EU company landscape is run by dinosaurs founded 50 years before US ones
The European company landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence 🦖
🇪🇺 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950
🇺🇸 Only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950
🇪🇺 Median year top EU companies were founded is 1913
🇺🇸 Median year top US companies were founded is 1963
Difference: 50 years!
*top 25 companies by size in US and EU
This was very hard data to collect because most EU companies have gone through lots of mergers and they like to state their founding year as way more recent than it actually is (e.g. LVMH was founded in 1987, but actually originates in Louis Vuitton from 1854)
So yes the EU company landscape is run by dinosaurs mostly, the latest big company to actually get founded in EU is clothing maker Zara, aka Inditex, in Spain, almost 50 years ago
Meanwhile the latest big US company is Facebook in 2004, 20 years ago, not so great either actually
If you'd add China to this you'd see more big young companies
The point here is that you see large scale incumbent companies are ruling Europe, and European governments are servicing them with regulation, so that new startups cannot flourish, and they love that
Not a conspiracy, just a status quo that benefits the powerful, big and rich companies and families of Europe
P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:
