Yes, location is becoming less important but there are differences in locally available talent and money. That’s the main reason incubators are forming in Europe too. If you are in the wrong place you will be starved for money and talent and others can outperform you. That what happened a lot, American companies outperformed European ones and when they needed to expand into Europe they could just buy the companies that are most similar in a few key markets here and expand from there. Being able to grow quickly enough to prevent that is sort of important if we want to own our tech giants.

Thank you, this explains it for me. The situation is still stupid tough...

1) you need a systems programming language (but not for OS development) that is safe and not too hard to learn

2) you need to run “scripts” but don’t like the hassle of lugging around the dependencies so you go for binaries instead

3) you work on green field cloud projects that run in/on kubernetes

4) you have a team of people that try to use every feature of a language regardless of it it is sensible and need a language that limits them

5) you need to be able to program something that can run in parallel that you can wrap your mind around

That said, I don’t use golang. If you have a hypothetical use for a language you wont get into it, you need a practical use where it makes sense or you will most likely use your preexisting tools because its more comfortable.

Yea, somewhat disappointing. My mx 3s mouse has problems with the click switches and the mouse isn’t all that old. I’ve also read about others with the problem. I would also like to be able to buy a replacement case for when the rubber starts to come apart. Has not happened on this mouse yet but on all other rubberized mice I’ve had. Replacement key caps for my keyboards would also be nice.

As somebody working in software startups in Europe, what I’ve seen is a pretty broken system. The companies have a wild west attitude towards sales that leads to irregular contracts unpredictable money flow.

I’ve worked on trying to predict our income based on our contracts and because of a couple of sales people a lot of the contracts where basically inscrutable, we brought two different experts in to “fix” my “failing” just for them to give up and do what I did and predict future income based on billing rather that contracts. That made us less interesting to the more risk shy European investors. It didn’t help that we abused a system that was designed to run an IT shop with because that is what the company started at years earlier.

The other thing is that until you make about 25 million revenue a year nobody is interested in you. To risky, not enough early investment and companies are money strapped. At that point a lot of the companies that come in don’t come in to invest but to buy up the company and those companies are usually American. If you do get investors and those investors are Europeans they are often Vulture investors that prop the company up, make it more presentable and just sell it on to the next investor. In one lucky case the IT startup was bought up by a European company that wasn’t in IT and saw the investment as a way to future proof itself.

The investment for startups and in particular IT startups in Europe is very broken and the companies that benefit from it are often American. It is getting better but I think the US can still snap up European companies for its own growth for the next 10 to 20 years.