> due in part to burdensome privacy regulations.

A large part is due to their approach to startup investing and chronic undercapitalization. GDPR is coming up 10 years now and the worries about it were overblown. What hasn't budged is Europe is very fiscally conservative on technology. Unless it's coming from their big corporations it's very hard to get funding. Everyone wants the same thing, a sure bet.

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bpodgursky 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think this is a very rosy framing.

GDPR showed that once you are a ten-billion dollar company, your compliance team can manage GDPR enough to enter the market. For a startup, starting in the EU or entering the EU early is still extremely difficult because the burdens do not scale linearly with size.

This means that yes, US tech giants can sell into the EU, but the EU will never get their own domestic tech giants because they simply cannot get off the ground there.

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yardie 7 hours ago | parent [-]

My company did not retain customer data or retained very little. So compliance for us was very simple. If your business venture relies on that PII data you're going to have a hard time. And I'm not exactly sympathetic since I'm regularly getting notified from HaveIbeenPwned about another PII leak.

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bpodgursky 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure what you're looking for here. If your position is "it should be difficult to make a company that has PII" you won't get any significant AI or consumer tech companies in your jurisdiction. That's just reality, they use PII, they personalize on PII, they receive PII, that's how they work.

If that is your goal, OK, that's a choice, but then you can't say "oh GDPR fears were overblown". They caused exactly the problems people were predicting, and that's what EU leadership is now trying to change.

	▲	hdgvhicv 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If I sign up your company I can opt into that personalisation at signup time. You have no business stealing my personal data until we enter an equal agreement.