In Europe, we spend a lot of time criticizing American Big Tech. And to be fair, there's plenty to criticize. These companies have created very real problems, both for Europeans and Americans.
But sometimes I wonder if our criticism has made us a little blind to the fact that American Big Tech includes some of the most successful companies ever built. And we Europeans have an awful lot to learn from them.
Over the past 25 years, American technology companies have been major drivers of innovation and economic growth. Meanwhile, Europe has struggled to produce technology companies with comparable global reach and impact.
Yet when we talk about American Big Tech, we tend to focus almost entirely on what's wrong with it. We worry about how much power these companies have over our lives, especially when so much of our personal data is in their hands. Those concerns are legitimate.
But I miss the curiosity about how these companies became so extraordinarily successful. What could we learn from the way they work?
I sometimes wonder if it's easier to criticize what the Americans have built than to confront why we haven't built more of it ourselves.
Of course, Europe faces structural challenges. Building a company across Europe means dealing with fragmented markets and different regulatory environments. Access to venture capital is also more limited. But I think culture plays a much bigger role than we often acknowledge.
Addressing those structural challenges requires us to be willing to learn from others.
We should be able to admire what American companies have accomplished while being critical of how they operate. Learning from their success doesn't oblige us to repeat their mistakes. It could help us build European companies that can compete with them, which seems to me a much more ambitious response than focusing all our energy on protecting ourselves from them.
Imagine if we combined the American ambition to build successful technology companies with the European values we care so much about. Wouldn't that be something worth striving for?
Come on, Europeans. Let's be a little less arrogant and a lot more curious. We have plenty to learn from what the Americans have built, even if we want to do things differently here.
And speaking of actually building something, my friend Kasper Tidemann is soon launching Purple, with a vision for a better kind of social media. Go grab your username. Built right here in Europe 😉🇪🇺