possibly measure. I'm not from Europe, but I bet the same is true country-to-country there.

by ryandrake

5/20/2025 at 4:07:19 PM

This is a good point. People always point to places like Sweden yet conveniently ignore the Bulgarias. In fact, most EU countries wouldn't even be considered a first world country.

by bobxmax

5/20/2025 at 12:19:04 PM

I don't disagree. I also hate playing this card but there's a racialized element to it... snobs on Reddit and HN love to glamorize Nordic countries in particular, despite being tiny, racially homogenous countries with their own bucketload of problems.

In my opinion the only real issue the US has is healthcare. In all other ways even for middle class people it's better. People think Canada is some socialized heaven... yet home ownership is MUCH more realistic in say Michigan than it is just across the border in Ontario.

by bobxmax

5/19/2025 at 9:38:00 PM

Looking at what the billionaires are doing in US politics, perhaps there's something to this.

by jampekka

5/19/2025 at 10:06:40 PM

Honestly, in academia you have good hands too, just not every lab. As in business, you also have not so good businesses.

Giving it to academia can 10x the result, but yes research is risky, that's why it's important it is founded externally.

Companies that profited from research in academia are very happy.

Overall I agree, the current European strategy is not optimal, for both Industry and academia.

by somethingsome

5/19/2025 at 9:59:20 PM

Europeans don't just dislike capitalism. They've been indoctrinated into thinking that if a business makes money, it must be cheating. The entire continent has Stockholm Syndrome from decades of leftist academics preaching that profit = exploitation, as if every entrepreneur is some 19th-century robber baron twirling a mustache. Meanwhile, they ignore that every single job, iPhone, and modern convenience they enjoy exists because someone, somewhere, took a risk to make a profit. But no, better to tax the hell out of success so the state can "redistribute" it into black holes like subsidized avant-garde puppet theaters and gender studies departments that produce nothing but resentment toward the free market.

These people aren't just anti-growth. They're pro-poverty. The degrowth movement (https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/material-civilization...) is basically a bunch of trust-fund Marxists and tenured academics who've never missed a meal in their lives demanding that regular people live worse so they can feel morally superior. "Oh, we must shrink the economy to save the planet!" Meanwhile, China's building a coal plant a week, India's economy is booming, and the U.S. is drilling, innovating, and getting richer. But Europe? Nah, they'd rather ration meat, ban cars, and freeze in the dark while patting themselves on the back for their "ethical" decline.

In America, a 20-year-old can drop out of college, code an app in his dorm, and become a billionaire. In Europe? Good luck. First, you'll need permits from 17 different agencies, all staffed by lifers who've never worked a day in the private sector. Then, once you finally start making money, the government will take half of it to fund some bloated pension scheme for bureaucrats who retire at 55. And God forbid you try to fire a useless employee labor laws make it easier to divorce a spouse than to fire a guy who shows up drunk every day. No wonder Europe's last big tech company was Spotify, and even they're based in tax-friendly Stockholm because the rest of the continent is a regulatory warzone.

The ultimate proof that Europe's system is broken? Its smartest people leave. Engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, they all flee to the U.S., Switzerland, or Singapore, where they're allowed to keep what they earn. The ones left behind? A shrinking workforce of aging socialists who still think the government can just print money forever without consequences. And when the economy tanks? They'll just blame "greedy corporations" instead of their own economic suicide pact.

The funniest (and saddest) part? The same anti-capitalist activists using iPhones, riding in Ubers, and ordering Amazon deliveries are the ones screaming for the destruction of the system that made those things possible. They want to abolish private property while living in nice apartments, end globalization while wearing clothes made in Bangladesh, and "eat the rich" while sipping $7 lattes. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.

If you want to see what happens when ideology trumps prosperity, just look at Europe. A once-great civilization now hostage to bureaucrats, academics, and activists who'd rather see everyone equally poor than let a few people get rich. The U.S. has its problems, but at least it still rewards hustle. Europe? It's too busy taxing, regulating, and guilt-tripping itself into irrelevance. Wake up, Europe. Capitalism isn't the problem. Your hatred of it is.

by greenavocado

5/19/2025 at 11:30:33 PM

“They've been indoctrinated into thinking that if a business makes money, it must be cheating. The entire continent has Stockholm Syndrome from decades of leftist academics preaching that profit = exploitation, as if every entrepreneur is some 19th-century robber baron twirling a mustache”

So true!! As a university professor, this nails it. It’s sad — Amsterdam, for instance, used to have such a strong culture of business. But that vitality has greatly diminished.

by dr_dshiv

5/20/2025 at 7:45:54 AM

This is very misleading, just look at the data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_startup_compan... Yes, it's different for different countries, and some EU countries are less startup friently. But countries like Norway or Estonia have ~1 unicorn per 1M people, just 50% of US (~2)

by coolvision

5/19/2025 at 10:31:10 PM

Your description of the European intellectual climate is admittedly accurate if somewhat hyperbolic.

But I think your analysis of the root causes is lacking. European humans aren't different organisms than non-european humans. Culture does not form in a vacuum. It comes from base properties of the geography and experiences of humans in the region.

In my opinion, it's primarily down to 3 things:

1) Population density: Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) as the US. Urbanization leads to more collectivist attitudes. If you compare European attitudes to those in a high density American location like New York City, you'll be amazed how similar (in everything from religiosity to socialist economic leaning to political philosophy). It's the higher proportion of low population density areas of the US that lead to major differences in political philosophy.

2) Experience of downside risk: European risk aversion is quite easily explained by the fact they have experienced the most extreme version of downside risk imaginable in recent memory (WWII). The worst thing the US knows is a depression. Not total annihilation, fire bombing and markets going to 0.

3) Ethnocentrism: Europe's nationalist ethno-states are far less culturally diverse than the broader US. This leads to a higher capacity of empathy for strangers (because people in a mono-culture are more similar to you, you empathize with them more easily). Ironically though, this empathy is what leads to a higher percentage of GDP being driven by centralized government spending (50% in Europe vs. 30-35ish% in USA). The market is less empathetic, but ultimately more efficient and grows the overall pie faster...even accounting for the additional increase in inequality.

Growth compounds exponentially, so this gets more dramatic over time. People in podunk US Midwest States now have a higher disposable income per capita (on both mean and median measures) than people in London, a place you would traditionally think of as among the richest in the world.

But again, the US didn't get here because 'culture.' It got here due to design decisions made hundreds of years earlier. Being a multicultural society reveals base human racist leanings, which results in more individualist governance, which leads to a greater embrace of markets and private capital, which leads to faster growth.

by pembrook

5/19/2025 at 11:32:32 PM

Coudenhove-Kalergi writes about this dichotomy you mention between urban man and rural man right at the beginning of the book "Practical Idealism." I think you will find it highly relevant.

https://archive.org/details/practical-idealism-english-ver-1...

by greenavocado

5/19/2025 at 11:58:02 PM

Great find, thank you for this!

by pembrook

5/19/2025 at 11:33:17 PM

I'm not so sure your first point is correct. Would you consider the Nordic countries to be collectivist? Because they are among the most sparsely populated countries in Europe, more sparsely than the US, but they are the countries with the best government services. Also, Canada is more sparsely populated the US.

by mcv

5/19/2025 at 11:46:24 PM

The north is different due to the weather. I mean, sure, Canadian tundra and the Nordic Arctic and Sub-Arctic is technically land, but I'm not sure you're getting a good comparison of population density by including it in calculations. That would be like calculating the oceans around the US in population density numbers since people live on boats technically.

Nordic countries have small populations due to the limitation of arable land to support humans at all. The US has no such limitation and could support vastly more population.

by pembrook

5/20/2025 at 3:56:12 AM

You bring up some interesting ideas, though I wonder about this:

>Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) as the US.

Are you sure about that?

>...The population density in Europe is 34 per Km² (87 people per mi²).

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula...

>...The population density in the United States is 38 per Km² (98 people per mi²).

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...

by opo

5/19/2025 at 10:34:48 PM

> anti-capitalist activists using iPhones, riding in Ubers, and ordering Amazon deliveries…

> every single job, iPhone, and modern convenience they enjoy exists because someone, somewhere, took a risk to make a profit.

Amazingly capitalists use things invented by socialists, like satellites, or the LED. Or things invested by Nazis and Monarchists.

Their favourite iPhone is made by communists, with minerals mined by .. well I am not sure what you call em but they are not capitalists

Every day Capitalists use public sanitation, running water, Education, GPS, police and prosecution but they imagine they could exist in a mad max world instead of dying of cholera

by ClumsyPilot

5/20/2025 at 9:51:18 AM

China is the most economically capitalist major country on earth. In fact, they embrace capitalism more than the US if you compare percentages of GDP driven by government spending.

50% of European GDP is government spending. The USSR was 70-80%. Meanwhile China is currently at 30%.

by pembrook

5/20/2025 at 12:03:06 AM

> Their favourite iPhone is made by communists

China has been a capitalist state since the 70s with a turn to State Capitalism in the 2010s. Furthermore, China's leadership remains anti-Welfarism, with Xi himself making speeches against expanding the already weak social safety net.

> Every day Capitalists use public sanitation, running water, Education, GPS, police and prosecution but they imagine they could exist in a mad max world instead of dying of cholera

Capitalism doesn't preclude public infrastructure. That's just a facile argument.

> the LED

The modern LED was developed by Texas Instruments and Bell Labs in the 1950s.

> like satellites

Both the US and the USSR knew about how to launch satellites in space by the mid-1950s. It was the USSR that chose to prioritize it, and the US that chose to deprioritize it.

by alephnerd

5/20/2025 at 12:28:19 AM

> Capitalism doesn't preclude public infrastructure. That's just a facile argument

I am measuring by the same yardstick as the OP.

If taxes to pay for public services are good capitalism, then you can’t call Europe socialist.

> The modern LED was developed by…

Whatever, take Hyperbaric welding. Will a western oil company refuse to use it because it was invented in USSR?

The fundamental accusation of the OP is totally hypocritical.

by ClumsyPilot

5/20/2025 at 2:19:05 PM

> I am measuring by the same yardstick as the OP.

Fair enough! Didn't see their argument. Yea that was dumb.

by alephnerd

5/20/2025 at 1:29:41 AM

> Their favourite iPhone is made by communists, with minerals mined by .. well I am not sure what you call em but they are not capitalists

Do you think those miners are volunteering out of revolutionary solidarity? Or perhaps "disposable cogs in the global supply chain" was the term you were looking for?

by greenavocado

5/20/2025 at 12:07:12 PM

> Do you think those miners are volunteering out of revolutionary solidarity?

Miners were getting paid in USSR too, are they capitalist too by this logic?

by ClumsyPilot

5/21/2025 at 3:43:13 AM

The USSR was a state-run economy. Workers got wages, sure, but the mines, the profits, the whole system was controlled by the government, not private owners chasing profit. Capitalism isn't just "getting paid," it's about who owns the means of production and how wealth circulates.

by greenavocado

5/23/2025 at 10:53:01 AM

Exactly, so with that in mind can you please explain how mines in Africa controlled by war lords represent capitalism?

Because if they do, then capitalism is horrible, and if they do not, then the argument made by the OP is hypocritical

by ClumsyPilot

5/20/2025 at 10:29:07 AM

Incredible to see such blind fanaticism here on HN. The sheer ingnorant, anti-europeanism here is incredible. Europe socialist? Hates capitalism? The home of thacher, austerity, the EU is socialist? I just don't even know what media one consumes to get this kind of world view.

Is this how american's justify selling their country to the highest bidder? "at least we're not eating toilet paper like the europeans". You know, some of the richest people in the world...

by Snow_Falls

5/19/2025 at 10:05:05 PM

Amen, I should frame this on my wall.

by loxodrome

5/20/2025 at 5:12:45 AM

> In America, a 20-year-old can drop out of college, code an app in his dorm, and become a billionaire.

Pedantic but counterpoint, Markus Villig.

by fakedang

5/20/2025 at 11:36:24 AM

>Europeans don't just dislike capitalism. They've been indoctrinated into thinking that if a business makes money, it must be cheating. The entire continent has Stockholm Syndrome from decades of leftist academics preaching that profit = exploitation, as if every entrepreneur is some 19th-century robber baron twirling a mustache.

Who told you that?

by high_na_euv

5/20/2025 at 12:41:16 AM

Your prior is objectively false, because Europe has the Stripe and Spotify founders (both of which became billionaires during the last 15 years or so).

by sally_glance

5/20/2025 at 2:31:25 AM

Em. Stripe was founded in Palo Alto. The founders had to move to the California because they couldn't get funding for an earlier startup in Ireland.

Spotify though, is Europe's own.

by Aloisius

5/20/2025 at 1:50:34 PM

Stripe founder (Patrick) spends half his time on Twitter complaining about the entrepreneurial blockers in Europe.

Clearly, he considers Stripe to be an American phenomenon.

by screye

5/20/2025 at 5:43:57 AM

Come on, the U.S is devolving into a fascist dictatorship as we speak, mostly due to capitalism and the worship of wealth. And for as long as capitalism remains, it will only get worse and worse, because capitalism is deeply flawed in that it has exponential power concentration built it. Monopolies form and rent seeking wealth siphons the wealth from the working people to the top. Breaking large companies would help, but it's like fighting a fire with buckets of water, eventually concentrating capital corrupts the regulators and this happens. If you can't see the connection between what's happening and capitalism, you really should think about it more objectively.

People are also happier in most European countries than they are in the US, because the constant competition for wealth and using wealth as the measure of what everyone is worth is not good for mental health and does not lead to a peaceful society, but one where people are set against each other. Europe has problems, but fixing them with capitalism is not going to lead to better lives for most people.

by TFYS

5/20/2025 at 2:14:38 AM

Have you ever even opened that journal ?

This sounds plausible on the surface, but by putting them all in the same basket you show that you have no idea what you are talking about : it's a bit like blaming wokists for their voting for Trump because wokists are from the USA and Trump was elected in the USA...

by BlueTemplar

5/21/2025 at 4:56:05 AM

Europeans don't just dislike capitalism. They've been indoctrinated into thinking that if a business makes money, it must be cheating.

Those are some big assumptions about 750 million people. Would love to see the data on this.

> In America, a 20-year-old can drop out of college, code an app in his dorm, and become a billionaire. In Europe? Good luck.

Assuming that's the case with you, right? And if not, then why not if it's so simple? Everybody knows that these cases are extremely rare, but they do happen both in the US and in the EU.

> The ultimate proof that Europe's system is broken? Its smartest people leave. Engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, they all flee to the U.S., Switzerland, or Singapore, where they're allowed to keep what they earn.

Again, would love to see the data on this. Based on my own personal anecdata, one of the reasons why IT engineers don't move to the US despite being offered to do so is because they enjoy the other benefits of living in the EU, like high-speed rail, free health-care, free higher education, being car independent, childcare benefits and having more days off.

by mbs159

5/19/2025 at 8:48:38 PM

I agree with everything except for one thing: I think their risk appetite is "u" shaped: low-risk is funded but they’d also fund insane-risk pie-in-the-sky academia dreams where many experts would immediately say that it will never work.

The stuff in between with sensible risk-reward ratios will indeed be ignored.

by baxtr

5/19/2025 at 10:12:35 PM

I disagree. The pie-in-the-sky academia dreams are not risk, they are safety. ITER and CERN and similar do fascinating research, and I don't mean to throw any shade their way, but they do not represent risk. There's not any possibility of failure. Things could go completely sideways and papers would keep getting written and no bureaucrat would lose their neck.

On the other hand, most startups have the ability to be total failures. If your social network, or your rocket company, or your new type of airplane collapses, it is a total loss. That is risk.

by owenversteeg

5/20/2025 at 5:08:57 AM

I think we are talking about the same thing to be honest.

They have turned something that should be high-risk into something safe with no consequences if there is no progress. Thus there is no progress, because why change things even if we are running into the wrong direction?

PS: I am not so much talking about CERN. CERN is basic science and we need that too. I am talking about projects that should be startups, i.e. commercially driven entities with the end-goal of making money.

by baxtr

5/19/2025 at 10:34:10 PM

Obviously, I don't know what baxtr meant, but I really hope it's not that. Because this critique of projects like ITER and CERN is really misguided IMO (and honestly just harmful). These are not startups, these are pure science projects, they are pretty much supposed to have negative ROI. It's not even fair to call giving them money an investment, these are grants and donations. Money that you sacrifice to a worthy cause, that supposedly would be the only cause in the fantasy world of communism-utopia, but that absolutely cannot get an investment in the world of pragmatic capitalism, because it is not about making money.

by krick

5/19/2025 at 10:40:52 PM

Hmm, perhaps my comment was not clear enough. I am all for large scale science and have nothing negative to say on the subject. I just do not consider that type of project to have serious "risk." Barring extreme cases, a bunch of researchers doing research is not going to produce any career-ending disasters.

by owenversteeg

5/20/2025 at 9:39:43 AM

I am definitely not talking about basic science projects. That’s an entirely different beast. And I want it to be well funded.

I am talking about projects that should be companies with an intent to make profits.

by baxtr

5/19/2025 at 8:50:13 PM

> they’d also fund insane-risk pie-in-the-sky academia dreams

Just out of curiosity, can you throw a couple of examples?

by krick

5/19/2025 at 8:59:58 PM

Particle accelerators?

by woah

5/19/2025 at 9:09:05 PM

Those I think serve a good purpose. We can discover the universe one atom smashed at a time.

It's non-profit and would not exist without external funding.

The discussion is more about businesses I think.

by hoppp

5/19/2025 at 9:24:30 PM

ITER and cold fussion. Its either impossible (my opinion) or far too early. ITER itself will not even produce single watt of electricity. Its PoC for net positive energy gain from cold fussion (we will see...)

by Borg3

5/20/2025 at 2:21:12 AM

ITER has nothing to do with cold fusion. And all cold fusion attempts so far ended up as scams.

by BlueTemplar

5/19/2025 at 9:01:53 PM

The Human Brain Project comes to mind.

by zmb_

5/19/2025 at 9:30:33 PM

I cofounded a startup, trying to get innovation funding and I can say this is 100% my experience. Universities don't think a Software for managing dance and culture academies is innovative, but they are in the field.

That was one of the requeriments: to be certified by a university professor. That doesn't make sense: universities are research centers, but not the unique source of innovation (and in our country, not even a source in most fields).

Your comment is pretty on point!

by jopicornell

5/19/2025 at 8:46:03 PM

Skimming the comments, this is pretty much what everyone is saying. And I'm sure it's true, but I'd like to also point out the amount of money in question. What was the investment amount for that toy project of Altman? Right.

I don't mean to say 70B is not a lot of money, of course it is. But perhaps that's part of the point: it's a lot of money to feed these technology partners of academia and other friends of friends you are talking about, it's also big enough to make the frontpage on HN, but when it's seen as a sudden huge investment into the whole market, it's kinda telling by itself that startups are not exactly thriving in EU. And also that money is cheap now.

by krick

5/19/2025 at 9:27:17 PM

They are also milked by companies, who re-designate pre-existing works (like software projects) as "innovation" and R&D. Its basically a hidden tax-refund with loads of busy-work bureaucracy.

by PicassoCTs

5/19/2025 at 9:05:42 PM

You are right.

Eu has great plans but unable to fulfill them.

I have been waiting for the Capital Markets Union for 11 years.

THe European blockchain infrastructure? Dead because only some universities can use it.

Eu is unable to fund innovation and it's not able to fund risky businesses. No VC culture either.

some Scandinavian countries have a little startup culture and government sponsored grants but the tax system drives startups that serve international audience away.

by hoppp

5/19/2025 at 9:51:08 PM

You are perfectly right!

I would just add this, from my experience with Horizon 2020: we were working on an R&D project at the time. Applied for grant. We got €16,000, peanuts. (We needed a few hundred thousand....) My point is that this type of EC/EU financing is distributed in a somewhat "social-democratic" manner, under the principle of "everyone should get something". Not mentioning the bureaucratic hell we went through to apply and get the funding.

by huqedato

5/19/2025 at 9:56:54 PM

The article addresses some of these points:

> EIB President Nadia Calviño emphasizes the bank's willingness to take more risks, notably speeding up the venture capital financing process, which could be pivotal for startups in a fast-moving market

> The bank aims to process startup financing applications within six months, significantly improving from the current 18-month timespan.

by thih9

5/19/2025 at 10:56:52 PM

That's part of the problem. 6 months is too long for an early stage venture to get capital unlocked.

And this rightfully causes a lot of us to worry that this foreshadows a significant lack of domain experience in the EIB's proposal (which btw hasn't been made public yet)

by alephnerd

5/19/2025 at 10:17:09 PM

There are a lot of grants for universities because a) that's how universities are funded and b) to encourage technology transfer. But pure startup funding does exist, eg the EIC accelerator. If you want to get it there are companies like Inspiralia which specialise in navigating the process.

by ajb

5/19/2025 at 10:57:26 PM

> will be distributed to members of the bureaucratic class and their network, for low-risk, low-reward projects

a quick search at the comments (so far) yielded zero results on "data prot", "GDPR", "privacy", so let me bring those up.

  GDPR is a _great_ tool for civilians
  GDPR is a _horrible_ tool if you are a business and want to innovate, expand, 'exploit' (positively).
  EU money will come with E(U) DP Supervisor and the many directives. There is no way someone can do a proper DPIA and find it 'clean' if you are honestly appraising processes x GDPR. And these people are fierce nay-sayers.  I've worked in banks, and I've worked in the EU. Those EU folks shit their pants when the DPOs walk in the room. Say "Legal basis" to someone working in the EU and see them cry (ok I exaggerate).
  US has been 'stealing' the talent from all around the planet, for decades (and good for both the US and the talents). Why would someone try hard and have regulations every step of the way, and not work for Google?
  Many years now I've felt that US is 30 years back in "tech" and will never catch up. US companies are dominating the space, and for every 10 steps we do in the EU, they go 10 miles, so every last year was better gap-wise. And I fear it won't change.

by HenryBemis

5/19/2025 at 7:28:53 PM

> If your business does not have university affiliations with people that get existing grants, or connections to EU bureaucracy, then you can forget about getting a dime.

So, then simply get in contact with your local university. It helps the university to get grants when commercial parties are involved, so this is a win-win.

by smokel

5/19/2025 at 7:36:39 PM

Hah!

I studied at an excellent Dutch university that's an EU funding darling and had plenty of connections. But because I had "just" a bachelor's degree from a top university, plus substantial relevant experience, nobody would take me seriously. Even with a master's, you will find most people think you are unserious in most "hard" fields. You often need a PhD. And then God help you if you choose to leave the existing ossified structures of academia and industry.

And then you still run up against the issues of risk tolerance (which is zero) and long timelines.

Look, the stated goal of this program is to compete with American venture capital, right? Then look at the founders who got American venture capital money. Look at how many don't even have a bachelor's! Count the number that participated in traditional structures of academia and grant-receiving corporations. Virtually none of those people would have ever gotten a dime of this money, let alone an offer to collaborate from a university.

by owenversteeg

5/19/2025 at 9:13:33 PM

A lot of founders are uni dropouts in America because the money flows easily and you dont have to study in university to have skills.

Its quite a stupid idea that only the most educated people can get these grants because people who excel at academia might not make it in the world of business.

by hoppp

5/19/2025 at 9:56:13 PM

Why such a crippling policy? Like you said, many successful entrepreneurs are university dropouts. For research grants, sure, go to PhDs. But if you want a tech industry, you need to cast a much wider net than that.

Although there's also NLNet that hands out open source subsidies from the EU. That might be more accessible, although I also get the impression that the money is a lot less. I don't have any experience with it, though.

by mcv

5/20/2025 at 12:17:19 AM

The American DoD is a bit like this. It is much easier to get R&D contracts if you have PhD next to your name.

by carom

5/19/2025 at 7:42:57 PM

I don't know what price you'd pay in your hypothetical scenario, but I would say that European universities often take a larger chunk of equity than US unis where spinouts are concerned [1]. Most US universities take between 0-5% equity, where EU could go to 10%, and UK unis up to 20-30%.

[1] https://www.spinout.fyi/data

by ainch

5/19/2025 at 8:17:29 PM

Dutch universities go for up to 25%, just for the IP rights [1]. With seed funding etc it often goes up to 30-35%.

[1] Dutch Universities spin-off terms: https://www.delftenterprises.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/D...

by bgnn

5/20/2025 at 12:33:14 AM

the feeling that they needed to include a few paragraphs of “look this isn’t the single digit amounts your friends are getting… but… it’s dilutive and we know best for you” language is telling

by amoshebb

5/20/2025 at 1:07:19 AM

Exactly. A lot of academics fall for it, thinking these are normal amounts. Then later when they try to raise money they often get into trouble as no invester in their right mind wang to touch them. Having a university as a major share holder with voting seats isn't a great idea!

by bgnn

5/19/2025 at 7:58:00 PM

If we're talking about existing EU funding mechanisms, the participating universities take no equity in their startup partners whatsoever, they just get paid part of the funding pot to do a bit of related research and publish it, and might be able to generate a bit of their own IP

by notahacker

5/19/2025 at 8:11:00 PM

When I did that university's cut was 30 to 50% of shares at a top Durch university.

by bgnn

5/19/2025 at 7:52:01 PM

Ha! You must have never dealt with European universities.

by josu

5/19/2025 at 7:55:24 PM

Yeah this, in fact forget local and just write to researchers in your field, or go through dedicated network events. Finding a university researcher with a common interest in a field who'd consider the opportunity to be subsidised for the next 3-4 years working on stuff they're interested in isn't the hardest hurdle deeptech startups will face on their road to commercialization, especially when the alternative people treat like it's some kind of meritocratic sieve is "get warm intros to a VC class so insular some of them write unironic LinkedIn posts about how it's impossible to be successful outside the Bay Area"

(Or just use one of the funding mechanisms that attach little or zero weight to academic collaboration)

by notahacker

5/20/2025 at 7:24:17 AM

Ha! Downvotes for pointing out that if you actually need them, university researchers are actually more willing to chat about getting research funding than VCs are to give the average first time founder money. Never change, HN!

Honestly, I'd love it if the mail in my inbox from universities wanting to do European projects with us was the result of me being some sort of uniquely-valuable well-connected wizard whereas all the founders had to do was flutter their eyelashes and say "Founders Fund are following on" to get term sheets from everyone in the Valley. But that's not the reality...

In reality there's no shortage of bureaucracy and credentialism if you want Federal contracts (and in some industries plenty of bureaucracy just to do your research in the US even if you don't take any money), and the US exceptionalism when it comes to mindset and regulatory looseness is pretty much the same in the backwater states that don't have any notable startups of their own, whilst Bavaria doesn't seem to be doing too badly for VC investment compared with anywhere that's not California despite the extremes of German bureaucracy. And fundamentally VCs and government funders on both sides of the Atlantic are doing different jobs, with different investment targets and different tradeoffs for founders.

by notahacker

5/20/2025 at 2:54:01 PM

There are clearly some frustrated voices in this thread. I try not to take the downvotes personally.

I hope to eventually learn how to engage more constructively with such responses. When someone claims to understand how a system works, yet behaves in a way that contradicts that understanding and then blames the system for not meeting their expectations, I question whether their insight is as deep as they suggest.

by smokel

5/20/2025 at 4:31:58 AM

Yes EU is corrupt shithole, this title means they have 70b to steal from

by tclover

5/19/2025 at 7:21:39 PM

...so it's corruption with extra steps?

by NooneAtAll3

5/19/2025 at 9:11:45 PM

Imagine a committee of 10 people granting funding to a firm to commercialise NFTs of digital fashion where the owner of the company is also a member of the committee. The company isn't even a real company but a general partnership without limited liability. Your inquiries into this affair under the public information act get stonewalled by a obscure law that where voted on as part of the budget of 2018. When members are asked about this incestuous relationship they react in an indigenous fashion saying there can not be a conflict of interest because they abstained from voting on their own project. You make some noice about this and you get ostracised. This is just one example.

A dutch sociologist has coined a term for this calling it network corruption, we had to invent a word for it because it is so prevalent, there isn't even a page about this on the English language Wikipedia: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netwerkcorruptie

by FjordWarden

5/19/2025 at 8:02:42 PM

Personally I wouldn't call it corruption, at least not all of it. If you were to drill down into the individual grants, you would find a lot of things that are broadly useful but not revolutionary. There's 4M euros to produce a new additive for beeswax and 500k euros to research migratory snails and 6M euros to study some new roads and that sort of thing. There's certainly obvious corruption too, but it isn't the majority of grant money. Most stuff is just very boring and vaguely useful.

I think a more useful description: it is an ossified structure where you have to play by the rules. Much like, say, the Catholic Church. You're not going to get a grant for your startup, or become Archbishop of Salzburg, by having an idea and sending some emails. You're going to have to fully commit yourself to the institution over a period of decades, and then you're in, and you're respected, and you can do some things, as long as they're not too revolutionary. Is that good for innovation? No. But corruption? I think it's something else.

by owenversteeg

5/19/2025 at 7:32:19 PM

No, it's the result of the public's/politicians' pathologic risk aversion and swiftness in calling everything corruption

Since it'd be obviously bad (sarcasm) if public money were spent on projects that deliver nothing or the people receiving them used them for anything other than the narrowest interpretation of the goal then you absolutely (sarcasm^2) have to have 50 different layers of checks and plans and assessment to make sure the little money is spent on the entities that lie the best. But at least no opposition politician can complain someone bought a fancier watch than they'd like or didn't deliver enough

Anyway the EIB is a different kind of funding process than EU grants and should be more effective (even just because capital doesn't come out of the EU budget or member states directly), though how much I don't know

by arlort

5/19/2025 at 7:25:39 PM

It's a weird kind of corruption where the most diligent and patient and boring wins

by ithkuil

5/19/2025 at 9:42:04 PM

[dead]

by TacticalCoder

5/19/2025 at 5:07:22 PM

From a person who has dealt with the management of European research projects: these funds will go through the EU bureaucratic maze, don't even think they will be available directly to startups. There will probably be programs and sub-programs, projects and other craps like that to more difficult for people to access the money. It's how the EU works. That's why startups flee to US if they want serious financing.

So leave me be very skeptical about this news.

by huqedato

5/19/2025 at 5:58:23 PM

oh, they are available to startups. Startups having the sole purpose of skimming funds by being the technology partner to some academic.

That's the best case. Then there is outright fraud:

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101092295 - European dynamic provides some project management and a wordpress-page for the lump sum of 800k€ and of course there is always "SOCIAL OPEN AND INCLUSIVE INNOVATION ASTIKI MI KERDOSKOPIKI ETAIREIA" headquartered here: https://inclusinn.com/. Probably still in stealth mode, using the 4M€ to "promote innovation".

by fock

5/19/2025 at 6:39:14 PM

> Startups having the sole purpose of skimming funds by being the technology partner to some academic.

Is cynicism about motives necessary?

I believe most people have enough self-deception and denial, that we don't need to assume fraud or theft. Similarly charities often end up being self-serving leeches - but the people seem to believe they are helping. Maybe I'm just naive? It is possible that most people in New Zealand are not so focused on intentional theft and fraud?

In New Zealand I've watched our government burn fucktons of money trying to invest in university "innovation". Academics convince politicians that they have valuable ideas, and politicians want to believe universities produce value. However the government funding is horrifically managed (no business sense) and the startups lack the right genetics and fail (even if matched funding from private investors). New Zealanders lack an entrepreneurial learning environment (maybe EU is the same): founding is difficult and really difficult if you've never watched someone close succeed.

I believe the root cause is that academics are not business/financially oriented, so the startups fail because they are not businesses. Plus the organisations picking investments are academic heavy and are not run by good capitalists. Academics often have good valuable ideas. But academics tend not to be hyper-focused just on business outcomes or they are not money focused. Business founders need to focus on profit (not status hunting, and definitely not looking for academic recognition).

I wondered for a while whether the cause was my own selection bias (startups mostly fail so I saw them fail) but I don't think that was the cause.

Also the government investing organisations love heavy handed shitty governance (and legal overcontrol bullshit). The principals believe their advice and overview is valuable. The investors put in bad CEOs and also force the businesses to make poor decisions. I've seen private VC funding make the same mistakes.

It is really sad to see good ideas get murdered by people with government money: I'm sure they believe they are helping and that they are trying to help (I'm not that cynical about motivations).

Our current government has just announced another 100 million to go towards academic startups. I just fucking wish our government would spend the budget instead by removing unnecessary red tape and to improve tax incentives (in New Zealand the incentives to grow businesses or create export income are fucked in my personal experience).

by robocat

5/19/2025 at 6:31:30 PM

Doesn't match my experience. I know of plenty of startups that received EU funding with relatively little hassle. It's not that hard. And if you are afraid of some mild levels of bureaucracy, you shouldn't be running a company. And it's not like the US doesn't have bureaucracy.

by jillesvangurp

5/19/2025 at 6:42:15 PM

Both is true: a lot of money is lost to bureaucracy and startups get funding, although it's not that easy imho. And the amounts are laughable in my experience, that's the biggest problem. Yes, it's nice that I get a kickback on research costs or whatever, but the process takes weeks and the returns are dismal. YMMV tho

by RamblingCTO

5/19/2025 at 6:43:03 PM

That's not my experience. I have multiple former colleagues who got got EU money for their startup and were able to leave their day job due to that funding. I only supported a bit as a software engineer but what I was involved in it was pretty straightforward.

by campl3r

5/19/2025 at 7:33:21 PM

A big factor is which country is actually disbursing the funds, the EC doesn't really do so directly

by arlort

5/19/2025 at 6:39:18 PM

I often read that EU is incredibly bureaucratic and risk averse. On the other hand, I also read stories how startups can successfully bootstrap themselves via generous support of the government, like tax deduction for small companies, unemployment benefits for founders, low-interest loans, venture investment, free mentorship by very experienced and connected executives, and etc. The stories about French and Denmark companies are especially impressive. So, I was wondering if there's a difference between the governments of individual countries in EU and the EU government.

by g9yuayon

5/19/2025 at 7:06:29 PM

> On the other hand, I also read stories how startups can successfully bootstrap themselves via generous support of the government, like tax deduction for small companies, unemployment benefits for founders, low-interest loans, venture investment, free mentorship by very experienced and connected executives, and etc.

I’m not seeing EU grants in that list. In general I’d say anything the bureaucrats can’t ruin with their gatekeeping, friendship corruption and overvaluation of social status is a positive. Anything they can ruin they will.

by bjornsing

5/19/2025 at 7:58:28 PM

Basically like this:

* If the result is good and useful, the credit goes to the member state.

* If the result isn't good, it's the fault of the EU.

Similarly how good Champaigne can only come from one place ;)

by izacus

5/20/2025 at 7:19:10 AM

I've only ever seen it go the other way around

by johngladtj

5/19/2025 at 6:45:51 PM

I know people who've taken money through these routes. The biggest surprise is the paperwork; since it's public money, everything must be fully transparent, and the government needs to justify why funds went to a specific person / entity.

In contrast, private investors have more discretion and fewer stakeholders to answer to.

by Irishsteve

5/19/2025 at 9:57:13 PM

They are bureaucratic and risk averse.

You could go on unemployment and cost them for a year or two, and they instead subsidize you starting a business for 6-12 months to the same amount. Worst case, you fail, and they spent the same amount they would have nevertheless.

Low-interest loans you won't get without taking on personal liability for your business loan. It's low-cost capital, but it's also low risk.

Tax-delays/exemptions for small companies isn't a big bet, it's risking a fraction of a fraction of a percent.

Venture investments by the government is rare (for good reasons, it'd be a huge opportunity for corruption).

by luckylion

5/19/2025 at 5:27:29 PM

Most of the time the money goes to keep big inefficient European companies European CHIPS act mainly divided the money into smaller sub programs, and gave the money to big companies like ST, Infineon, NXP etc.

For start-ups they do a lot of online calls to ask "what do you need" though. When you say money, they are like, yeah but what do you need except money!?

by bgnn

5/19/2025 at 5:57:28 PM

And many of these sub-sub-programs cost more to run than they distribute.

by edf13

5/19/2025 at 6:29:37 PM

Just like NGOs and charity in general.

by 77pt77

5/19/2025 at 6:26:36 PM

Feature, not a bug.

by nand_gate

5/19/2025 at 5:44:07 PM

European voter moral imperatives contradict the structure of the countries and special economic zones that foster the greater proportion of startups.

by ty6853

5/19/2025 at 7:00:46 PM

I applied to a few different programs and got funding for industry research a few different times. It was some work, but still not harder than getting academic research funding...

by nxpnsv

5/19/2025 at 6:18:33 PM

If this is the case, then I sincerely hope this will be attacked.

My cynical side says that it will just be politicized, so some factions can say EU/state bad, while others jump through hoops to defend it.

by dgb23

5/19/2025 at 9:40:04 PM

most of the funding will go to incumbents too, not startups. EU values establishment over innovation. So you can think of German automakers, Airbus and others creating new innovation programs and that's where the bulk of many many billions will go to. Startups get the crumbles and are scrutinized more heavily.

by bytesandbits

5/19/2025 at 5:51:43 PM

[dead]

by seivan

5/19/2025 at 5:13:08 PM

PS: I really don't understand the downvotes to my post. I've just expressed my (educated and objective) warning.

by huqedato

5/19/2025 at 5:31:27 PM

I share your sentiment, I'm also very skeptical that this money will be wisely used, a good chunk of it probably sinks into the Treibsand of European bureaucracy. And significant amounts will go to shallow ideas of startups. Europe just doesn't have the right startup spirit. It's over regulated and risk averse. Both fatal for a fruitful development.

by sowhat25

5/19/2025 at 6:00:54 PM

it's not sinking in the bureaucracy. There's an industry of outright fraud an embezzlement...

by fock

5/19/2025 at 5:31:22 PM

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

by dudefeliciano

5/19/2025 at 6:46:53 PM

One of the primary reasons I quit using reddit was because of the ideological dog piling that turned so many communities into insular echo chambers.

I know you’re just quoting the rules, but I’m noticing the same process happening here. It would be a shame if HN continued this trend while everyone stayed silent.

by jack_h

5/19/2025 at 7:14:34 PM

Do you think the question “why am I getting downvoted” is interesting? And is it interesting enough to warrant a separate comment thread? Now imagine if everyone who got downvotes started asking that question, it would lower the quality of conversations here, people would start justifying their vote and their opinion or attacking the other. And in the end, I doubt the people downvoting would really answer, only the people agreeing/upvoting would post some snarky comment about the downvoters being fools, or the quality of the site going down. That’s the “it never does any good” part (were already in it in this conversation IMO)

In my opinion that comment got downvoted because it’s not interesting. It’s a comment I have heard dozens of times, did not provide any example or source, and plenty other people posted effectively the same in here.

by dudefeliciano

5/19/2025 at 5:59:23 PM

I love reading comments about the voting on comments; On the otherhand I find comments on what comments induviduals find "boring" to be tedious.

by Chris2048

5/19/2025 at 6:00:01 PM

It's a quote from the site rules.

by detaro

5/20/2025 at 2:53:49 AM

Actually, it's a quote from the comment I responded to.

It, in turn, appears to be a promotion of one of the site guidelines. In turn I would promote the official guideline:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting"

as well as the not-official personal guideline:

"Guideline-lawering is boring, and uninteresting to any good hacker, or true codesman."

by Chris2048

5/20/2025 at 8:55:43 AM

No it wasn’t quote from the original comment, i copy pasted from the guidelines - and the comment “why am I getting downvoted” is off topic in regards to EU and tech funding. The guideline exist precisely to avoid every post devolving into the (boring) conversation we are having now.

by dudefeliciano

5/20/2025 at 6:57:49 PM

Yes, it was, I was quoting your comment - I'm the authority on that fact.

> is off topic in regards to EU and tech funding

cool, then it's a tangent to the original topic, as is your own comment policing. Who made you the voice of HN?

by Chris2048

5/21/2025 at 6:24:55 AM

> Who made you the voice of HN?

The fact that I read and understood the guidelines? If I had not said that someone else would have.

BTW "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting" refers to submissions, not comments.

by dudefeliciano

5/19/2025 at 6:04:31 PM

It’s people who either don’t know how it works when dealing with the EU or maybe they are beneficiaries. /shrug

by christkv

5/19/2025 at 6:51:16 PM

I haven't downvoted you, but I understand why some might have because every thread on Hacker News regarding Europe and software attract this exact comment almost as if written from a template. Doesn't make it right or wrong, but it gets a little stale.

by aranelsurion

5/19/2025 at 6:07:01 PM

Yes we all know this, this is nothing new. But its the movement in right direction, especially now, rather than literal burning money on globally-abandoned green deal. Perfect being enemy of good and all of that

by jajko

5/19/2025 at 5:34:32 PM

Why not finance a more wide tax break for tech companies, including small companies?

I have seen first hand, one of my classmates from high-school, whom I didn't consider to be too bright, receive a 100k EUR grant to build an esports platform that ended up being a styled-up wordpress blog. He had zero interest in tech, never programmed, the works...

He had no interest nor knowledge relating to tech, but managed to somehow get that grant. Meanwhile, I was paying taxes on hard earned freelancing dev money. We were both 23 years old at the time and it was really jarring.

I'd rather they cut taxes for already profitable small companies. The taxes in EU are astronomic.

by fear91

5/19/2025 at 7:24:01 PM

Tax breaks is not going to do much, because that is not where the real problem is. Imo EU is being underestimated. The EU is really competitive at boring high tech that bootstrap themselves like cars, civilian air planes and tooling, so the business and innovation climate is not bad.

What's different from the EU and US is that the US has single capital market with more unified regulations where it is much easier to pool infinite VC money into an idea. Contrary to popular belief it's actually the LACK of EU regulations that makes the EU less competitive, because a company has to deal with 20+ regulatory bodies.

In short, the EU should focus on more market integration.

by enaaem

5/19/2025 at 8:00:22 PM

Yep, so much this (and Draghi concurs). It's kind of bizarre that the EU needs to do what it's biggest critics fight the most: integrate it's markets and eliminate cross-member bureaucracy.

by izacus

5/19/2025 at 11:35:31 PM

> that bootstrap themselves like cars, civilian air planes

A civilian airplane manufacturing business takes decades to get off the ground, and is practically impossible to start without heavy government involvement. Cars are not that far behind. How did you pick these as businesses that "bootstrap themselves"? Bootstrapping requires a non-capital intensive business model. These are the opposite. These are businesses running on decades of momentum and government support.

by tormeh

5/20/2025 at 7:35:01 AM

Probably should say companies that are not financed with infinite VC company. Since that is a uniquely American advantage that is not developed in Europe yet.

by enaaem

5/19/2025 at 10:28:56 PM

> bootstrap themselves like cars

You mean the cars whose manufacturing has to be stopped because they don't know how to use one chip in pace of another, while Tesla was chugging in numbers because they were the only ones who knows how to program a new chip.

by YetAnotherNick

5/20/2025 at 7:31:49 AM

Tesla is one of the few car companies that receive infinite VC money. European cars are more competitive then American. There is a reason why Trump is complaining that no country is buying in American cars. There are far more European cars in Asia than American ones.

by enaaem

5/19/2025 at 7:11:04 PM

I could not agree more. But the problem is: then the politicians / bureaucrats don’t get to decide who gets the money.

by bjornsing

5/19/2025 at 7:53:01 PM

Because investment is often tax-deductible anyway now-days with modern policy trying to encourage this via huge tax-discounts on capex. Therefore tax-breaks on profits just allow existing owners to cash out cheap. The companies that need the help need capital, not tax discounts. Further to this the companies that are profit-generating, still require capital for growth, the small tax on profits isn't enough to make a difference in the scale of things for investment required since corporation tax rates are often so low.

by zipy124

5/19/2025 at 7:14:57 PM

Can the EU directly regulate the details of the tax regulations of their member states? That would be extremely surprising to me and, even if done, would likely be seen as a sever overreach.

by constantcrying

5/19/2025 at 7:36:54 PM

It's quite simple. The EU can't tell member states how much to tax and even if you cut out all of its budget you'd save maybe a percentage point or two in taxes

On the other hand the EIB (which is anyway not directly controlled in their executive actions by the EU) can grant funds since it's kind of it's role as an investment bank

by arlort

5/19/2025 at 8:48:03 PM

In Norway, you can get 25% tax break on R&D costs. It can be combined with other softfunding up to 70% for small companies doing research, and 50% for larger companies doing development.

by jononor

5/20/2025 at 2:17:33 AM

but how does that work? The money you pay on taxes, is on income - that money is now yours. On the other hand I'd assume a grant is the property of the company, not your friend. Where they able to just leach it all away as personal income?

by Chris2048

5/19/2025 at 7:14:33 PM

> Why not finance a more wide tax break for tech companies, including small companies?

Because then these communists wouldn't get to choose who gets the money.

by Canada

5/19/2025 at 4:57:57 PM

Calviño is the wrong choice to lead this. Why not tap a few people from Mistral if they care about AI? Spotify if they care about more generic tech?

Funding will not fix the fact that euro salaries are not even remotely competitive especially after tax. Maybe it’s better to be poor in europe than America but MLEs at large AI labs and bigtech SWEs are definitively not.

Plus, capital is somehow still more risk-averse in the EU despite the ECB's policy rate consistently running >200bps lower than fed funds. And of course the process of getting funds from the EIB remains agonizing even with this change.

by landl0rd

5/19/2025 at 8:48:04 PM

I hear these salary comparisons a lot, but when I was studying at the most popular Dutch technical university none of the future SWEs I talked to where even considering moving to the US (this was back when there was an excess of swe jobs everywhere). There's not much of a braindrain of engineers as far as I can tell, European engineers are not vastly less impressive than their American counterparts, and the people running succesfull startups in the US do not posess any particular brilliance.

All of which is to say, I don't think lack of Software Engineering talent is the problem.

by Fraterkes

5/19/2025 at 8:59:18 PM

>There's not much of a braindrain of engineers as far as I can tell

Not in your bubble: top university in the tax heaven EU country with some of the most US companies. Of course those grads can just stay and get FANG jobs there but not everyone comes from the NL.

>the people running succesfull startups in the US do not posess any particular brilliance

Their advantage is easier access to more capital than those in the EU. Capital helps with success even more than skills. Hence why the US has more big successful companies than Europe.

by FirmwareBurner

5/19/2025 at 9:33:05 PM

Big successful companies in USA aren’t big just because of better access to capital. It’s easier to create a monopoly there without major consequences for the business. Europe has no interest in having such businesses, as was demonstrated by DMA.

by ivan_gammel

5/20/2025 at 7:54:44 AM

> Europe has no interest in having such businesses

That's objectively false. EU would love to have its own monopolistic companies in the tech sector the same way it has in other sectors. It's only against them because it has none.

> as was demonstrated by DMA

Europe's DMA is orthogonal to its wishes of having monopolistic companies as all of those companies are American not European.

by FirmwareBurner

5/20/2025 at 9:17:01 AM

Objective statements require some evidence. Are you referring to evidence elsewhere in the conversation or have you forgotten to include it?

by gorgonical

5/20/2025 at 9:21:57 AM

Like I previously wrote, the evidence is the monopolistic-style European companies that exist in different sectors than software.

by FirmwareBurner

5/20/2025 at 10:21:19 AM

Can you give an example of a European consumer-oriented business being a monopoly in the EU? When it was founded? How is it regulated?

by ivan_gammel

5/19/2025 at 10:15:19 PM

I'm in the bubble where probably the most engineer brain drain of any bubble (VC early stage). My observation is that the brain drain is... moderate. Huge, huge brain drain of startup founders. But of engineers? A tendency towards risk aversion and a preference for stability nixes that in my experience. I know some specialists who hopped over to the Bay in pursuit of the niche and lucrative jobs that their specialism rewards. But for most run-of-the-mill software engineers, I really haven't seen anyone fleeing to the bay for more money.

by stuartjohnson12

5/20/2025 at 1:04:39 PM

I guess I wouldn't call startup founders leaving "brain-drain" necessarily.

by Fraterkes

5/19/2025 at 10:00:09 PM

First of all, I'm not in a bubble, those don't exist. Secondly, if your assesment is remotely true, shouldn't every european software engineer be moving to the netherlands to work at these mythical FANG locations? Has that happened?

by Fraterkes

5/20/2025 at 7:48:00 AM

>First of all, I'm not in a bubble, those don't exist.

Why do you think bubbles don't exist. People's perception of reality is shaped by their own experience within their immediate proximity and network of people.

> Secondly, if your assesment is remotely true, shouldn't every european software engineer be moving to the netherlands to work at these mythical FANG locations? Has that happened?

A lot of EU people used to move to the NL for tech jobs at big US companies like Uber. Obviously the NL can't house every single person from EU as evident from the NL's housing crisis, nor is every EU worker willing to relocate to NL.

by FirmwareBurner

5/20/2025 at 8:02:00 AM

I was just trolling, sorry. Bit of a bad mood yesterday

by Fraterkes

5/21/2025 at 5:08:55 AM

The cost of living is smaller in most countries in the EU, though. Also, most get free healthcare and free higher education, so it evens out considering these benefits

by mbs159

5/19/2025 at 5:12:55 PM

> Calviño is the wrong choice to lead this

Will Calviño be picking and choosing the grantees?

by JumpCrisscross

5/19/2025 at 5:17:55 PM

This isn't the point. More knowledgeable people at lower levels can help. But when leadership lacks domain expertise it's very hard to know what to do or not do, what will help and won't. She could be smart and lean heavily on industry experts but that still makes her the wrong choice to lead it when one of them could have done so better.

This is the equivalent of private equity installing someone who knows nothing but MBA material at a biotech company or a ML research company or anything else where domain expertise can actually help.

The EU is actually better at bringing in bits of "technocracy" to let industry experts lend their expertise. I don't know why they are doing that here. I think it's the wrong call.

by landl0rd

5/19/2025 at 5:19:09 PM

Elon Musk lacks domain expertise given how he asked to rewrite Twitter stack to the devs after it was bought

If you're talking about the domain of startups and companies themselves though, I'll give you that

by amarcheschi

5/19/2025 at 6:32:38 PM

His domain expertise is running a high performance engineering team. I think he has a good record of that.

by meekaaku

5/19/2025 at 8:46:19 PM

I don’t remember mentioning Musk once in my comments. He’d also be a poor choice. They should stick with a european who understands the challenges of start-up high tech in europe.

I am in fact talking about start-ups and tech as a domain. That’s the area at issue so they should hire euros who understand those challenges well to fix them.

by landl0rd

5/19/2025 at 5:23:54 PM

> Elon Musk lacks domain enterprise

What does this mean? I can't parse it.

by robertlagrant

5/19/2025 at 5:29:47 PM

Sorry, I meant expertise not enterprise

by amarcheschi

5/19/2025 at 5:36:49 PM

Ah, okay. I still don't quite know what it means. He clearly has something, as he's launched/run various successful and wildly innovative companies.

I think that's different to someone allocating public funds well. In my very limited experience of that in the UK, the people involved were completely unaware of what to do, and were convinced by salespeople and partisan semi-internal contractors with a bias. If Elon Musk wants to risk his own money on an internal decision at Twitter, so be it. That's a lot better than risking somebody else's money forcibly extracted from their pockets.

by robertlagrant

5/19/2025 at 5:48:56 PM

Knowledge of the domain he launches company of. I'll give him that he's great at launching and probably managing companies, he's still not an expert in the technical side of the field his companies operate in

I answered because the guy above me complained about lack of domain expertise

by amarcheschi

5/20/2025 at 10:06:14 AM

Ah yes I understand. I think for me the difference isn't just domain expertise, although it is a little bit. It's more whose money you're risking. If investors want to give Elon Musk some of their money to try something, I don't care, as it's not my money to lose.

by robertlagrant

5/19/2025 at 6:22:40 PM

You don't see why it might not be a good idea to give leaders in for-profit companies like Mistral or Spotify the keys to billions of dollars in funding?

by 9283409232

5/19/2025 at 7:01:13 PM

It's a much better idea to give it to people who actually have experience turning financial investment into a valuable technological product than giving it to bureaucrats with no such experience.

by logicchains

5/19/2025 at 5:10:29 PM

These initiatives always end up the same way: bureaucrats distributing taxpayer money to the socially focused careerists at the top of large companies and academic institutions (perhaps after they’ve left and founded a startup). It’s just so engrained in the European way of thinking that you need to ”be someone”, not ”understand something” or ”be able to do something”. It’s sad, but that’s how it is.

by bjornsing

5/19/2025 at 6:23:12 PM

> you need to ”be someone”, not ”understand something” or ”be able to do something”

This very succinctly describes the entire management class here in Sweden... The public sector is run by incompetent people who have to buy consultants to do anything and the private sector is led by the same kind of people to the point where actually competent people avoid going into management. I wonder how long we can keep this up.

by zppln

5/20/2025 at 5:51:29 AM

> The public sector is run by incompetent people who have to buy consultants to do anything

No, this is just the definition of state corruption. They could have competent people, if they wanted to.

by hulitu

5/19/2025 at 6:32:09 PM

The public sector isn't allowed to hire people and do things that could be perceived as competing with the private sector, which drives paying consultancies for things like software development as soon as the result could work as a product (i.e. more than one government body would want an instance).

Procurement ("lagen om offentlig upphandling"), one of the big wins for the right, is also fundamentally broken in that a lot of the public servants involved are fresh graduates that soon gets poached by private corporations and the organisational response is to sign long term contracts with huge corporations that supply many different things and are also allowed to bring in subcontractors for the things they don't. This effectively destroys any possibility of commercial competition.

It's purposefully designed this way by conservatives.

by cess11

5/20/2025 at 5:53:11 AM

> The public sector isn't allowed to hire people and do things that could be perceived as competing with the private sector

That's the problem, isn't it ? The holy capitalist cow stands no competition.

by hulitu

5/20/2025 at 6:43:29 AM

I consider that to be a problem, but for our local 'owner families', i.e. oligarchs or wealthy dynasties, it's not. It allows for very efficient capture of public institutions and a kind of glacial stability that makes people in power feel more safe even though some of them have to switch roles every three to ten years or so.

Historically regimes like this tend to incite a lot of violence, either through criminal organisations as people seek fame and fortune outside the paths controlled and largely captured by the elites, or through militant revolution that might turn into civil war. I consider it highly irresponsible by our large unions and mainstream labour parties to having given way to this situation, they should have 'learned from history' as the tankies of old put it.

by cess11

5/19/2025 at 7:47:06 PM

Leave Sweden is the solution for people like you who don't appreciate how things are arranged. You can be much more successful in a more mature economy where there is a better connection between productivity and career opportunities / renumeration.

by carlosjobim

5/19/2025 at 5:45:10 PM

Very nicely put! I have been in discussions with these type of people, several times, to start a company in semiconductors and quantum computing. I was often the only one who can "do" things and it was not appreciated. Academics didn't have the time or will to start a company (and had no industry experience), but wanted to have more than 50% of the shares because the government or EU gave the money to them, in return the university wanted 30% cut because they bring "a prestigious name", bug companies forced on you by EU funds did't want shares but they wanted control (board seat) and IP rights. All these were for <500k seed fund which would barely cover couple of engineers salary for a year!

by bgnn

5/19/2025 at 6:54:41 PM

That’s the typical racket, yes. 20 years ago I saw it as an unfortunate consequence of policy mistakes. But now I’m more inclined to see it as the intended purpose of these systems. ”It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

by bjornsing

5/19/2025 at 7:18:05 PM

It is not like this is the first time the EU has flushed enormous amounts of money into a non-existing sector. The results, especially when compared to US venture capital are abysmal at producing actual products, especially products which could feasibly rival the US tech sector.

by constantcrying

5/19/2025 at 6:25:02 PM

I don't recognise this description. To me it seems rather easy to just grab some cash off EU or swedish public investment campaigns by having a credible business plan and a project description that fits the campaign.

Research departments at large corporations with the right contacts can get campaigns designed for them, more or less, which I disagree with but it's not like it fits the picture you give.

The EU also does relatively much of "startup" funding through public credit, which is nice, because bad business ideas are killed fast if they can't beg their way into years and years of burning someone else's money, which we due to the private investment sector also had some of until the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the rate hike.

by cess11

5/19/2025 at 6:50:43 PM

> Research departments at large corporations with the right contacts can get campaigns designed for them, more or less, which I disagree with but it's not like it fits the picture you give.

Not sure what you mean... It fits perfectly with the picture I’m trying to convey.

by bjornsing

5/20/2025 at 5:22:15 AM

It's not particularly bureaucratic.

by cess11

5/20/2025 at 6:06:09 AM

I’m using the word ”bureaucrat” mostly as a derogatory term. The problem as I see it is actually a lack bureaucracy. It arises when you hire ”bureaucrats” and tell them ”you are now a general do-gooder who can do whatever you want, like an angel investor but with public money”. The systems that are bureaucratic (in the real sense of the word) actually work pretty well. Sweden owes a lot of its prosperity to a generous unemployment benefits system, for example.

by bjornsing

5/19/2025 at 5:12:20 PM

> These initiatives always end up the same way

By “these” do you mean anything European, or something specific to this structure?

by JumpCrisscross

5/19/2025 at 5:21:19 PM

I was primarily referring to EU initiatives. But the national ”innovation system” here in Sweden is pretty much the same. It’s a cultural issue, not an organizational one, IMHO.

by bjornsing

5/19/2025 at 5:45:46 PM

EU government funds are also similar.

by bgnn

5/19/2025 at 4:57:13 PM

It's really tiring to see the same handful of arguments on HN every time anything related to Europe or the EU is posted on here. Yes, some things the USA is doing better than Europe, but far from everything and depending on your political leanings (or rather social position) even most.

by StrauXX

5/19/2025 at 5:47:56 PM

In this case, it's not hard to make the argument that you can't have one without the other.

If you're always going to lean into risk aversion and safety nets, you will lose to the player who is willing to make more risks. This involves the losers losing bigger, but the winners winning bigger.

That's what the US is compared to Europe. The winners are better off, but the losers are worse off.

Everything is a trade off. But it's highly unlikely you can have best of both worlds in the long run.

by zpeti

5/19/2025 at 5:45:40 PM

The USA doing things better is quickly going to be false

by hnthrow90348765

5/19/2025 at 6:00:36 PM

Compared to whom?? The EU??? Lmk when they’re building anything competitive.

by djohnston

5/19/2025 at 6:33:34 PM

In 2019, Airbus displaced Boeing as the largest aerospace company by revenue.

In October 2019, the A320 family became the highest-selling airliner family with 15,193 orders, surpassing the Boeing 737's total of 15,136.

In 2023 the number of Airbus aircraft in service surpassed Boeing for the first time.

by albumen

5/19/2025 at 6:40:40 PM

One example? How about tech?

by nxm

5/19/2025 at 6:50:15 PM

How is Airbus not tech?

In any case, Spotify, SAP, Booking definitely qualify as competitive.

by Fargren

5/20/2025 at 1:08:27 AM

The context of the article is an innovation fund for tech startups. The comment was a dumb remark about how the US will fail in this domain. Airbus is not relevant to the discussion because Airbus is not a tech startup.

So, Spotify and raises eyebrows … SAP. Innovative.

by djohnston

5/19/2025 at 6:54:58 PM

If building airplanes isn't technology, I don't know what is.

BTW, Boeing is in the USA's top 10 exporters, it's not a minor thing.

But yeah the USA has a definite edge in software, if that's what you mean by "tech".

by nickserv

5/20/2025 at 1:10:48 AM

In the context of an article about an innovation fund for tech startups, that’s obviously what I mean by “tech”.

by djohnston

5/19/2025 at 7:31:59 PM

erlang ? skype (rip) ? ocaml ?

by agumonkey

5/19/2025 at 6:25:13 PM

I wonder why US businesses and people import so much stuff from the EU if there isn't anything competitive coming out of it

by ABS

5/19/2025 at 7:56:57 PM

Nobody here is seriously suggesting the EU doesn't compete economically. The conversation is focused on tech companies, which is in the subject of the thread. Broadly the EU competes very well with the US, China and globally more generally. In most tech areas the EU continues to lag far behind the US and China.

by adventured

5/19/2025 at 7:59:08 PM

except you seem to think (like many others commenters in this thread) that "tech" means solely "silicon valley-type startups", which it does not.

I'll give you some examples that usually stun the average Italian hence they usually stun most other people as well. You think Italy and probably think fashion but in fact the Top 10 Italian exports are (first semi-random results):

  1) Machinery including computers: US$116 billion (17.2% of total exports)
  2) Pharmaceuticals: $55.5 billion (8.2%)
  3) Vehicles: $47 billion (7%)
  4) Electrical machinery, equipment: $45.8 billion (6.8%)
  5) Gems, precious metals: $25.7 billion (3.8%)
  6) Plastics, plastic articles: $24.3 billion (3.6%)
  7) Articles of iron or steel: $21.4 billion (3.2%)
  8) Mineral fuels including oil: $19.4 billion (2.9%)
  9) Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $17.4 billion (2.6%)
  10) Clothing, accessories (not knit or crochet): $16.4 billion (2.4%)
I see a lot of "tech" in this list, I had this very same conversation with a German Private Equity last week but they are well aware and invest in "tech", just not the "tech" the average HN visitor think about

by ABS

5/20/2025 at 8:24:38 AM

"Tech" as in "toolmaking" is a category so broad to be almost useless. (And somewhat questionable too, when the likes of Google make money with something that is more of a service : advertising.)

"Infocom" has always been clearer to me, not sure why its usage waned so much ?

by BlueTemplar

5/19/2025 at 6:24:26 PM

Commuter rail, public transit, a social safety net, and I personally would take anything from Volkswagon group over the average Dodge vehicle

by xethos

5/19/2025 at 6:56:52 PM

Dodge is owned by Stellantis, a EU company...

And Ford makes good cars, when they choose to.

by nickserv

5/19/2025 at 9:30:56 PM

My mistake, I'd forgotten Dodge was owned by Stellantis.

That said, multiple American car companies (Dodge, Jeep, Chrystler) going under and ending up owned by an EU conglomorate sure doesn't feel like a stirling defense of GP's claim, I.E., "What the EU builds is not competitive with what America builds"

by xethos

5/19/2025 at 9:23:15 PM

Volkswagen of diesel-gate fame? That one?

by WrongAssumption

5/19/2025 at 9:38:20 PM

I mean, Jeep and Dodge (when owned under their American umbrella corp., FCA) were later found to be using similar defeat devices (see "Other manufacturers [0]). Though if you want to smear them, you may as well go all in and point out they were the original Nazi car brand - not even Tesla has that kind of credibility

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

by xethos

5/19/2025 at 6:26:12 PM

Spotify is a Swedish company and is the defacto music streaming company, Supercell is one of the largest mobile game companies and is Finnish, Mistral AI is French. There are a lot of European companies that have solid footprints in America.

by 9283409232

5/21/2025 at 5:11:46 AM

High speed rail seems like cool tech, but I guess it doesn't compare to the Boring Company Tesla tunnels or whatever.

by mbs159

5/19/2025 at 5:09:53 PM

[flagged]

by chermi

5/19/2025 at 5:21:08 PM

How many of the top level comments are just blanket assumptions that this is going to be corrupt without any pointing at specifics of this proposal? The knee-jerk reactions are strong

by miltonlost

5/19/2025 at 5:35:18 PM

Because it's their experience with how the EU is run. These top level commenters you refer to don't want to waste their time with the specifics is the proposal because they believe that these initiative is a poorly managed redistribution of tax money.

by sowhat25

5/19/2025 at 5:42:44 PM

True. I sometimes forget this is site is more VC bro than tech bro. All that matters to most on here is how easy it is to make money for themselves.

by miltonlost

5/19/2025 at 5:50:53 PM

I don't think VC system is good, but I'm tired of going in to EU calls to only see there's actually no money for start-ups but it's often earmarked to keep big EU companies afloat and competitive. This is in itself not a bad thing, pretty much everyone does it (US military industrial complex for example). So I accepted these as money injection to big business rather than expecting it to tickle down to small businesses or start-ups.

On start-up funding we have a systematic issue of European wealth going to US for investment and EU start-ups going to US to find investment. These EU money injections doesn't solve it imho.

by bgnn

5/19/2025 at 5:31:42 PM

>How many of the top level comments are just blanket assumptions that this is going to be corrupt without any pointing at specifics of this proposal?

How many points do you need on the graph till you're convinced they form a line?

If some person or some org, has a history of spending money and not delivering anything, what are the odds "this time will be different"?

To me, this initiative is just another point on that line.

by FirmwareBurner

5/19/2025 at 5:13:44 PM

Seems comparison makes certain regions look good or bad, and that could lead to accountability which would be good or bad depending upon how you benefit or not from the policy.

That’s part of the problem with globalists who want a single world government, one government for the world deprives the people of choice.

by newsclues

5/19/2025 at 5:01:47 PM

“The bank aims to process startup financing applications within six months, significantly improving from the current 18-month timespan.”

Oof.

The right way to do this would have been to match private financing so the EIB is providing capital but not gatekeeping. (That or commit to giving the first N companies to reach some milestone a bunch of cheap capital.)

by JumpCrisscross

5/19/2025 at 5:12:30 PM

Matching private funding brings the decision making lever to private funders, creating a mechanism to extract tax dollars with minimal government discretion and would be a process ripe for abuse by those with significant capital.

One person's gatekeeping is another person's stewardship and due diligence

by RobRivera

5/19/2025 at 5:16:46 PM

Governments would never deploy capital in ways that are stupid, corrupt or gatekeeping.

One person’s stewardship and due diligence is another’s person’s definition of fraud wealth transfer and crime.

by newsclues

5/19/2025 at 5:34:52 PM

> One person’s stewardship and due diligence is another’s person’s definition of fraud wealth transfer and crime.

Yes, that why you then buy the government and fire everybody who's investigating your many crimes. Much easier that way.

by exe34

5/19/2025 at 5:43:46 PM

Yay subjectivism means no one is right!!!! Definitions are meaningless!!!

by miltonlost

5/19/2025 at 5:28:46 PM

Nor would VCs, obvs.

How long does it take to get a Series A round, and how many bureaucratic hoops do petitioners have to jump through?

by TheOtherHobbes

5/20/2025 at 1:02:08 PM

Easier for government to collect more taxes than it is for VCs to raise more after either fail and go broke.

by newsclues

5/19/2025 at 6:09:24 PM

In comparison to just giving money today? Just look at the number of failed green projects in the EU where somehow the executives got rich and nothing got built or if built failed to deliver. At least with matching the private sector has to put a eur down for each it receives and the fund would own participations in ventures.

by christkv

5/19/2025 at 7:08:18 PM

Another model would be for the EIB to commit money to an investment fund and then run a tender process to select a private sector firm to manage the fund. At the individual investment level, give that manager the usual discretion to invest and manage that VC funds have and pay them a market rate with an appropriate fee structure to do it.

You could also insist on the manager raising a certain minimum amount of matching private sector money to "keep them honest".

by tomatocracy

5/19/2025 at 6:37:59 PM

> The right way to do this would have been to match private financing so the EIB is providing capital but not gatekeeping

Israel did this with Yozma back in the 2000s, China recently with Guidance Funds, and the US with he IRA and CHIPS Acts, so it is a model that does work.

That said, the EIB press release is very vague [0], and it appears to be a proposal right now, and still needs to be approved by EIB's Board of Governors.

Realistically, we wouldn't get a true picture of this until mid-late 2025 at the earliest (notorious European summer season is about to kick in), so there's no point speculating about this until the final version that is passed by the Board of Governers

[0] - https://www.eib.org/en/press/news/president-calvino-tech-fir...

by alephnerd

5/19/2025 at 5:13:16 PM

[dead]

by ihsw

5/19/2025 at 6:29:17 PM

Europe is going to have a hang-over from resting on it's laurels for the past 20-30 years. I don't know if people will be able to tolerate the changes needed to totally stand independent.

If Europe wants to copy the powerhouse tech industry of the US, it's going to have to become more like the US.

by Workaccount2

5/19/2025 at 7:02:56 PM

You mean the Euro should become the world's reserve currency?

by nickserv

5/19/2025 at 7:40:24 PM

Meaning the EU should stop being so risk adverse, stop having 27 different regulatory bodies for the same thing and the list could go on.

People here talked about Israel: the Shekel is not a currency anybody except them use, but they churn out successful startups at an incredible pace. They use their tech talent very well and are not encumbered by a myriad of regulations.

by ExoticPearTree

5/19/2025 at 6:47:25 PM

It's very hard to copy Silicon Valley, even other US regions are not able to do it.

by koonsolo

5/19/2025 at 7:44:19 PM

There's something magical about California and New York (another tech powerhouse).

NYC has this vibe of "getting stuff sone, no BS" kind of mindset. California has this relaxed vibe but at the same time the sky is the limit. I think it has something to do with how the sun shines there and the ocean. You feel like just working and things are going to be OK.

I am always more productive in NYC or LA. And I have no real explanation for that.

by ExoticPearTree

5/19/2025 at 7:51:41 PM

NYC and SF have private capital concentrated in enormous quantity. Look to the preceding 5 decades to see how that happened, it did not spring up overnight.

by dustingetz

5/19/2025 at 6:50:56 PM

I don't think becoming even more neoliberal is going to solve anything for the EU, you people know one button so you all you ever want to do is press it harder to solve any problem, it's hilarious.

by lyu07282

5/19/2025 at 6:41:15 PM

I was happy to read this as a founder who was raised in the UK. I wish I didn't have to move to the US to start a company but it's starting to feel like a joke here.

> The bank aims to process startup financing applications within six months

No good founder is waiting for 6 months. It makes absolutely no sense when VCs can make decisions in days, hours even.

by ayushrodrigues

5/19/2025 at 6:43:58 PM

> I was happy to read this as a founder who was raised in the UK

The UK isn't a member of the EIB.

> No good founder is waiting for 6 months. It makes absolutely no sense when VCs can make decisions in days, hours even.

Speculation, but based on similar initiatives done in the EU in the past, it will target industrial and manufacturing vendors and suppliers (especially as this proposal is linked to KfW).

That said, no point discussing this until the final proposal actually gets presented and voted on by the Board of Governors. Most of what exists publicly is just vague press releases.

by alephnerd

5/19/2025 at 6:46:16 PM

True, but the EU startup ecosystem is small and shared. Only so many places to raise capital from.

by ayushrodrigues

5/19/2025 at 6:48:50 PM

Yep! But the overlap between the UK and EU ecosystem would be dwarfed by the overlap of the US-UK ecosystem.

So long as the EU doesn't have their own equivalent of Index Ventures, I'm not sure an EIB style industrial policy program would have significant impact on the British startup scene.

by alephnerd

5/19/2025 at 6:45:47 PM

Most startups will use funds like in addition to VC funding. It allows you to increase your runway so you’re better positioned for your next funding round.

by cheeseface

5/19/2025 at 6:49:50 PM

Seems plausible but my experience with EU bureaucracy doesn't give me a lot of hope that this is worthwhile for startups

by ayushrodrigues

5/19/2025 at 7:05:51 PM

Which EU bureaucracy, or all of them?

by Ylpertnodi

5/19/2025 at 6:34:27 PM

If anyone is in the US and interested in coming over to Europe to build a startup…

I started an incubator specifically for US based entrepreneurs looking to make the leap from what is, right now, an incredibly unstable place to build, and assist in getting both private and public funding for you, and take care of all the admin and immigration paperwork.

Come to Brussels, Belgium. It’s the most international city in the world per capita, English friendly, welcoming to expats and there’s 0% capital gains tax. It’s also human sized, you don’t need a car to get around.

https://sevenseed.eu/program

Shoot me an email if you’re interested. This program was birthed right here on HN in a Who’s hiring thread. I’ve talked to 50+ founders who have had enough of the current admin and want change.

by scrollaway

5/19/2025 at 7:37:10 PM

From my personal experience this funds most of the time end up being absorbed by big corporations that had the contacts and the bureaucratic muscle. So basically it's throwing away 70B euros of citizen taxes.

by donperignon

5/19/2025 at 8:25:38 PM

Exactly this. Imagine the slowest consultant firms, with the most powerpointists, huge hourly rates for very simple projects that pay peanuts for the not so bright devs...

These are the companies with the connections that are getting the money.

by _zamorano_

5/19/2025 at 7:58:02 PM

It's unclear to me if Europe can move any faster than they can boot strap a VC culture. They can only grow a cadre of VC partners through experience. Some American firms have branches in Europe, and there are some European VCs that have decent scale, but I would guess it's 1/4th the size of the US venture business. Maybe less if you factor out investment that doesn't really look like US venture investment. European institutions should step up in the role of limiteds.

The article doesn't give a lot of details, but the ones it does aren't inspiring confidence. A six month decision process is wildly incompatible with startup needs. EIB might be better off being limited partners in existing European VCs.

by Zigurd

5/19/2025 at 4:55:48 PM

investment is one piece of the puzzle - but you need talent, reasonable cost of living, and a fiscal climate that rewards success instead of sucking any sliver of it with onerous taxes. All those factors of course vary throughout the EU but it would be nice if they took a more holistic approach to supporting tech ventures.

by jarym

5/19/2025 at 5:26:51 PM

The US is adopting isolationist policies based on a nationalist ideology. The government is run by anti-intellectuals. The US economic policy is based on xitter rants, and flip-flops every week. The fickle vindictive ruler is personally attacking businesses that don't make him look good. It's clear that in the US the path to success is now loyalty. The president runs a memecoin.

The EU is getting ready to brain-drain the US.

by pornel

5/19/2025 at 7:48:04 PM

> The EU is getting ready to brain-drain the US.

It is not going to happen, this is just day-dreaming. Yes, I saw the news, but you can't compare a few tens of people wanting to leave the US for ideological reasons to millions of people that stay in the US because they can fare better and make more money or start new companies overnight because they have a great idea.

by ExoticPearTree

5/19/2025 at 5:52:56 PM

I make 4x in the US what I’d make in Germany.

by underdown

5/19/2025 at 8:12:09 PM

The US is not adopting isolationist policies. It's adopting more nationalistic policies, which is no different than how China has been running its economy (and politics in general) for decades. And specifically the four year Trump Administration is pursuing heavily nationalistic policies. There's no evidence the Democrats will keep much of Trump's policy direction, as certainly the Biden Admin and Trump Admin could hardly be more different.

Let me know where you see the US military pulling back from its global footprint. How many hundreds of global bases has the US begun closing? They're expanding US military spending as usual, not shrinking. The US isn't shuttering its military bases in Europe or Asia.

The US is currently trying to expedite an end to the Ukraine v Russia war, so it can pivot all of its resources to the last target standing in the Middle East: Iran. That's anything but isolationist.

Also, the US pursuing Greenland and the Panama Canal, is the opposite of isolationist. It's expansionist-nationalistic. It's China-like behavior (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South China Sea, Tibet).

by adventured

5/19/2025 at 5:06:39 PM

> All those factors of course vary throughout the EU but it would be nice if they took a more holistic approach to supporting tech ventures

All of those things can be bought. One of Europe’s strategic disadvantages vis-à-vis America and China is low availability of big, risk-taking cheque writers. Fixing that today is worth more than a working group to write a paper about a holistic solution in ten years.

by JumpCrisscross

5/19/2025 at 5:35:55 PM

> but you need talent

Thankfully the US is making talent flee, hopefully some of those will wash up in the old world.

by exe34

5/19/2025 at 4:54:04 PM

The folks who allowed the continent to fall behind through over-regulation would like you to know they'll now do a good job at being the capital allocators.

by FaridIO

5/19/2025 at 4:55:56 PM

The continent is well ahead in health, quality of life, justice and society, partly due to regulation.

by closewith

5/19/2025 at 5:04:45 PM

Those are all irrelevant. The market will magically fix everything, don’t you know that?

by whatnow37373

5/19/2025 at 5:06:40 PM

It’s funny because there are people in USA who actually believe health and quality of life are irrelevant because they’re not measured by GDP.

by j7ake

5/19/2025 at 5:37:23 PM

I hope all this stays true without growth. I hope it wasn’t a temporary utopia built on the tail end of centuries of theft and violence all over the world, and a relative peace subsidized by the US Navy. American problems generally last 4 years, and even our bigger problems sit on top of relative self-reliance. As far as I can tell you can’t even heat your homes in winter without Russian or American gas.

by FaridIO

5/19/2025 at 7:27:37 PM

> As far as I can tell you can’t even heat your homes in winter without Russian or American gas.

LOL? Is this some strange side quest started by Russian propaganda? I wish I could link it but there was a literal Russian propaganda ad showing Europeans freezing during the winter of 2022 due to no Russian gas imports... which obviously did not happen.

1. Do you realize that the Russian energy sector is screwed for good, after the start of the war? European gas imports from Russia are basically 0. And Europe has diversified, it's now importing from the US, from Qatar, from Algeria, from a lot of places. Germany built a bunch of LNG terminals in 6 months. Russian gas imports are never going back.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Europe...

The EU (and Europe in general) is investing like crazy in renewables. Heat pump sales are up 3 digit percentages since 5 years ago. EVs, ebikes, solar panels, wind farms, etc, etc, etc. In 20 years there will be hardly energy dependency on anyone external.

> I hope it wasn’t a temporary utopia built on the tail end of centuries of theft and violence all over the world.

You mean, just like the US theft and violence all over the world? :-)

Pot, kettle, something.

* * *

Edit: found the Russian propaganda video: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/zuj7lx/russian_st...

by oblio

5/19/2025 at 6:50:43 PM

> American problems generally last 4 years, and even our bigger problems sit on top of relative self-reliance.

America, the famously self-reliant giant. This has to be satire.

by closewith

5/19/2025 at 5:06:53 PM

I think the concern is the fiscal ability for eu nations to continue to pay for the things that help it stay high on those metrics, especially without innovation.

The productivity numbers for the eu are dreadful so something needs to change.

by kasey_junk

5/19/2025 at 5:33:50 PM

The distribution of productivity gains in the US is beyond dreadful, so something needs to change.

Besides, it's screamingly obvious the US has literally chosen to pivot back to the Middle Ages, so even these captured productivity differences won't be an issue for much longer.

by TheOtherHobbes

5/19/2025 at 6:23:15 PM

How is the US anything like the Middle Ages?

You did say literally so can you do a point by point comparison?

We have other people claiming the US is fascist and one of the aims of fascism was to take European culture and religion back to before the Middle Ages - they wanted to emulate the Roman Empire.

by graemep

5/20/2025 at 4:29:18 AM

That's because many European countries now already had 4 months of basically all media reporting daily of how Trump is dismantling the US.

Public perception for many people is that the US is on its way to become a failed state.

by badestrand

5/20/2025 at 4:49:24 AM

[dead]

by computerthings

5/19/2025 at 6:53:16 PM

> The productivity numbers for the eu are dreadful so something needs to change.

A happy, healthy society does not need to change to meet capitalist productivity goals. Consumption is killing the world, led proudly by the US.

What needs to change are the metrics we use to judge a society, because if financial success leads to the United States, that's the cautionary tale for the rest of the world, not the example.

by closewith

5/20/2025 at 1:17:34 AM

That may be true if the things driving quality of life metrics don’t require productivity. But many of them clearly do (e.g. social security for the aged in the face of demographic shrinking).

by kasey_junk

5/19/2025 at 5:19:50 PM

[flagged]

by slaw

5/19/2025 at 5:26:44 PM

[flagged]

by miltonlost

5/19/2025 at 11:46:12 PM

Look, 6 months is better than 18 but it drives the type of startup you’re likely to get. Anyone trying to move fast just can’t participate. They’re forced to go elsewhere. You can only deal with organisations that can survive and plan for 6 months. What do they do in the meantime? Build? Wait? Especially in AI, the world is moving so fast that you need to make decisions within days, not half a year. How many frontier models and innovations arrive in half a year, while this lot think about the now-outdated proposal?

All you’ll get are sluggish companies designed to suck up the funds. I used to work for such a company. The business model seemed to be whatever would fund hours of researchers time, and travel money for those smart enough to write papers for whatever conference was in a country they hadn’t visited yet. Targeting EU funds was top priority and they could do it by creating some arbitrary “consortium” that generated enough credibility with adjudicators. I hated the waste and the lack of actual goals.

by richardw

5/19/2025 at 5:55:07 PM

As with Germany’s 1€ trillion new credit, of which half goes to the military, so will the EIB ‘inject’ more than half of it into the military. Large established tech companies will get a big part and quantum startups will see their expected cash flow. Good timing for those quantum start ups which have been popping up through the whole EU recently.

by sharpshadow

5/19/2025 at 7:06:59 PM

Investing in the military seems like a necessity given what's going on. One madman to the east was bad enough, now there's another to the west.

The Ukrainians have done some pretty incredible stuff with very basic tools and lots of ingenuity.

by nickserv

5/19/2025 at 5:06:44 PM

When it comes to European tech funding, I'm a big fan of NL Net's Next Generation Internet (NGI) grants[0]. These grants the only kind of investment I care about and the only kind I want to see. My opinion towards this is influenced by the enshittification[1] that has unfortunately been embraced by large tech companies and financial powers in the United States. Overall I'm not confident this is actually good news, but the fact that the financing is also available to researchers seems like a possible silver lining.

[0] https://nlnet.nl/commonsfund/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

by evanjrowley

5/19/2025 at 8:26:22 PM

I can totally second that.

I have just stumbled over a project that was developed as part of that fund. Super minimal probably the funding and obviously only a start, but this has a 'dutch flair' of being practical, usable etc. As always: please send people to teach the germans about how to build things (2 extra cookies if you teach us how to *Railway*)

I do think the way to success for EU is to start with this little elements. Maybe EU cloud infra later relies on one little OS component that is still maintained by 3 people - not one ;).

If we invest our time in something else than cloning hyperscalers - maybe there is a silver lining in form of a technological jump on the horizon. What about a Eurocloud that is a distributed system and not a 'monolith by monopoly'. The Systems we replace are not cheap, so there is even money on the table. Building EU hyperscalers just would suck OS projects dry of their 'IP' and siff money to a account on the caimans or UAE somewhere. Not building them is the way.

Maybe not make this a 'bring US startup culture to europe' thing as well? It leads to monopolies and a lot of 'loosers'. Not a super efficient way to build what in fact is infrastructure.

by therebase

5/19/2025 at 5:31:27 PM

I don't understand why people in the comment seem to obsess with “bureaucracy” and “taxpayers money”. The EIB is, as the name says: a bank. It has some strategic targeting running, but the way it works is through making loans. The EIB is making profits with its investment activity!

by littlestymaar

5/19/2025 at 6:58:52 PM

EIB has EUR 500B of capital, invests about 80B/year, and makes about 2B/year profit [0]. European states buy EIB bonds which pay interest [1].

This new 70B will come from bonds sold to EU member states. The states need to approve purchasing the bonds.

EIB earns about 3% profit. Private banks earn about twice that [2]. EIB is a non-profit organization.

EIB makes about 10% of its loans outside of the EU.

[0] https://www.eib.org/attachments/lucalli/20240237_070525_fina...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Investment_Bank#Fundi...

[2] https://www.bankingsupervision.europa.eu/press/speeches/date...

by mleonhard

5/19/2025 at 11:20:04 PM

The banks are a part of the government in the economic zone where they operate, or you could also say that the government is a part of the banks – since the banks have the strictly political privilege to conjure money.

And bureaucracy is not limited to government offices.

by carlosjobim

5/19/2025 at 8:40:55 PM

What does “inject” mean here? Iirc, Israel did something similar a while back and boosted a ton of startup early on, but they quickly died off and they realized you need the scrutiny from free market VCs to create competition.

for a lot of startups

by bli940505

5/19/2025 at 9:22:43 PM

They should start funding Mozilla, imho. EU's stance in consumer protection is a great match. Plus it is strategically smart to have a browser under your own control.

by amelius

5/20/2025 at 4:33:00 AM

EU funds to pay for American engineers in California who earn 5x what European enginners get, great.

by badestrand

5/20/2025 at 8:18:07 AM

Yes, lure them to the EU. Open an office there.

by amelius

5/19/2025 at 4:46:49 PM

Great idea and I think they should 10x it, but... the person in charge according to the article is EIB President Nadia Calviño. She is a Spanish career politician and a socialist lawyer with background in media and broadcasting. They rarely put in charge experienced people or at least engineers. It's so sad to see the EU crumble due to a cast of career bureaucrats squeezing it to its last drop. There are so many great universities and researchers to build things.

by alecco

5/19/2025 at 4:53:54 PM

>They rarely put in charge experienced people or at least engineers.

Because most of the time, the point of such government "investments" is to be another hidden wealth transfer from the taxpayers into the pockets of those with government connections (your Siemens, T-Systems, Capgemini, Thales, etc). That's a feature, not a bug.

Imagine Dell, Zuck, Jobs, Page and Brin back in the day, waiting for handouts form the US government to fund their companies, instead of VCs. None of their companies would exist today.

Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects, you can't rely on them to build you the consumer focused private tech industry the US VC industry did. It's not something achieved through central planning, and the EU refuses to get that, so it keeps throwing money into the "maybe it'll work this time" bonfire.

by FirmwareBurner

5/19/2025 at 5:31:17 PM

Yeah! Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

by AStonesThrow

5/19/2025 at 6:12:58 PM

So I used to buy all those publicly, slowly I started divesting from any public utilities to the extent I could. Everytime I switched from public to private, I didn't see all the bad stuff happening people seem to think would happen.

I switched sanitation to a private septic system. I bought a share of private well to avoid public water systems. I built my own roads and live in a community where all the roads are private easements so no tax money (you can drive for miles and miles without ever hitting a public road). Medicine, I made friends with a private practitioner that was educated at a private university. There are basically no police here, so I learned todefend myself. I send my kid to private school. Out of your list, the only thing I benefit from tangentially is public roads but they are way worse value than our privately funded ones (I first built mine with nothing more than a hatchet and a shovel for $0 and then later learned how to operate a backhoe).

I'm well aware I still use some public services, even if indirectly, but when I compare the costs they are all much more efficient when I have switched to private infrastucture vs trusting politicians not to squander it. My local taxes are now down to next to nothing, and when I look at what exactly I am getting for the ~30% I pay out to the state and federal the only thing I seem to be getting on ok deal on is the US navy protecting trade routes, maybe contract law courts, and nukes for mutually assured destruction.

by ty6853

5/19/2025 at 5:03:38 PM

> Imagine Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brinn back in the day, waiting for handouts form the US government instead of VCs.

The US hands out money extremely generously through federal grants, DARPA and orders which have to be made to American companies through things like the Buy American Act. Silicon Valley itself was spurred by the DoD spendings.

by StopDisinfo910

5/19/2025 at 5:07:52 PM

>The US hands out money extremely generously through federal grants, DARPA and orders which have to be made to American companies through things like the Buy American Act.

You're ignoring my point or arguing in bad faith, since I already addressed this to the comment you're replying to.

The EU also spent a lot into defense and R&D, the difference is the US gov didn't spend money in the start-up consumer market, but they let private entrepreneurs commercialize some of the solutions that trickled down from the defense tech into the consumer sector to make money (CPUs, 3D graphics, radios, etc).

This is where the EU is deficient and you can't fill this entrepreneurial visionary void with government bureaucrats shoveling taxpayer money around to their friends.

What did DARPA have to do with Apple's success in the music and phones business? What DARPA money went into the iPod or the iPhone? They were made with commercial off the shelf chips that the likes of Nokia and Ericsson also had access to, not some super secret US DoD tech.

Just like many SV companies, Philipps, Ericsson and Nokia also were government founded from selling radars and radios to the military initially before the tech trickled to consumer. Yet Apple is now a multi trillion company(that was nearly bankrupt in the 90s) and the EU phone companies have withered away. Why is that? Is it because of "DARPA and the government"?

by FirmwareBurner

5/19/2025 at 5:14:26 PM

> US gov didn't spend money in the consumer market

The U.S. spends obscene amounts of money on crap from Microsoft and Amazon and Oracle and Google.

by JumpCrisscross

5/19/2025 at 5:21:58 PM

Government buying from a monopoly is a bit different than government financing an early stage startup as OP described

by breppp

5/19/2025 at 5:16:40 PM

So does EU on Siemens, Thales, T-Systems, Capgemini, SAP, etc plus hundreds of other politically connected body shops peppered around Brussels. What's your point here, where are you going with this? That all governments have their preferred go-to monopolies for services? What's that got to do with the start-ups I was talking about?

And Amazon got off the ground from Bezos selling books online from his bedroom then pivoting to webs services, not from receiving government handouts to start a e-commerce business. These are the kind of scale-up success stories the EU lacks and can't be done thorough direct government intervention.

by FirmwareBurner

5/19/2025 at 5:29:17 PM

Your point:

> Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects

My point: well, the US government literally funded what became the VC landscape you seem to imply can’t be spurred by a government and still routinely fund very generously companies which then become industry behemoths.

Every new promising fields in the US is flushed with government handouts through DARPA grants, federal research grants or supplying contracts. This money then irrigates the whole fields as companies do business with each other.

It goes all the way to the VCs. Take a look at the list of the US biggest investors and see how many of them got rich through companies having the state as their biggest customer.

Heck, Siemens and Thales which you seem to despise are basically acting like dozens of American companies which are entirely funded by the DoD but on a smaller scale.

by StopDisinfo910

5/19/2025 at 5:32:27 PM

>well, the US government literally funded what became the VC landscape

I've already addressed this point here in the comment you're replying to, but it seems people like to argue in abd faith, or jump to comment without fully reading everything. Let me copy it again here: "The US government didn't give Jobs taxpayer money to design the iPod, he had to scrape it himself wherever he could and convince people that licensing music will be the future, and it paid off big time. That's the beauty of the free market that decides which products live or die, not the government."

>Every new promising fields in the US is flushed with government handouts through DARPA grants

What did DARPA have to do with Apple's success in the music and phones business? What DARPA money went into the iPod or the iPhone? They were made with commercial off the shelf chips that the likes of Nokia and Ericsson also had access to, not some super secret US DoD tech.

Just like many SV companies, Philipps, Ericsson and Nokia also were government founded from selling radars and radios to the military initially before the tech trickled to consumer. Yet Apple is now a multi trillion company(that was nearly bankrupt in the 90s) and the EU phone companies have withered away. Why is that? Is it because of "DARPA and the government"? Come one mate.

by FirmwareBurner

5/20/2025 at 8:45:23 AM

Nokia in particular became tremendously successful. You cannot use Nokia as an example of a failed startup.

by BlueTemplar

5/19/2025 at 6:10:51 PM

You do realise the fact that some companies can innovate without government money doesn’t in any way invalidates the claim that the US government does indeed give handouts.

I am lost on why you fixate on Apple or why you talk about some secret DoD tech. The DoD buys a ton of things which are not secret.

And yes, the amount of money the US spends on its companies is a significant driver in the US economy success in a way which is not dissimilar to China through with more steps involved or Europe for that matters which also does it but on lesser scale.

There is no "come on" here.

by StopDisinfo910

5/20/2025 at 7:55:34 AM

I was only arguing against your previous claims ("Silicon Valley itself was spurred by the DoD spendings") with examples that EU did the same and yet has no SV of its own, and that the success of the US tech companies comes from the private sector, not the government intervention.

This new comment adds no extra proof or value to your original claims.

by FirmwareBurner

5/19/2025 at 5:07:47 PM

the USA venture system has built the most addictive and invasive tech system yet -- ads + phones. Hot on their heels is an invasive and controlling behometh called China. None of these are clear winners, in fact it remains to be seen how long this is stable. Its not intellectually honest to claim victory for the USA based on VC practices IMO

by mistrial9

5/19/2025 at 5:23:13 PM

[flagged]

by miltonlost

5/19/2025 at 5:02:19 PM

You are using the word "socialist" as if it implied "bad". I find that to be a very unreflected point wothout further elaboration. Most of Europe is built on socialist-democracy. Wether it works "better" or "worse" than the USA way can be debated. But it is definetly not "bad" per se.

by StrauXX

5/19/2025 at 6:25:40 PM

You are twisting my words. I informed correctly she has zero experience or credentials to manage this project. She was picked because she is part of the Spanish Socialist party (currently ruling) instead of being picked for being the right person for the job. I would've mentioned the equivalent if it were a politician from Macron's center-right party, for example.

Socialists milk the funds for their NGO friends, and likewise the center-right politicians divert the funds to their corporate backers. Two sides of the same coin.

by alecco

5/19/2025 at 7:39:26 PM

I am in the process of moving my startup from Canada to Germany. I started in India, so I have experience running a bootstrapped business on three continents. I am not looking for funding, and in fact use the business profits to invest in other companies.

Dealing with German bureaucracy is the hardest thing I have done in my life, perhaps second only to bootstrapping my business. Bureaucracy isn't a side effect of poor planning; it's tool to control individual liberties and capital, without going full communist.

For the first time, I am considering selling my business. I want Europe to succeed, but I see no way how. Any little faith I have in EU actually resides in a handful of underdogs like Estonia and Poland.

Most of that €70B is going in the pockets of bureaucrats and consultants, assuming any startup sees a dime within 3 years.

by nish1500

5/20/2025 at 9:30:35 AM

What is the motivation to move startup from Canada to Germany, if I may ask?

by akreal

5/19/2025 at 4:56:58 PM

Good for EU for trying to improve tech market, but I recall seeing another thread here at HN why it can't be solved by simply throwing money at it.

by pknomad

5/19/2025 at 10:28:55 PM

If you want to start something in tech- you got to eastern europe in europe. Everywhere else, established industries and clubs will leach all the motion from you. But in poland, the baltics, Finland -you somehow can start things and its still reasonable easy to set things in motion. And there is nobody there to stop you.

by PicassoCTs

5/19/2025 at 9:11:02 PM

Does anyone know if any non-EU citizen can get such funding to start up a company in Europe? Say, an American?

by hintymad

5/21/2025 at 6:19:16 AM

Even if you were a local, you'd have to be "in the network" so to speak. Then you could push a meme project with some buzzwords that align with their political views and you would be allowed to dip in. Additionally, the EU is maliciously anti-wealth, even if you fund it yourself, they will actively cripple you with nonsensical regulations and taxes to make sure your company does not take off.

by bone_frequency

5/21/2025 at 6:45:46 PM

> EU is maliciously anti-wealth, even if you fund it yourself, they will actively cripple you with nonsensical regulations and taxes to make sure your company does not take off.

I'm a little cynical about this. Apparently EU has lots of wealthy people and they get to keep their wealth for generations. It's just that we don't necessarily even know who they are or how they keep generating wealth. Per Taleb in his book Skin in the Game:

"Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent[1]. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.[iii]"

[1] 39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 % of the income distribution, 56 % will find themselves in the top 10%, and 73% percent will spend a year in the top 20 %.

[2] The type of distributions –called fat tails –associated with it made the analyses more delicate, far more delicate and it had become my mathematical specialty. In Mediocristan changes over time are the result of the collective contributions of the center, the middle. In Extremistan these changes come from the tails. Sorry, if you don’t like it but that is purely mathematical.

[ii] HBR article by Joan williams https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-t...

[iii] Ref http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-t...

[iv] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/piketty-and-pare...

by hintymad

5/19/2025 at 10:01:59 PM

€70bn is 150,000+ YC seed rounds?

This seems like A LOT of cash filtering into the system whichever way you cut it.

by andy_ppp

5/19/2025 at 7:41:30 PM

As someone working on a project funded partly by the EU : there was no bureaucracy or very few.

It's great.

by maelito

5/19/2025 at 9:24:08 PM

Can you share what vehicle you used for funding?

My experience is that we had to hire consultants from big corp consultancy firms just to guide us through the documentation needed and the application process.

by DoingIsLearning

5/19/2025 at 5:44:07 PM

I wonder what percentage of that money would be spent on just complying with various regulations.

Then it would be interesting to see this % comparison with US and China. Could be strongly correlated with ROI.

by option

5/19/2025 at 5:11:04 PM

This will be a transfer of money to existing big corp on BS projects that go nowhere. How about they just use the money as a cheap credit pool for VC's one a 1:1 match for private investments and maybe they can even make money from this.

The person in charge is not fit to run a small coffee shop much less a 70B fund.

by christkv

5/19/2025 at 7:12:20 PM

The US has a start-up culture heavily centered around venture capitalist investments. The EU is currently trying to be the venture capitalist and to create a European start-up culture where none was before.

I think this is a terrible idea, because it does not address why there is no European startup culture. Europe has tech talent and Europe has money, yet it has no start-up culture. There are many reasons for this. To me the most important ones are:

- Many EU member states have very start-up hostile labor laws. In Germany many tactics/offerings US startups use to hire talent are illegal.

- The wage difference between hard work at a startup, less hard work at a large corporation and very low stress work in a government office is minimal. Working for a startup is almost never financially rewarding.

- The mainstream social democrat conception of work, which much of the population shares, is totally at odds with American start-up culture.

Money does not solve any of these problems, because it does not answer the single most important question. Who is going to do anything with this, that is actually worthwhile. I have seen dozens of these EU funded projects and as a tech enthusiast I think many of them are exciting and cool and fun and interesting. The number of actual useful products I have seen is at zero.

by constantcrying

5/19/2025 at 7:18:04 PM

You mean ultra performant RISC-V 64bits microarchitecture CPU at 18A manufactured in EU?

by sylware

5/19/2025 at 4:55:35 PM

Imagine if AI does become so powerful UBI is a necessity. How would europe be able to pay for UBI without money coming in and taxes being paid to fund it? Things like this seem critical for the future of the EU and yet I'm super sceptical this will lead to openai etc level quality.

by qoez

5/19/2025 at 5:02:36 PM

At what point would AI necessitate UBI? I'm assuming your idea here is, roughly speaking, that at some point, AI will displace a large section of the work force, rendering them homeless and unable to feed themselves, and that to prevent this, UBI would become necessary. But don't we already have homeless folks? Haven't we already been through technological revolutions putting people out on the streets? If this historical precedent is anything to go by, the politically dominant class is perfectly content with people going homeless on account of not being able to find a job. Seems to me that the classical solutions of pumping drugs into the streets, immobilizing the downtrodden, and straight up slavery through the prison system, are much more likely to happen than UBI

by wesselbindt

5/19/2025 at 5:35:07 PM

if enough workers are displaced due to this, and they do not receive some form of income, the politically dominant class will be in danger

by dudefeliciano

5/19/2025 at 5:38:41 PM

Or they make money the way B2B companies do; which seems like companies just shifting money around on the upper layers without it ever really reaching the hands of lower classes.

by qoez

5/19/2025 at 11:30:35 PM

But the thing is that there's other ways of dealing with discontent in the working class. Sure, UBI is one of them, but there are less pleasant solutions (just do slavery, or have a well paid class of kapos, or sow internal strife by pushing an "it's the Jews/Muslims/trans folks" narrative with the media that you own), and history shows that the politically dominant class is mighty partial to that kind of solution.

EDIT: Maybe I'm too cynical, but as far as I can see the last time serious improvements to the material conditions of the working class were made was when the soviets were still around, and the threat of a worker's revolution still seemed somewhat realistic. I think the politically dominant class has become quite adept at suppressing that kind of thing, and UBI does not seem to be part of their preferred playbook.

by wesselbindt

5/19/2025 at 5:05:51 PM

Let’s all focus on not waging bloody goddamn war against each other first before worrying about AI anything.

by whatnow37373

5/19/2025 at 5:02:27 PM

> Things like this seem critical for the future of the EU

Solving faraway hypotheticals in lieu of actual problems is half of the EU’s problem.

by JumpCrisscross

5/19/2025 at 5:11:44 PM

I've never found someone with creative enough accounting to make UBI work. Just purely on numbers:

57 million UK adults getting £1000 a month (It'll leave you dying on the street in 1/3rd of the country)

Over the course of a year = £684 billion. Current total government spend is 1,278 billion

If you abolished all forms of social care including welfare, pensions, child care, disability (the lot). And education. And the NHS. you could do it providing you also dropped defence by 2/3rds.

UBI is madness.

by swarnie

5/19/2025 at 6:16:37 PM

> 57 million UK adults getting £1000 a month

You phase it in. You start with something a little more than UC of, say £400/month for people not receiving pensions. You increase as it can be afforded. it gives people a great deal of security.

So far fewer people (37m of working age) getting less than half the amount you came up with costs. That is £278bn offset by reducing welfare spending. You would need to continue housing benefit and some others if it was that low so you could not dismantile the entire system.

> It'll leave you dying on the street in 1/3rd of the country

I doubt that - it is not a decent income, but most people would earn on top of it. That is the whole point. It would give people a greater incentive to work than the current system which reduces welfare if they earn. A lot of people will not work because they are no better off if they do.

OBR projects welfare spending to be £338bn by 29/30 anyway.

You are leaving a lot of things out. For one thing if it was taxable income (as pensions and many benefits are) tax revenues would increase too as most people would pay on it.

It would provide a huge economic stimulus which would further increase tax revenues. People on low incomes spend more of their income. Some of that would be on things with consumption taxes.

It would give people a great deal of financial security.

You cannot calculate the effects of a huge change like this on the assumption that nothing else changes.

by graemep

5/19/2025 at 6:20:30 PM

£1000 a month for a single person certainly sounds like poverty, but £2000 a month for a couple sounds more manageable. If they each find a side gig that pays just another £100 a week, they're suddenly into the top half of households [0] - even better than that outside London.

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...

by dmurray

5/19/2025 at 7:43:10 PM

That's in line with the OP's point that it's not really affordable compared with the current system, for all that system's flaws

The fact that a UBI which set at a rate low enough to make some existing benefit dependents would also be a generous subsidy to homeowning couples who might be able to use it to to retire a decade or two early isn't one of its strong points

by notahacker

5/19/2025 at 5:14:56 PM

This also assumes that government tax revenue doesn’t drop, and with most of the population unemployed, that will likely not be the case.

by freeone3000

5/19/2025 at 6:18:34 PM

If AI was putting people out of work at that rate the remaining businesses would be hugely profitable so there would be a huge tax base. The economic output would be the same or higher.

If you are suggesting people would choose not to work if we had UBI, the evidence from trials so far is that it does not happen.

by graemep

5/19/2025 at 8:03:12 PM

Corporation tax is much lower and easier to dodge than income tax. Corporation taxes were only 11% of UK government income compared to 28% for personal income tax, 18% for national insurance and 17% for VAT (sales tax). If a company did develop AGI, it would sell services in the Uk and pay licenses to the technology in a subsidiary in a low-tax durisdiction like we have with ireland for the past couple of decades.

by zipy124

5/19/2025 at 5:24:39 PM

Even if AI can became so powerful it eliminated all office work there would still be jobs for people to do involving moving or manipulating physical matter, I wouldn’t worry about it. We need cooks, cleaners, mechanics, nurses, movers etc.

AI alone is not enough to kill off all jobs. UBI isn’t coming.

by deadbabe

5/20/2025 at 8:54:10 AM

At such a high level, money is irrelevant : it's just a token goverments implement for signaling purposes in the economy.

by BlueTemplar

5/19/2025 at 6:04:18 PM

You're asking how Europe would pay for a large scale social program? I hope you don't live in the US my friend because if AI gets to a point where UBI is ever needed you better get comfortable sleeping outside.

by Jackpillar

5/19/2025 at 7:52:34 PM

Europe's finances are in dire straights under the heavy pensions and existing government spending. The US also has high debt, but has much lower taxes than the EU so can theoretically raise revenue if it really needs to, while Europe has little room for more taxation

by daedrdev

5/20/2025 at 1:53:39 PM

In the context of an AI revolution influenced requirement for UBI, the political mobilization & effort required to sort the financial situation of Europe is exceedingly more attainable than the effort & mobilizations required to (A) passing a UBI bill, (B) raising taxes (lol c'mon), and (C) distributing said resources into a social safety net in the US that is not means-tested to hell and equally distributed and fought at every corner by corporate America.

We're the only developed western country on planet that doesn't have healthcare as a human right and you think our governments will pass a universal basic income?

by Jackpillar

5/19/2025 at 6:26:41 PM

Given that all startups work 32 hours per week.

Thats alot of money to spend.

by bitlad

5/19/2025 at 5:12:43 PM

[flagged]

by dachworker

5/19/2025 at 5:17:49 PM

Can you be more specific? Which politician is using this fund in a corrupt fashion, to help which friend? Please provide names.

Or are you simply expressing the same meaningless general cynicism that is so predictably and boringly parroted whenever any government tries to do anything?

by landryraccoon

5/19/2025 at 11:13:12 PM

If you assume that the previous poster is right and do a casual web search for corruption with EU fudns, will you find anything?

It is so prevalent that your question makes as much sense as demanding the names of soldiers killed in the Ukraine war to believe the war is real.

by carlosjobim

5/19/2025 at 6:41:45 PM

Only names?

Is it even valid unless it's full names, dates of birth, addresses, bank account numbers, receipts and notarized video evidence where they explicitly admit to being corrupt?

by 77pt77

5/20/2025 at 5:17:58 AM

> Can you be more specific?

See the last wave of arrests in Brussels. (some defence lobby - they wouldn't touch the politicians).

by hulitu

5/19/2025 at 4:44:37 PM

> Drawing on the current geopolitical landscape, Calviño sees the uncertainty generated by US President Donald Trump's economic policies as an opportunity for Europe.

The opportunity of wasting the hard earned money of the citizens she means.

Have they considered doing useful stuff like removing regulations, lowering taxes, fixing the immigration mess, etc? You know, what actually made America an innovation hub.

This will end the same way it always does every time the EU gives away money to economic sectors they are jealous that the US have and they don’t: a select few will fill their pockets with nothing to show for it.

by jaoane

5/19/2025 at 4:51:08 PM

That’s never been the European way of doing things. You can’t beat America at being America.

From the East India Companies to Airbus, strong European companies have been made around strong European states.

by sillystu04

5/19/2025 at 5:17:06 PM

You should ask Isaac Newton (yep, that one) about these strong European companies:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.001...

Btw: the East India trading company is still used in economics schools as an example of state interference in trade and what can go terribly wrong.

by spwa4

5/19/2025 at 5:00:54 PM

Bad example.

The East India company era had WAY less regulation all around, way lower taxes, less types of taxes, a very attractive simple investment climate (the literal founding of the concept "stock market", in its simplest and most primitive form) and close to 0 (illegal) immigration. They also had no euro, no socialist EU and no self-imposed limitations on energy conversion (there was no electricity, but wind was huge and allowed for mass production of stuff).

by bboygravity

5/19/2025 at 5:06:15 PM

When companies were operated by royal charter and owned by aristocrats there wasn’t much meaningful distinction between dividends and taxation.

> They also had no euro, no socialist EU and no self-imposed limitations on energy conversion (there was no electricity, but wind was huge and allowed for mass production of stuff).

These are the diseases of weak states, incapable of creating state ownership enterprises that could dominate the world.

by sillystu04

5/19/2025 at 4:53:29 PM

> You know, what actually made America an innovation hub.

An innovation hub or a capitalistic, fascistic hellscape about to collapse into itself?

> This will end the same way it always does every time the EU gives away money to economic sectors they are jealous that the US have and they don’t:

I think you are so far down the propaganda rabbit hole that you can't see the reality. Europeans do not want the US oligarchy. This move is to try to distance the bloc from the failed experiment that is the States.

by closewith

5/19/2025 at 7:05:02 PM

In what reality is giving politicians a fund to pick winners and losers in the economy going to prevent fascism?

The tech sector in the "fascist hellscape" is paying its workers 3-4x what Europe is, and Europe is doubling down on the policies that got it there.

>I think you are so far down the propaganda rabbit hole that you can't see the reality

You built your whole argument on a future collapse you've imagined for across the pond, rather than engaging with the topic at hand. You are the one who refuses to see.

by missinglugnut

5/19/2025 at 8:22:49 PM

> The tech sector in the "fascist hellscape" is paying its workers 3-4x what Europe is, and Europe is doubling down on the policies that got it there

The absurd income inequality in the US tech sector is not the boast you think it is.

> You built your whole argument on a future collapse you've imagined for across the pond, rather than engaging with the topic at hand.

The collapse of US society has already occurred.

by closewith