Also, much of Swedish design is built on simplicity. You can see this everywhere from web design, to store design and of course furniture. The only downside, as others have pointed out, is that its extremely expensive.
EDIT: Discrepancies around definitions of conservatism.
Highest bracket in Tel-Aviv is, as far as I know, ~60% (50% income tax + 10% health/social taxes) + 17% VAT (=~sales tax equivalent, essentially applicable to individuals but less so to companies)
Highest bracket in NYC as of 2013 (unless the "fiscal cliff" is averted) is a few % short of 60% (40% federal, 13% state, 2% fica, 2% social security, and a few more). If the fiscal cliff is averted, it's still 53% or so. + 8.5% sales tax. (sales tax applies everywhere)
Also, what do you get for these taxes?
In Israel, you get comprehensive universal healthcare (services paid by tax, drugs and medicines subsidized by tax), comprehensive public education - no tuition for high school, $3000/year tuition for public universities, $6000/year for private universities or colleges. (All Israeli universities are world class; most colleges aren't). You also get reasonable social security payments when you retire, and reasonable unemployment for 6 months or so after getting laid off (and unreasonable barely-but-enough-to-not-starve unemployment later). And also mandatory conscription when you reach 18, and the occasional bus bombing.
In NYC, you'll get free public schools (some of which are excellent and some of which are glorified babysitting institutions), and other than that ... mostly nothing. You're supposed to get social security payments when you retire, but the books don't balance (unlike the Israeli pension fund books, which do). You also get the occasional hurricane (but only one in the last 100 years had really been devastating - two in the last 106 years)
In Stockholm you pay about 30% in income tax (add 20% if you earn more than 401 100 SEK annually, you earn about 360 000 SEK annually as a newly graduated MS CS student). However you also have another tax, the employment tax, which isn't displayed on your salary specification and is paid by your employer in addition to your salary. The employment tax is 31%. This makes the effective income tax about 81%...
The sales tax is 25% for most things.
We do have free public education, and healthcare for everyone under 18 (it's heavily subsidized after 18 but not free). The standard of our universities is not bad but i wouldn't call it world class as they try to make you believe... We do have problems with the earlier education. Stockholm doesn't have any problems with natural disasters or bombings but the housing situation is pretty crappy.
Swedish income taxes are extreme and have a very high VAT as well (25%): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden
btw, anyone form Dalarna are reading HN?)
Perhaps we can have a sweded version of NYC in the US? :) That would be ideal.
- Oh, that's simple, you completely lack experience.
- Have you missed the entries in my CV?
- No, but none of them was in Sweden.
On the other hand, this may be completely irrelevant in startups.
Minneapolis? The "super nice" midwest basically has it's roots in Sweden.
Tel Aviv is for example smaller, but I guess that the comparison is to the bay area/silicon valley or something like that.
The Swedish definition of "metropolitan" area is skewed, it consists of several cities and according to wikipedia its 6,519 km2 that is compared to Tel Avivs metropolian area of 1,516 km2. Still Tel Avivs has a metropolitan population of 3.4 million people compared to Stockholm's 2.1 million.
Just looking at the map, a slightly better/more conventional measure of Stockholm might be Stockholm municipality[1] + Huddinge, Sundbyberg and Solna, which gives an area of 350 km2 and a population of about 1.1 million.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_in_... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Municipality
San Francisco attracts talent from all over the US, or rather from all over the world.
But it is a tiny tiny tiny startup ecosystem.
English, fluent reading at least, is absolutely must have for a CS person.
There is a huge difference between, say, Indian guys being taught in English and Russian being taught in Russian.)
And, of course, never read any serious books, like TAOCP or SCIP in translation.) Master your English first and then enjoy non-distorted flow of author's thoughts in his own wording.
how? the world's ranking of english proficiency is dominated by Europeans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index#2... I am pretty sure among the IT branch the scores are much higher although you don't need perfect language skills to understand technical concepts.
While you don't need perfect language skills to understand technical concepts, not being at full proficiency can be a barrier. I know that when I help people out on StackOverflow, one of the main barriers to answering some people's questions is that they can't formulate it in English in a way that I can understand. Proficiency is a two-way thing; besides being able to read English, you need to be able to speak and write it well to fully interact with the technical community.
Another Stockholm start-up that looks interesting is Gavagai http://gavagai.se/
And Telepo (http://telepo.se/).
Here at $MEGA_CORP we did some recruiting recently and we hired from all over Europe. One good(?) thing is that the political situation in Russia is quite crappy at the moment, so there it is possible to recruit top talent from there.
I guess hiring from the across the pond is slightly harder. But if you pass the normal skype/phone/online interviews and you are good it shouldn't be a huge problem to fly you over for an onsite interview.
However, because of taxes, government regulations, and the fact that it's very difficult to fire someone, it's tough to grow past the startup phase.
This is probably why it's not looked at as a great place to start a business by most.
