26 lessons I wish I'd known when I started as a business owner trying to achieve success. Today is my birthday so I wrote this article "26 Lessons in 26 Years" to help anyone who wants to build a great company and live a good life: https://t.co/dsQCfvln49
eu/acc 🇪🇺
Turn nuclear back on (looking at you Germany), ramp compute, prioritise easy visas and tax breaks for exceptional people starting new companies, remove incentives for regulation circle jerks and pay people to have children.
Confident Europe and the Uk can become powerful again but not with one hand tied behind our back.
This is so true
Went to a beautiful luxury 🇯🇵 sushi restaurant in Europe a few days ago
An 🇺🇸 American man and woman were sitting at the table next to us, eating sushi, drinking sake, while handing over papers with business plans and charts on them to each other and scheming their next $$$ plans
Whether that's good or bad, that's GDP (and innovation) in the making
The most concerning part about this is that most Europeans don't realize how stagnant Europe has now become
Europeans are literally blue-pilled and are mostly concerned with climate change, immigration and the Ukraine war
Nobody in Europe is thinking why increasingly everything they use is made in China running on American software
The knee jerk reaction is to proudly pass regulation against American tech
The chad reaction would be to reduce regulation so that European entrepreneurs would actually stay in Europe to build European startups increasing Europe's GDP and making Europeans richer!
I am European and I have regular conversations about this with people here, it's just not on top of mind AT ALL! While it should be because Europe's GDP is stagnant and the real innovation now happens in US and China and elsewhere, not in Europe
People in Europe do love to complain about rising cost of living and the increasing unaffordability of living, but they don't realize why. They point at foreigners/immigrants as the problem, which can't be the whole story
Other Europeans I talk to get visibly upset if I ask them about stagnant GDP numbers: "why should everything be about money?" they say in a thick German accent
The whole story is that Europe has made it very difficult for people to start a business, raise capital, innovate and get the reward for taking that risk, so why would anybody?
And for the Europeans that do, it's way easier to open a US Delaware company, raise capital in US, sell your stock or IPO in the US, because why even do that in EU, where it's too hard? The proof is in the pudding, if it was so easy in EU then why is startup funding in US $270B AUM with 330 million people vs $44B AUM with 746 million people? That's almost 14x bigger startup funding market per capita
Why doesn't EU have ANY trillion dollar companies? While US has six? Why isn't there any European company in the top 10 of largest companies? While 80% is American?
Why is Stripe, a company founded by two Irish brothers, an American company and not a European one? It could have been
Very few Europeans will agree with this post because they can't see it, if they would've seen it, we wouldn't be here in the first place!
What's the role left for Europe in the future?
Signed,
- A techno-optimist European who'd love to see Europe become wealthy again
92% of grades in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies classes at Yale are A or A-, vs 55% in Mathematics. The math majors must just not be as smart. (Table via @sfmcguire79.)
Most people fail to grasp how important culture is to the success of an economy. Anyone who's had a chance to compare the work ethic and productivity of Europeans to Americans would not be surprised that the US consistently outperforms Europe.
The easiest way to become a better business owner is to study long-term value investing. Read everything you can about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s approach - I guarantee it will transform your business results.
When a business segment underperforms, you have only a few options. Either pivot/re-position the business, come up with a strategy to differentiate your offering that is hard to copy, or milk it for cash and exit.
#1 mistake businesses make: planning their strategy without anticipating their competitors' actions. The only strategies that have value are those that are hard to replicate. A great plan which is easy to replicate will not generate superior profits.
One implication of this is that most CEOs and executives overestimate how much influence they have over their company. Most of the profits a business generates come from the competitive structure of the industry and the positioning of the company.
Most of the business and financial results you're getting today come from actions you took years ago. What will your business results look 5 years from now based on your current actions?