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Rudolf van der Berg's avatar

A serious problem in the analysis is to look at "Europe" and the "USA" only in terms of global behemoths. Scaling to the largest scale is easier done in the USA, because of the size of the domestic market, which in turn creates global visibility. However, Spotify, Booking, SAP, Just Eat, ASML, Ericsson, Nokia, Orange, Ubisoft, Telefonica are examples of European players with massive reach across the world. Amazon may be big in retail in the USA. In continental Europe it faces more difficulty, because of stronger local competitors, such as Coolblue in the Netherlands, Mediamarkt in Germany etc.

The capital market issue is a massive thing however. A tech startup in the Netherlands will have a really hard time getting tens of millions of funding. To have any chance in the USA that type of money is needed. Scaling to global level is then eeasier from the USA than from the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany.

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Anupam Chander's avatar

Thanks for the careful read of my paper, Kate--and what a great post, canvassing and appraising Anu's and my approaches. I learned from your framing.

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