There's an important distinction. The US is racially much more heterogenous than "Europe", but culturally fairly homogenous, because the vast majority of immigrants want to be Americans.
To have a Silicon Valley, you've got to attract a disproportionate share of talented and ambitious people. You need a critical mass. That's much easier to attain in a culturally semi-homogenous country full of nomads than in the EU, which has its people segregated into over 20 different nations. This is also why the US has better universities. If the same linguistic and cultural barriers existed between Montana and Massachusetts (which are culturally very similar places, on the European scale) as do between Russia and Great Britain, we probably wouldn't have a Silicon Valley.
By the way, European investment bankers work the same egregiously long hours as American bankers do, and middle-of-the-road Americans would gladly take the lives of average Europeans. There isn't a huge difference in the distributions of drive; what differs is the level of effort expected from the rank-and-file. Arguably, however, Americans get less from them, and the rank-and-file are so unproductive (compared to startup founders) that this difference is inconsequential at the big-picture level.
To have a Silicon Valley, you've got to attract a disproportionate share of talented and ambitious people. You need a critical mass. That's much easier to attain in a culturally semi-homogenous country full of nomads than in the EU, which has its people segregated into over 20 different nations. This is also why the US has better universities. If the same linguistic and cultural barriers existed between Montana and Massachusetts (which are culturally very similar places, on the European scale) as do between Russia and Great Britain, we probably wouldn't have a Silicon Valley.
By the way, European investment bankers work the same egregiously long hours as American bankers do, and middle-of-the-road Americans would gladly take the lives of average Europeans. There isn't a huge difference in the distributions of drive; what differs is the level of effort expected from the rank-and-file. Arguably, however, Americans get less from them, and the rank-and-file are so unproductive (compared to startup founders) that this difference is inconsequential at the big-picture level.