The buying power of 10m in SV is equivalent to what, 2m in Italy?
There's definitely a lot of sweet VC money to collect with a business office in SV, but I have no idea why a large company investing a lot of its own money would choose to throw 4/5ths of it away.
Well, in Italy a software dev would earn 1500€/month (anecdotal based on friends), so if you are talking about a software startup, it's not out of the blue. My salary (I'm italian living in Canada) is at least 5x what I would be making in Italy
