If your gyms don’t open until 10am on a Sunday, can you even call yourself a tech hub?
No, says Alex Recouso, a Dubai-based founder who suffered a series of culture shocks on a recent visit to Spain. The lack of an early-morning gym was the first offence. A shuttered coworking space and a cafe with no wi-fi twisted the knife.“Absolutely unthinkable in a barely productive economy like the US, yet [sic] alone UAE,” Recouso wrote on X, in a post that went viral among techies. “Europe is a daylight museum”. This might also be one of the best tweets ever? And it comes at a time when we risk falling hostage to a meme-war without end, a constant rolling wall of gloat and taunt.Because online, people are having a massive, forever argument about whether Europe has a good tech scene. Most of the American techies I follow jump on this topic with gusto, jibing that Europeans are workshy, that they flip on the out-of-office in June and leave it running until September (admittedly it’s been known to happen). It’s all fairly jokey, until you realise that some big tech figures really believe this stuff. US investor Marc Andreessen, for example, recently shared a rule of thumb for a successful tech sector: "The principle is just 'Do the opposite of the EU’,” he said on a podcast. And so it feels like Europeans are permanently on the back foot online, fighting off allegations that they're lazy (or in love with compliance and government LPs). Europe’s lack of decacorns clearly means this is a region of betas, frauds, papier-mache imitations of actual founders. If only Europe put in a proper shift, it could avoid a weekly bath of humiliation over some new tiddly fundraising round.A détenteBut I sense a momentary détente; a silencing of the guns in the tech war. Recouso's observations were considered so wide of the mark that they prompted a wave of reflection — maybe, just maybe, you don’t have to be grinding in a coworking space on a Sunday (in lovely Spain!) to feel thrillingly alive. All the things Recouso flagged are the "exact reason" I moved to Spain a decade ago, Sofia Lindman, a tech consultant, wrote on LinkedIn. "Tell me you're going to have a stroke at 40 without telling me you're going to have a stroke at 40," chipped in Andrea Glorioso, a policy officer at the European Commission.Some cafés don't have wi-fi because “they don't want folks like Alex working remotely having one coffee in two hours," added Kyle Davies, a marketing manager in Valencia.Ashley Duqué Kienzle, an American founder living in Barcelona, loves the moderate tempo compared to New York. “Don't try to make Spain the US, please,” she tells me. I reached out to Recouso for his reaction to the reaction (his website says he charges $1,500 for a one-on-one video call, so perhaps that conversation won't be happening anytime soon).I did, however, track down someone who knows him. "We went to university together," says Álvaro Leal, chief of staff at Barcelona-based software company Factorial, which has managed to overcome the crippling Sunday coworking blackouts to appear on Sifted’s latest ranking of the fastest-growing startups in southern Europe. His take basically was that fewer things open on a Sunday does not equal civilisational failure."So many young hackers don't like coffee shops or coworking. We just need good wi-fi at home," he says.
