Writing from a German startup right now, I can't quite follow the author here. Granted - German copycats and especially the Samwer Brothers have brought some bad feelings into the community... but Berlin is getting better and bolder every day. It's basically almost all the goodness from Silicon Valley, but without the hype and craze. It's a friendly, crazy and green city with great work ethics - you don't live for working, you work for a living. Contrary to the article, accelerators, VC funding and the war for talent have long arrived here for sure - but it's all still pretty calm and well-thought out. Maybe there's still a little less innovation here, but on the other side, it's much harder to get funding without a business model that makes sense. Color definitely wouldn't happen here. We got all the cool things and conferences, but I'm pretty glad we're doing it the German way: No hire and fire, health insurance for everyone and the income disparity feels just so much more just compared to the states. I once thought of moving over to Silicon Valley, but by now I'm pretty glad that everything I want has moved over here without bringing the TSA, mass surveillance, corporate politics, discussion about the validity of evolution, a deadlocked two-party system and a growing helplessness over the unstoppable and unlimited capitalism that's ruining society already over there. All the best from Berlin - and if you feel the same, maybe it's time to come over? Dom
There are no corporate politics in Germany? That's pretty awesome.
In all seriousness though, you're cherry picking some of the bad stuff about the US. I'm sure if you wanted, you could do the same thing about Germany or anywhere else. For instance: the weather, the lack of anything remotely resembling a mountain near Berlin, and, most importantly, the lack of good Mexican food.
> the lack of anything remotely resembling a mountain near Berlin
Bavaria and Switzerland are not that far. Polish Sudety even closer and much cheaper.
> most importantly, the lack of good Mexican food.
Tex-mex is an American obsession. In Europe we have mediterranean. A doner-kebab is for us what a taco is to you, and say what you want, but kebab is a snack there's no shortage of in Berlin.
> but my definition of "not far" means I can ride my bike to it
haha, well... I thought of going for a weekend, not after work. There are a few nice Mexican restaurants in Warsaw, so I know the deal, still sadly mex didn't somehow fall into the 'grab a taco and walk' category as I see on American movies, this space is totally occoupied by kebabs.
(btw, HN could display a country next to the nickname, so there's no "oh, you're not from the US too".)
Greesy kebabs with a lot of sauce 'spicy, mild or mix?' are a European invention I think. I've been to a few middle-eastern countries including Turkey and haven't seen sauce in kebab ever (still they give sauce in Berlin).
That is because they are Shwarma's and are completely different again. The kebab is a Berlin invention (according to TimeOut Berlin). Which makes sense, a marriage of the German sausage + bread culture with some dish from the middle east.
Wait, wat? Kebab is middle-eastern food with hundreds of years of history. 'Doner kebab' (the popular one in a bread) is Turkish. German sausage has nothing to do with it.
There are lots of ways you can serve kebab/shoarma and none of them are 'wrong' per se. The popularity of doner and roll is probably just a matter of convenience for customers and business owners. The sauce thing was just an observation, and frankly I don't know how what local influence made it served that way in Europe.
according to Time-Out Berlin. Yeah, according to Wikipedia, I'm wrong. Never trust a travel guide. I've been to the Emirates and what they have there is entirely different to what they have in Germany. Australia, France and the Czech Republic have something different, which is 'the greasy thing'.
and that's what I said. cultures mix, cuisine is imported, adapted to local preferences, exported again around other regions, that's how it works. You were only wrong saying that kebab was invented in Germany, it's just that there's where the modern well-known in Europe Turkish doner started do gain broad popularity - that's probably what your guide meant. I assume it was the saucy thing we have all around Europe.
All dishes are different around the world - spaghetti, sushi, pizza, hamburger, etc. Sometimes a dish is luxury in one country and casual food in the other. It always differs, even across regions of one country, regional influences, etc. It doesn't mean it's a different dish by definition.
No, literally - the middle-eastern "kebab" is called cevapcici in Europe (at least in Ausria/Germany), it's a totally different dish from dönner kebab.
Before taking its modern form, as mentioned in Ottoman travel books of the 18th century,[6][7] the doner used to be a horizontal stack of meat rather than vertical, probably sharing common ancestors with the Cağ Kebabı of the Eastern Turkish province of Erzurum.
In his own family biography, İskender Efendi of 19th century Bursa writes that "he and his grandfather had the idea of roasting the lamb vertically rather than horizontally, and invented for that purpose a vertical mangal".[8] With time, the meat took a different marinade, got leaner, and eventually took its modern shape.[7] The Greek gyro, along with the similar Middle Eastern shawarma and Mexican tacos al pastor, are derived from this dish.[9] There are several stories regarding the origins of gyros in Greece: One says that the first "gyrádiko" was "Giorgos" who brought gyros to Thessaloniki in 1900[citation needed]; another legend from a meat production company states that döner was first introduced in the 1950s in Piraeus by a cook from Istanbul.
Let me rephrase. Of course there's corporate politics here. There will always be because greed is a very human trait. The difference is that greed is something commonly seen much more positive in the US. We just fired our president because of a "corruption scandal" that would have been piecemeal for Romney or Berlusconi (we're talking about some couple thousand bucks here). It's one of the first countries with a politically meaningful and rapidly growing movement for net neutrality and liquid democracy (-> pirate party). I wasn't trying to paint things better than they actually are - I was trying to raise awareness that you can still have a great quality of life and innovation in a business climate that's full of regulation, taxes and an exhaustive social net. If I stepped on anyone's toe, I'm sorry.
>It's one of the first countries with a politically meaningful and rapidly growing movement for net neutrality
Although it does not use the term "net neutrality" (which I had never seen before about 5 years ago), the 1956 "Consent Decree" (a kind of court ruling), which resolved the second anti-trust suit against AT&T, imposed a version of net neutrality on the U.S. telephone network, and I have seen at least one writer credit that "Consent Decree" with enabling the growth of the internet beyond the purely government-operated stage (because the growth of the internet at that stage came from large organizations' leasing "dedicated copper" from AT&T Long Lines, which wanted to but was was unable to turn down requests for such leases because of the Consent Decree).
This version of net neutrality was restricted to large corporations (IBM was a very vocal advocate of this version of net neutrality) and the judicial system, and had almost nothing to do with popular opinion or electoral politics, but it was the law in the U.S.
Berlin is awesome. I know is a question with a very flexible answer but what are the monthly net rates a Py/Django/DB expat developer can expect in an average size company (not boring bigcorp) in 2012?
Very flexible indeed. Anywhere from 30k€/y (entry level, junior dev) till 60-70k€/y (top talent with work experience and some management duties) is possible for a regular full time job - sometimes more, but extreme rates are still pretty uncommon here. (Note though that you've got around the same standard of living here than for double the amount in dollars in the valley.)
One main difference between Europe and the US is that wealth concentration in America is much, much higher than in Europe.
This is one of the main forces behind the VC scene: for a multi-millionaire, throwing a few hundreds here and there to some young gun is nothing, even if you lose them all you'll still have your Porsche and your boat.
In Europe, wealth is more distributed, which means that, for many, a bad investment of a few hundred thousand euros can make a real dent in the family fortune. We have less poor people, but less uber-rich people as well, it's a trade-off; it so happens that this trade-off works well with heavy industry but less with the super-dynamic "business at the speed of light" of this new millennium.
This is not to say we should cut some slack to the uber-rich (most of them come from aristocratic families and don't deserve to be where they are anyway), but rather that we need to find different, european ways of generating seeding resources for startups, and that's a bit of a bitch.
I would say liquid wealth. There are plenty of very, very rich people in Europe, but their wealth is tied up in land, property, art, etc that can't easily be "invested".
I don't think it's so much a lack of funds, but a lack of motivation and an entrepreneurial focal location. Unfortunately europe's riches are typically not entrepreneurial and state-subsidized entrepreneurship fails. Maybe the successes of a first generation of entrepreneurs will create such a hub.
There used to be great entrepreneurship hubs in Europe... in the 1500s. Wealthy europeans are more likely to invest in experimental art than experimental businesses nowadays.
We've got billionaires in Germany, too. But those guys do invest their money in shitty financial products or odious investment deals (lookup Schickedanz Quelle). As starting a company is a matter of attitude so is investing into startups.
There are platforms like seedmatch for example which generated 100k in 46 minutes from various people, so there's light at the end of the tunnel.
It seems that some kind of mutual fund could be a way for a large number of people to pool enough modest individual contributions of wealth into a fund big enough to seed a large number of startups.
If US based startups would start globally instead of only nationally, they wouldn't have the "problem" of copycats. It's the same with movies. If the movies would come out globally, people would have less incentive to pirate them.
And even if there are copycats, so what. I didn't hear ebay complain when they bought their German equivalent. It saved them a lot of time and know how, if not money. And Facebook certainly doesn't complain about their German "competition".
I'd say live and let live. Also: If you can't beat them, just buy them. Otherwise ignore them.
I participated in a German Government startup program in 2004/2005 called EXIST-SEED (nowadays called EXIST Gründerstipendium). I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. The funding I got was relatively modest (35 kEUR in my case -- as a consultant I now earn more than that within 4 months) and I was drowned in bureaucracy. To this very day, I am arguing with the German IRS because they do not want to treat a failed startup as a business and thus refuse to deduct the expenses I had. I literally ended up spending more time with bureaucracy than doing real work.
If you compare the modest startup funding provided by the federal government to the amount spent on the German cash-for-clunkers program in 2009 ("Abwrackprämie"), which was 5 billion Euro, you get an idea what the government's priorities really are: Firstly big (automotive) corporations, then a lot of nothing, then the Mittelstand, again a lot of nothing, and then as an also-ran the startup scene.
You're ultimately fighting an uphill battle as a founder in Germany: A tiny private VC scene, meager support from the government and a mind-boggling bureaucracy.
I don't see this changing so I drew the frustrating conclusion to become a consultant fleecing fucking big corps.
+1 to confirm the bureaucracy around governmental/European funding: I lost 6 months on preparations for them and finally quit.
If I would have continued (and be accepted) I would have lost another 3-12 months until signing the contract.
After that I'd be caught in at least 2 waves of unexpected monitoring and re-verification (which ultimately means not receiving the money in time from the state, all while I'd still have to pay my taxes, employees and suppliers according to the contract)
And then there's the other issue that a failed founder in Germany is pariah.
From reading here and elsewhere, in the US you seem to get a reasonable chance (and maybe even some recognition) for having tried to start a company (and managed to keep it alive for some time).
Here, you failed, so you will fail, so why should anyone employ you?
In a (possibly flawed) attempt to cheer you up: be aware that you basically say
- failing is frowned upon in Germany
- I do not want to run that risk
- so I will not try to start a company
Thereby effectively continuing the mantra "do nothing you could fail in".
I think that entrepreneurship has got a lot to do with "acting in spite of" and would not assume the situation in the US (I don't know personally) to be like there are happy parties where people are celebrating crashed businesses...
Definitely agree. Belgium has a similar culture to Germany and despite mucking around quite a bit, none of my friends or family has ever made a disparaging remark about my entrepreneurial vagabondry. They probably think it's weird for me not to just go work for BigCorp, and it's not like I get a ton of support from them, but they do try to be encouraging even in the face of failure and they certainly don't frown upon it.
There's probably a kernel of truth to the idea that Americans are more entrepreneurial and less judgmental than your average European, but the idea that, in Europe, failure turns you into a pariah seems like a nasty myth that becomes real simply through repeated mentions.
This comes up often. Can you elaborate on how one becomes a pariah after failing a tech startup? And how does it make it impossible to get funding again? Is it because the banks will not give you loans due to bad credit or sth?
So in my case, the Finanzamt argues that what I did for the startup does not fulfill the definition of a "gewerbliche Tätigkeit" and consequently I can't deduct the "Vorsteuer" of my expenses. (As a business you get the VAT you paid on expenses back from the Finanzamt, which is called Vorsteuer.)
Download the Umsatzsteueranwendungserlass and go to page 63 of that PDF (section 2.3. "Gewerbliche oder berufliche Tätigkeit") to find a list of things that indicate whether you're having a business or not:
In theory, if you fulfill the definition in that PDF, you're on the safe side. In practice however, the Finanzamt often tries to fleece you by simply making a claim that something can't be deducted, shifting the burden of proof to you. My particular case is still in dispute, I have an appeal (Einspruch) running against their decision. Most likely they'll lose, but they try to fleece people nevertheless because they figure that people will just pay and not spare the time to counter their evil tricks. If you do decide to shoot back, you have to be a German native speaker so you can read the laws and you should have some experience with the tax system. Alternatively, get a Steuerberater but be prepared to waste more money on your Steuerberater than what you would otherwise have paid for the Finanzamt's tricks.
One final word of warning: If your startup fails and you wind down the company, be prepared that the Finanzamt will conduct a detailed examination of the tax declaration of the past 3 years (Betriebsprüfung/Außenprüfung). This can drag on for several years because they're pretty slow. Apparently they routinely do this whenever a company is shut down.
"People in SV are not afraid to fail. In fact, having failed before is considered a great quality. If you haven’t failed, you’re either inexperienced or suspicious. Startups try, fail, try again, pivot, fail and try again."
I think aside from maybe regulation, this is the biggest issue that Germany has and it's also the same one that Japan faces. The fear of failure and losing face. I'm not even sure that you can change this short of a few decades.
In the UK, if you fail, its pretty much game over. You get black listed and pretty much, that's the end of it. If you fail and go bankrupt, then set up again, you are almost seen as a fraudulent criminal. In the US, it seems to me that you can try and fail as much as you like, as long as you keep trying and don't get criminal. Trying seems to be enough to get some level of respect. It is absolutely one of the things the US does so much better than here in the UK, possibly all of Europe.
(I'm normally critical of the US, so its nice to take the opportunity to offer praise!!!)
Yeah, similar in Poland. One who failed is a looser not worth listening to, because he did stuff wrong, ergo he doesn't know anything. I think that's one pretty demotivating factor of business cultures of European coutries (don't know if all though) compared to the American way where if you failed 10 times, you're 10 times more experienced. I was always amazed how people who had lots of failing businesses are invited as speakers to US conferences, something that seems impossible around here.
No doubt there are some differences with the US here; the start-up career path perhaps isn't necessarily so widely known about and recognised outside the tech community, nor is it quite as breathlessly cheerled as in the bay area.
But still, this isn't really the UK (or at least the London tech scene) which I know. A failed tech startup is very different to personal bankruptcy or some shady business operating on the edges of the law. And I think a lot of the tech sector here see it as a positive thing if you've learnt from it.
Very true. We also have a different attitude to firing and hiring in the UK and thus the recruitment market is quite different. For instance I don't know of any recruitment agents in the UK that specialise in start-up positions (and I would be more than happen for someone to point some out!)
There is a big difference between being part of a business which "failed" and personal bankruptcy - that's the benefit of limited liability, after all.
In my opinion outside of SV, the more progressive the metro in question is; the closer they are to SV's view (the inverse is also true). I think places like NY, Austin, and Boston are also like this. I'm sure there are more places in the US like this, though I wouldn't know: Atlanta (I used to live here but many things have changed) and Seattle come to mind.
Context: I founded companies in CEE and moved to London.
Many people mention mindset and cultural attitude in the comments.
To me "mindset and culture" are just symtoms. The reason is very simple:
The markets in europe (compared to the US) have:
Same downside. Smaller upside.
This leads to less risk friendly and safer (slower) patterns and systems. Incorporated over centuries this leads to cultural attitude and mindset.
It's not that this is the best attitude for doing startups. But it is a (market) selected attitude for doing business within these markets. The best ways to break this: Minimize your downside (skip problem-solution phase by copycating) or don't be limit to the market (by far harder due to media (and ultimately network) bubbles).
June 1.-3. i'm organizing a Startup Weekend in Frankfurt Germany, to get a strong Startup culture and community started here, and this will include more events in the future. I set out to do this not to copy the culture of silicon valley, rather the culture of the Amsterdam Startup scene and especially the Appsterdam Initiative.
When i was at Startup Weekend Amsterdam and got to meet Mike Lee and others it occured to me that this was a concept that was much more realistic for a european and especially german city.
In Germany getting VC Money is not easy and you have to be very careful how the deal is done because of Tax issues. Taking risks is very unpopular in Germany and failed startups are viewed upon as wasted money and time, failed founders are looked upon as pariahs.
To combat this all that helps is a very strong community that has a common denominator where people share their point of view which is different from most of the people around them and help them with problems that are common only to startups in germany.
Non-Startup-event-wise our city isn't bad. Our Webmondays draw >100 people, our Barcamps over 200. We've got a local Hackerspace which offers 3D Printing Workshops among other things. We have a strong web culture, although Co-Working spaces are still being set up and are still more expensive than i would like them to be.
Frankfurt is known mostly as a banking city and some Venture Capital Groups are based here. It's not ideal as office space doesn't come as cheap as elsewhere, but the infrastructure in Frankfurt is superb and I've never met so many qualified Freelancers as in the Rhine-Main-Area.
The founder of one of the current YC Company Popset, Nicolas Bös, is from Frankfurt and very excited that we're building something here, which comes to show that we have the potential here.
It's a European cultural issue. Denmark is not any different.
There are big discussions in Denmark right now about how to create growth. So the following can be applied to Germany as well I think.
I am saddened to see that most politicians thinking is:
1. Education
2. Green Tech (Wind Mills and Wave Mills primarily with government funding. Yes you heard that right)
3. Upgrading your education
4. Education
5. Innovation
All completely useless. And here is why:
1. Less than 5% of people with higher education in Denmark starts companies.
2. Green tech is not a thing. It's a term a vague one like UX. Let it go on record that the next bubble will be the green tech bubble.
What we should be talking about is technology, chemistry, biology, physics and various combinations of those.
Instead as seem to be the case in most of Europe eager to ditch nuclear (an actually fairly environmentally friendly energy source) governments are betting on specific technologies. Completely disregarding that it's impossible to get any proper economy into them anytime soon.
What can I say, sigh...
3. Denmark has a fairly large group of blue collars. Of course it makes some sense to try and upgrade them and I am sure it helps with some of them. But the battle to get a proper production industry up and running is simply futile and wont work.
First of all, the danish salaries are some of the highest in the world. Danes have some of the most protecting laws to the blue collar worker (no I am not at all against that, just trying to explain why it wont work) That means we are loosing to Germany and Poland and Sweden.
Danish Engineer ca. 40.000 DKK
Polish Engineer ca. 15.000 DKK
Indian Engineer ca. 5.000 DKK (if not less)
Just to show you the difference here. Anyone having done outsourcing knows that the quality can be different but it really depends on what kind of project we are talking about.
Second. The US lost 4 million jobs to the Chinese between 98-04. In the same period of time the chinese lost 18 million jobs to ... the robots.
Everything that can be automated will be automated and believing that we can somehow resurrect an industry that never really where that competitive is just pure insanity. Even engineers are loosing jobs.
4. Yes education once again. This is just to illustrate how much the government believe in this. Recently a study was done that showed that companies with most Phds had the highest revenue. This was then used as a proof to show just how important education is for the future of this country.
Now anyone who have spent just a couple of days on HN knows one of the biggest fallacies gets called out here.
"Correlation != causation"
Of course the other take on this story could be. The companies with the highest turnover had the most Phds hired.
The report made no attempt to claim connection between the number of Phds and the financial success of the company. No. Leave that the to the politicians.
5. According to our politicians we are supposed to grow from the experience economy and through innovation. Our cultural minister even have made a "task force" of cultural celebrities from around europe who are to travel around europe and find out how to use art as a vehicle for growth and innovation.
Yes you heard it right. This is the kind of insanity we are dealing with here.
Never mind that saying we need innovation has as little effect on the ability of a country to innovate as saying green tech creates green technology. The politicians actually believe that they can intellectualize growth and progress.
In other words. Everything that is right about SV is wrong about Denmark and my guess most places in Europe.
My impression (foreigner in Denmark) is that visibility and what "counts" is some of the problem as well. For example, university masters programs track employment statistics of their graduates, but the statistics, in many cases, count people who start their own businesses as basically in the "not employed" bucket, so there's no incentive for universities to promote entrepreneurship, and to the extent they do, they get no credit for it anyway. The statistics are basically looking for, "graduated, got a job at Maersk".
I don't think the salaries are the issue, though, because Danish engineering salaries, while nice, are slightly lower than Silicon Valley, so they can't be the main difference.
Another complaint I've heard is that there are some issues around entrepreneurship and the social-welfare system, because if you start a company and it fails, you aren't eligible for the same benefits as an employee who joins a business and then gets fired. That's also true in the U.S. (no unemployment insurance for entrepreneurs), but the U.S. social-welfare system is weaker so it's not as big a differentiator; losing the a-kasse is a bigger deal. On the other hand, the fact that Danish startups get free healthcare for themselves and employees is a plus.
Salaries are not the issue for engineers. But for production blue collar it kind of is. That plus the fact that automation is really starting to kick in.
I mean in 30 years from now, can you see construction workers build houses the way they do today in most modern societies?
I certainly can't and yet some young guys today is going to choose to work in that field because that is what they think they can manage.
I mean hell even the creative industry is feeling the heat in many ways.
Danish healthcare is a plus but I think it's only a matter of time before we will see the end of it.
It's unsustainable because you can never put enough money into healthcare. 100% taxes arent enough to compensate.
The US system is broken in many ways but so is the Danish. It's just not visible yet.
With all due respect, but it feels like you're railing against those political priorities because they don't suit you, not because they are wrong.
I would love to have a startup hub somewhere in Europe (C'mon London, kick it up a notch!) but there are tons of other ways for governments to create jobs and further the economy.
We shouldn't automatically assume that fostering tech startups is macroeconomically superior to, say, creating an environment that's enticing to big multinationals.
> The challenge is to create businesses that can sustain themselves and thus help grow the economy.
Again, what evidence is there that tech startups achieve this goal more easily than any alternative?
> how wouldn't growth of danish economy suit me if that was the case?
You'd appreciate any kind of economic growth, I suppose, but wouldn't you prefer it if, in the process, you got a vibrant startup scene out of it, rather than if it happened all through education and clean tech? Nothing wrong with that, it's just that, say, your average student or blue collar worker would have a different perspective. The government's job is to figure out what would make most people happy, not what would make techies happy.
"Again, what evidence is there that tech startups achieve this goal more easily than any alternative?"
Where did I claim that?
I was showing evidence and argument that the proclaimed solution from the government isn't going to solve what they attempt to solve. I.e. just because you have better educated population doesn't mean that you get growth.
I suppose, but wouldn't you prefer it if, in the process, you got a vibrant startup scene out of it, rather than if it happened all through education and clean tech?
As a french, I get very strange feeling reading comments here. Germany is presented as an example by French gov for it's better industry (presidential elections are in May ).
Does that means that Germany is not better, or that France is even worse ?
There is a huge difference between the state of the economy in general and the state of the startup scene.
That being said if we compare by economic growth I'd expect Germany and France to lead in Europe at the moment. Speaking as a German I have the impression that the people in France are underestimating there economy somewhat.
I think one of the reasons there are more copycats in Europe, mainly non English speaking Europe, is because of the low number of US startups making their product multi-lingual, marketing or attempting to support those markets.
I am a German engineering student. I will try to describe the situation as I see it from here.
1. Start-Ups are lacking incentives:
Germans are obsessed with evaluating risks and will almost always go for the safe bet, rather the risky way. Its somehow ingrained in our culture. So the college grad has two options: 1- Land a safe job in the industry (eg. automotive), company benefits maybe even a company car. Thanks to relatively good job security and the good state of the economy you can probably work there for a long time, maybe not the highest income but good for suburban life + 2 spain vacations a year. 2 - You have that Idea. But there is a high chance you will fail. You will have to spend alot of time learning company laws, tax problems, etc. And while there is a chance that you can be a wealthy man while building you dream product. You will spend most of your time thinking about failure (even if you dont even have wife and kids to support). - By the time I finished building product x (and then probably fail), I will have reached a higher position and a company car a bigcorp - why bother the risk.
Also talent acquisitions are rarely head of, we don't have Google or Apple who will aquire a small media/tech company for the people. Big money is in other industries that have a higher barrier of entry than web-startups.
2. Germans don't get the valley VC investment strategies:
Throwing millions of $'s on company's that dont have a business plan, just because it may be the next google/facebook/...? Considering failure as the norm, just because one of 100 company's you fund will go public. Germanys company culture is built around long time growth and substitutability. Big companys like Bosch ( €51billion revenue, 300k employees) are family owned (and 92% goes into a charity). Try to explain your SV funding business model to a german business person and he will shake his head and dont even try to get a bank loan.
3. Lack of entrepreneur networks:
SV is described in the way of "you can bump into a VC guy in a coffee shop and pitch him on your idea". Everyone know everyone, several events, money everywhere. I am not 100% up to date with the berlin scene but I dont think it is quite there. Although universities try to built networks and encourage students to start a company its nowhere near the possibilities of SV
4. Perfection mentality
Also known as "Ingenieurs-Mentalität". Its also a cultural thing I guess, especially at technical institutes / universities. If it isnt perfect you dont even think about bothering someone else with it. Never ship something that is half baked.
That said I consider myself an entrepreneurial person but also struggle with those points. (Like most people on HN, I guess) I have a long list of ideas. I sometimes start to build but stop when I realize how long the way to perfection will be. I set myself a goal for this year to complete one project and release it just for the heck of it. I will report when I reach this goal.
Battling with the "Ingenieurs-Mentalität" is my biggest issue right now and I know some people who have the same problem.
It's a weird problem to have but it really seems cultural.
I got some half-baked ideas that would be not far from an minimum viable product, but I can't help it and overthink all possiblities and eventually stop working on that idea because I'm bored with it and seemingly can't get it off the ground.
Your first point raises an interesting issue: For an individual, working for a start-up is almost certainly a bad bet. Most likely the company you start will go out of business. Moderate upsides are rare. Massive gains are incredibly rare (although obviously they're the ones everyone points to and remembers).
However for the German (US, etc) economy, having a start-up culture is valuable. That's where the future technologies are incubated and future companies formed.
I suspect most people in the US who choose start ups and entrepreneurialism do so because of US culture and because they wilfully ignore the personal risk.
Working for a startup is low risk in terms of getting to work with decent tech, with smart people, etc. It also raises your employability in general. It's higher risk financially, sure, but for a funded company, you still get paid a decent wage while working, so that's not as big a risk.
the german startups are all formed within large companies, and fall under "R&D". The intrapreneurs get their job security (as researchers, or incubator members). And if their ideas get to market, they get royalties/spun off into a seperate division.
I think the culture is too different, I also think their education system has something to do with it, relatively few go the gymnasium and then to university(thus study formal computer science) where as in the US, university is something everyone is expected to do. I am not sure how their vocational education is for computer science, or even if their expected or encouraged to start up on their own.
I'm currently in the 12th grade of a Gymnasium in Germany and while we get a lot of information on jobs, possible areas of study and things you can do after studying at a university creating or joining a startup is not even considered.
The risk is generally considered to be so high that you have to be unbelievably good at what you are doing, insane or most likely both to take it under consideration.
That's exactly why I and a friend go into schools and talk about entrepreneurship for some years now. They won't ask for it, so we call them. But only in Cologne right now.
As a first order of approximation, I think there are two important dominant factors affecting proliferation or lack thereof of startups in a country:
1) Social Rule Obey Factor: This signifies how the people in the country are willing to follow social and legal rules, even when they appear frivolous. This factor obviously is hard to quantify, but an easy heuristic to compare countries in this dimension is to look at their traffic pattern: In countries like India, China, Russia, Turkey the traffic is mess, due to the fact people do not really care about the rules, e.g. "if other people obey the rules I can get ahead with not obeying". Having a high SROF, i.e. "follow the leader type society" is an impediment to innovation because innovators and entrepreneurs are by their very nature anti-authoritarian and like to go against the rules (e.g. Feynman's safe breaking adventures at Los Alamos), this is sometimes called the "hacker culture". On the other hand, too low a SROF leads to anything goes type societies which may be detrimental to developing important aspects of the entrepreneurship culture, e.g. IP.
2) Entrepreneurial Spirit Factor: This is what people have discussed in their comments here, a lack of fear of failing, taking risks, etc. The ESF of a society correlates highly to historical factors, e.g. in the US it's high due to the "pioneer spirit", in Israel due to the sense or urgency (surrounded by enemies). It's very hard to boost up ESF in the short term. As Adam Shand has put it: "We can't create a culture of freedom and innovation, but we can build a network which fosters its growth", i.e. you can only try to nourish ESF by creating secondary tools (e.g. VCs, entrepreneurial networks), you can't increase it directly.
So, I divide countries (again, simplifying things, of course) as follows:
|------------|--------------|---------------|
| | High ESF | Low ESF |
|------------|--------------|---------------|
| High SROF | US | Most of Europe|
|------------|--------------|---------------|
| Low SROF | India, China | |
|------------|--------------|---------------|
The US is in the best spot, having both factors high; however, its SROF is just at the Goldilocks point, neither too high as to stifle innovation or too low to lead to chaotic behavior. This is achieved by the existence of very low SROF cultures, i.e. SV in an otherwise high SROF country. Countries like India and China (also Russia, Turkey, Brazil, etc.) have a high ESH but low SROF, which makes things chaotic and slows down the set up reliable entrepreneurial institutions. As mentioned in most of the comments here, Europe has to get over it culturally induced low ESF. Again, I think, the reason is cultural: Most European society historically had rigid class-based societal structures (e.g. even today people are generally classified by their vocation) so there may be an instinctive aversion to people who want to shake the structure and cannot be classified easily. This, of course, doesn't explain the success of India, with its rigid caste structure. I think the very strong jugaad culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad), which is also prevalent in countries like Russia and Turkey may explain this. As raganwald emphasizes, "At either end of the educational spectrum, there lies a hacker class".
Who is in the bottom right cell? An example would be most Arab countries, with dismal levels of ESF (not needed due to oil money).
