As a European living in the US I believe what is holding Europe back more than anything is the fragmentation. Companies like Google and Apple come out of the US because of the pro-business policies. However, I believe the gigantic, relatively homogenous market is by far the biggest advantage. If Europe spoke predominantly a single language and had largely the same regulations Europe could stand a much better chance. That's too often overlooked and the lack of a European Google or Apple is just blamed on socialism.
If market size is more important, we'd expect most European startups to come out of the largest countries, even after weighting by population, right? And if entrepreneurial culture or socialism was more important, we'd expect some metric for those to be correlated, right? Really curious as to whether this analysis has been done in an authoritative way.
One reason that's often put forward for why Sweden breeds a disproportionate amount of successful companies is that the Swedish market is so small that they have to quickly learn to expand and navigate the global market. Meanwhile in "big enough" markets like Germany and France there's enough room for expansion without going global. So it could go both ways.
The list would be dominated by American and Chinese companies even if each person on the planet had an equal chance of founding a huge company. The question is whether big countries like the US and China would be overrepresented per capita. And looking at that list, it's not at all clear. UK, Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea all have companies near the top.
Yeah, I've long suspected the same, that the big market is a significant advantage. It's easier to grow in a big market, that's why the US has (seemingly) more big companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, McDonalds.
