The root cause of that is the lack of a true Capital Market union.
In the US, you can get VC across state borders and VC can invest in any US company regardless of their location. Not in the EU.
Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible. And even if managed, now that NL investor has to repeat the entire process for Poland, Spain, Malta and other countries.
> Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible
If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones. So that would be more of a problem for setting up VCs in the EU rather than attracting capital in general, as the same would apply to the rest of the world. Is it easier for a US or Singapore VC to invest in an Japanese startup vs an Estonian startup? As far as I know the answer is a "no", but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
This is because there's no unified capital market.
A texas VC can invest in a startup in Chicago and a startup in Florida can raise money from NY and so on.
> If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones
Yes, because there's no unified capital market. You describe an effect not the cause. With 27 member states, if such regulations are bi-directional, you'd need 351 of such "regulations". If one way, you'd need 702.
In the US with 51 states, there aren't a total of 1,275 "regulation contracts" between all states, there's one, and it's federal.
I'm sure there's at least one US state where it's a pain to set up a company. So startup founders don't set up in that state but in Delaware, or recently maybe 1-2 ones. Germany is that state for the EU where it's a pain, so you set up your legal entity elsewhere.
In countries that have it. In Slovenia we have no such legal entity and so starting a business requires, at the very least, ~400€/month for a single proprietorship (unless you are already employed elsewhere already, then it's <100€) or even more for an LLC-type company (since it requires one fully employed person at a level above minimal wage).
Opening a company in Estonia is very cheap but in Spain the manager/CEO needs to be an "autónomo" (like a self-employed tax status). This costs thousands of Euros per year. Something like 2,400-30,000 Euros per year, every year, forever.
> In addition, water is almost never wasted, only moved around.
Technically yes, vapor goes to the atmosphere etc. But in certain areas, data centers are effectively removing water that was previously used for farming.
Yes it's TS and types compatible. What about Rails or Redis or Linux? The most brilliant projects I know come from one person. Everything is hard to sell if you don't have corporate money stream for marketing :) No?
Linux and Redis have funding and millions of users. So much depends on these projects. Rails is less popular these days but still a project with a long history, financial backing, and a huge ecosystem.
Imba has some brilliant ideas and Sindre is extremely smart... but IMO the decision to go with a custom language has hurt the project more than it has helped. It won't work with any of the tooling around JS/TS. Development is also extremely slow. More than 4 years after announcing v2 here on HN[1], it still hasn't been released.
The reality is that almost nobody is using Imba and it currently sits at about 2000 weekly downloads on NPM with no growth. Even Mithril which is also super niche has more downloads than Imba [2].
I have a tech startup in Estonia and I agree. To me the biggest limiting factor is lack of funding.
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