> Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the opportunity for "unlimited" growth is limited.
If you manage to get 10 million customers, your business is already successful on a gigantic scale, and you should have all the know-how in taking on the world. The success of other people is rarely the reason why you are failing in your own life. Start somewhere, do something.
> The money being thrown around the US is like nowhere else on the planet.
That's true and it's awesome. In Europe money is only thrown to real estate owners and any enterprising people with a dream are cordially invited to fucking forget about it, shut up, and fall back in line. Even if they already have a proven track record. They take their idea to the United States and are treated incredibly well in comparison. Even if their business will only be a niche business with limited reach, like 99% of businesses.
> Europe money is only thrown to real estate owners and any enterprising people with a dream are cordially invited to fucking forget about it, shut up, and fall back in line.
That's simply not true. Europe is a continent that includes startup powerhouse Sweden, UK that has a ton of them too, and France that is making massive strides (just check out Station F). It might be true in Slovakia or whatever, but you simply cannot say that broadly for the whole continent.
> That's true and it's awesome
Is it? It is to an extent, but it also encourages nonsense (Juicero, the AI spice mixer), pump and dump tech-isation of existing stuff with no business model (Wework) and outright scams (Theranos, Nikola).
If the barrier to entry to get money thrown at you is so low, a lot of it gets wasted. So the rest really really has to make it big, which gives some perverse incentives (like Uber dumping to driver old school taxis out of business to then jack up prices, because if they're not a monopoly/biggest fish in town, they wouldn't have been worth it)
Nations like Sweden and the UK might have a healthy startup scene despite not getting good help from banks and other capital institutions.
Go search the web for startup financing in Sweden. One of the big banks has a page dedicated to this - but they're not offering their own money, instead they're pointing to government grants and government lending programs.
> If the barrier to entry to get money thrown at you is so low, a lot of it gets wasted. So the rest really really has to make it big
You can't do your accounting like that. One entity does not make up for the losses of another entity. Money is cheap in the US and thrown around to bad startups and good startups. In Europe money is expensive and mostly available to governments or for real estate feudalism.
If you manage to get 10 million customers, your business is already successful on a gigantic scale, and you should have all the know-how in taking on the world. The success of other people is rarely the reason why you are failing in your own life. Start somewhere, do something.
> The money being thrown around the US is like nowhere else on the planet.
That's true and it's awesome. In Europe money is only thrown to real estate owners and any enterprising people with a dream are cordially invited to fucking forget about it, shut up, and fall back in line. Even if they already have a proven track record. They take their idea to the United States and are treated incredibly well in comparison. Even if their business will only be a niche business with limited reach, like 99% of businesses.