I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.
A good insight on the feasibility of the eurostack [at the time of writing].
And that’s just IT. I suspect it would be a lot harder if it was a physical product. It reminds me of Smarter Every Days videos about how hard it was to make a purely American made grill scrubber.
If we are looking at this from the angle of geopolitical dependency rather than ideological purity it’s quite far down the list to self-manufacture products that are available widely from several countries with varied political and economic ties.
The point is to diffuse the economic ties enough that no actor would be individually holding a leash like US currently is. In some products this requires local capability, but hardly all of them, the point is to make EU a sovereign actor at the world stage, not prepare for an “EU against the World” -war where EU detaches itself from the global community.
And that’s just IT. I suspect it would be a lot harder if it was a physical product. It reminds me of Smarter Every Days videos about how hard it was to make a purely American made grill scrubber.
I think you’d be surprised. Europe has a quite robust manufacturing base compared to its “cloud hosting” base.
It’s sort of a mirror image of the U.S. yes we can make things here, even at a competitive price, but we’re really behind on cloud offerings.
Many of the basic components will be hard to source from a European factory. Things like nuts and bolts.
I don’t know about factory, but Würth as a company can deliver all your nuts and bolts and crapload of other things from their own manufacturing.
True. Most of the manufacturing seems to be mid - high value add manufacturing. (Ie washing machines, ventilation, electrical, etc)
Literal commodity manufactured parts will be more global.
If we are looking at this from the angle of geopolitical dependency rather than ideological purity it’s quite far down the list to self-manufacture products that are available widely from several countries with varied political and economic ties.
The point is to diffuse the economic ties enough that no actor would be individually holding a leash like US currently is. In some products this requires local capability, but hardly all of them, the point is to make EU a sovereign actor at the world stage, not prepare for an “EU against the World” -war where EU detaches itself from the global community.
I fully agree. We can buy screws and nuts that can be made anywhere and produce our own value added products.
Or the guy who spent 6 months and 1500 dollars to make a sandwich by himself