I didn't downvote the OP but I am picking up a tone of indignation that I don't quite understand. I find this pretty interesting.
Here is my take on the situation:
Let's say I own a widget factory and you are highly skilled at turning paper clips into widgets. We agree on a price for your time and I hire you to start making widgets. Things are going gangbusters, you produce a ton of widgets and I pay you for the time you spend working for me. All of a sudden people stop buying widgets. I no longer need your services so I have you stop coming in and stop paying you for your time.
I don't understand why I should be obligated to pay you for services you didn't provide. It's not like I can go to my customers and ask them to pay me for widgets I didn't sell them.
You own a factory. Your employees don't. There's a power imbalance in the employment relationship.
Most people (who don't own things like factories) need a regular, predictable, stable income to survive, and finding new employment is not always easy.
Therefore, people in most developed countries have agreed that by taking on an employee, it is contingent on the employer to provide some guarantee of stability. This is borne out by laws restricting firing in many cases, and requiring severance pay in the event.
The USA is an aberration in this regard - even the workers seem to value the rights of the employers far above the rights of the employees. I'm not sure why this is.
In return for these employee benefits, the employees make less money, and are less likely to be hired, since every mis-hire is a potentially fatal error for the business. The laws of economics are not magic and the costs have to go somewhere.
Cost and availability of capital, rather than anything else.
Like, if you are a PM at FAANG you can probably get a seed round for any kind of nonsense in SF, but in Germany you would need far more proof and preferably revenue (I don't know Germany that well, but it's similar across much of Western Europe).
Because the dollar is the world reserve currency, and lots and lots of large pension funds, university endowments and family offices spend tiny proportions of their assets on VC (as it's expected to be uncorrelated with market returns).
VC's tend to be look a person in the eye and judge his (almost always) character. They don't like travelling, so most of their investments are made in the Bay Area.
Coupled to this, there's much more availability of angel funding because of the previous unicorns (paypal, eBay, Google, Facebook et al) so it's easier to get started.
There are definitely some cultural issues at play also, but fundamentally the reason that the US has such a high proportion of tech giants (which seems to be what you're focusing on) is the low cost of capital caused by the dollar's exorbitant privilege.
You realize other countries have VCs too right? Yet hundreds of foreign billions still go to America because it's a better environment for innovation and produces bigger and more impactful companies. Your 3rd point even relies on it.
Note that it's per capita, and Israel has a population of 8mn, versus the US's 330mn.
I think it's pretty clear that most VC funding is given in the USA.
And note that the terms are often much better, and funding is accessible earlier. This article explicity states that you want to get seed funding in the US if you want to maximise your valuation. See: https://medium.com/sosv-accelerator-vc/what-does-seed-fundin...
Yes but these companies also largely exist because you have a deregulated market whereas the European Union is a much more regulated market.
These regulations provide for worker rights, productions and consumption safety, product quality and much more. Something America is lacking in completely.
You also have a government and department of defense that helps a lot of your big multinationals grow and kill it's foreign competitors.
You can look at the acquisition of Alstom by General Eletric as a good example.
Well that's the point. US has lower regulations and more fluid employment which leads to bigger and more innovative companies. America isn't as nationally protectionist as China though, although that will now change with this pandemic.
I think that just speaks volumes of your cultural bias.
For me, it is quit natural to assume that a base level of employee protection causes innovation. And Germany would be a good example, as there are quit some innovative small to medium sized companies. The only thing lacking is tech unicorns and there are all sorts of reasons for this.
The proof are the many valuable American companies making world-changing products used globally and constantly copied by many other nations with their own domestic clones.
What is missing is a causal link between lesser employee rights and those values.
I could claim that the historic position of the USA after WW2 caused all of these. My claim would be as baseless as yours. A good starting point for research, but nothing more.
That quote by Ronald Wright is actually paraphrasing part of a John Steinbeck book, where he's using it to describe people who wanted socialist governments, but were dissapointed that everyone ended up poor instead of a utopia where everyone has everything they need.
It's funny how it started out as a criticism of people who think that the government should have more control of how businesses operate, but has been paraphrased so many times that it's now used as a way to criticise people who want to minimize government involvement in business.
>To paraphrase a famous quote, in the USA the workers don't see themselves as workers, but as temporarily down-on-their-luck owners.
It's hilarious applying it here, given the situation described was reversed. Your position is that the worker who doesn't own the factory should dictate what the factory owner should pay because of a power imbalance.
Weird.
Perhaps the issue is having difficulty telling the difference between workers and factory owners in general.
> You own a factory. Your employees don't. There's a power imbalance in the employment relationship.
You make it sound like employers are all fat rich people smoking cigars while everyone else is in a sweatshop. The reality is that 99% of businesses are very small in size (as in, one owner and very few employees) and it's often much more a partnership than the power imbalance you are talking about. Yet the same laws apply whether you deal with a 10 persons company of a 100000 persons one.
There's often (though not always) some size cutoffs in various benefit requirements for small businesses to relax the rules a bit. Such as 50 employees for the ACA I believe.
But I agree, people act like the economy is nothing but fortune 500 megacorps and push for laws that make it harder for everyone to survive except for such businesses and their employees.
And people always miss the hidden cost, even when talking about the fatcats. If you require companies to provide a year of severance, then everyone just gets paid (n-1)/n as much on average, where n is the average number of years an employee is expected to stay.
I've heard the difference between European safety nets/regulations and US systems described as "freedom to" vs "freedom from". If we accept your premise, that the hidden cost of regulating severance is a decline in salary, this fits the above difference. In the US, you have the "freedom to" be as irresponsible as you want, living at or beyond your means, but if you're laid off, you bear the responsibility of dealing with the consequences. In Europe, you have the "freedom from" having to worry about that situation, since the safety net will provide some time for you to get back on your feet, and the price was a lower salary (in effect, forced savings).
Is this stat still up to date? It changes drastically between booms and recessions. In some years small businesses have had far more employees. A fact which should affect policymaking as much as the ratio at any given point.
Either way I'd expect fewer americans still work at large businesses than at small and mid-sized businesses combined.
The issue of course is that more regulation makes it that much harder for small business to hire and over time forces more and more of the economy and the labor force into the arms of big business.
That's 10s of millions of small companies hiring half the people. The point being there's plenty of people in America becoming "owners of the factory".
Why don't you look at the actual data: Firms with fewer than 100 workers accounted for 98.2 percent, and firms with fewer than 20 workers made up 89.0 percent. [1] The vast majority are small companies with single-digit employee counts. Add in independent contractors and it's even more skewed.
Being an entrepreneur means getting things done with what you have. You don't need to be wealth and instantly go from 0 to 1000 employees. Most people start with modest means and build up from there.
Wrong. 80,5% of all SMEs don't employ anyone (nonemployer firms).
So not only do most Americans do work for multinational companies (53%) but on top of that, 80,5% of the ones working in SMEs are themselves the owners and don't have any employees to speak of.
Which leaves a whopping 19.5% of American SMEs which actually employ workers.
Nobody is stopping you from owning a factory. The workers are also free to leave anytime without any notice or responsibility to the employer. This is a flexible arrangement for both parties that focuses on individual freedom and responsibility.
It also helps make it easy for entrepreneurs to start companies and create jobs in the US and is a direct reason why we don't see the same innovation in regulation-heavy regions.
Sweden and Germany, for example, are heavily regulated but have more innovation in terms of GDP% than the USA.
If you're talking about why we don't see more visible commercial innovation from European countries then it's more about access to the enormous amounts of capital to build a big name startup like Uber etc.
Nobody notices the legions of small bootstrapped or seed to profitable software businesses across the EU.
How do you measure "innovation in terms of GDP"? I certainly don't see trillion-dollar world-changing companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon coming from those regions. What small business could replicate the impact of Windows, or Gmail or the iPhone?
It's worth noting that those companies have trillion dollar stock valuation, but by far less actual revenue. Average revenue per year of these companies is "just" 159 billions. Amazon has had a revenue of 88 billion.
German companies with more revenue than Amazon: Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW, Allianz, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Uniper, Bosch.
On the smaller end, Germany also has a comparable number of employer firms per capita as the U.S.
Empirically it largely is a myth that worker protection and consumer protection stiffles enterprises or innovation.
Amazon 2019 revenue is $280B, which is greater than every company you listed and tied with Volkswagen.
Valuation reflects market sentiment and potential but perhaps I should have left it out. The real focus is the "world-changing" aspect of the products produced.
What have been the recent global innovations produced by those German companies? Anything turned into a household name?
You're correct regarding Amazon's revenue, I somehow got the 2014 data, sorry.
I'm actually not quite sure what you mean with the "global innovations" part, though, could you expand on that? What is it that makes e.g. Microsoft innovative?
What I see is the your big four all sell consumer product/ services and thus are more visible. E.G. Bosch is developing electric powertrain components, produces radar/lidar and video sensors for autonomous driving. Bosch also produces the robots used in those mostly-automated factories.
Every Apple iPhone and Watch uses Bosch's gyroscope and accelerometer tech. They're also the market leader in smaller EV tech used in electric motorcycles, bikes and scooters. It all goes out to consumers without them knowing. Even Tesla use Bosch parts.
I would think that since innovation and growth (caused by innovative use of resources or increase in efficiency or novel products and services) in general should be relative to the population and its state to begin with, nominal GDP growth per annum would be a reasonable metric as a proxy for the wildly non-measurable "innovation in terms of GDP"; for reference, here's the data for 2018:
Spending on research and development is an awful proxy for results delivered by said R&D, which is what we would actually want to measure if we're looking for innovation relative to GDP.
The car was invented in the 1800s, and has seen mature competitors in many other countries like Japan. In the current century, Tesla is the auto giant leaving behind all the legacy manufacturers while also branching into energy products.
Pivotal products are a better milestone than vague estimates of R&D spending.
There's no doubt about Tesla's ability to bring an innovative product to market but they're not a giant by any measure except valuation.
Little known German company ZF has almost double the revenue of Tesla. They also make the transmission for the Porsche Taycan EV that's outselling the 911.
How are Tesla more innovative than other companies ? They kicked off a big conceptual change but I don't see that they have a significant technological advantage over other companies like Volvo.
>How are Tesla more innovative than other companies ?
People always seem to compare Tesla technology of tomorrow with what its competitors are doing right now. That's why Volvo "only" has level 3 self-driving, while Tesla has a fleet of robotaxis that are earning you money on its ride-sharing app while you sleep.
I joke, but a large portion of the Tesla fan base has no clue what is going on in the autonomous driving or auto manufacturer world outside of Tesla. Tesla has been a big innovator, but they aren't leaders in everything....not even close.
The thread is about innovation, so that's what counts. And what other manufacturer matches what Tesla has driving on the roads today? The closest realistic challenger is the expensive Porsche Taycan which is still missing all the functionality and usability features.
>Tesla is the auto giant leaving behind all the legacy manufacturers while also branching into energy products
Tesla has sub-1% market share in the global auto market and rapidly declining energy product deployment (they deployed 4x more MW 4 years ago than the did last year). Let's not pretend Tesla has taken over anything yet.
Seriously, who's stopping you? It's ironic to say that on HN when YC has helped launch thousands of companies and several self-made billionaires.
The ability to hire and fire fast is undeniably helpful for companies, and being able to quit and move to new jobs is just as useful for personal career development. It might not be for everyone, but it's not any less valid.
The typical member of the precariat doesn't have the financial means of taking an unpaid sick day. How on earth do you imagine that they have the means of starting their own company?
The discussion was about at-will employment in America. There are pros/cons to both employee and employer, and it is an absolute truth that this arrangement helps companies grow and helps employees eventually start their own companies - as opposed to different regulatory environments.
Adding more regulations will bring equivalent trade-offs because that's the reality of economics. Do you disagree?
If you want to get bogged down in technicalities and anecdotes though, then sure life isn't fair. I worked manual labor before and now own multiple properties. I guess it's just magic.
No one suggested it was magic. What it often is - statistically - is socioeconomics. It’s more or less the single best predictor of outcomes for you and yours.
There are outliers, but we’re talking about broad systemic patterns.
You evidently went to an okay UC - you probably had supportive parents. Be it emotional or financial support. Perhaps both! Perhaps your family life was reasonably stable. Perhaps you had three square meals most of your youth.
The point is that you are in a position to access capital that is markedly different from a lot of individuals born into lower socioeconomics striations in society and the statistics are weighed :heavily: against them.
This is often through no fault of their own.
Thank your lucky stars the world aligned for you as it did. Where and with whom you started that life made a far bigger difference than any perceived grit you might think you exercised.
That's called venture capital, or a loan, or a mortgage; things that millions of others have used to start their own businesses. Happy to make some intro's for you. Let me know.
But that's not always possible when you don't have a good enough job to save which is the reality for a majority of Americans since they live pacheck to paycheck.
Sure, because nobody has ever taken a loan to start a business before. And VC funding doesn't exist. And mortgages are a falsehood. And companies are never bootstrapped either.
I guess eventually owning a factory is just impossible right?
Yeah and I could become a rock star if I started playing the guitar.
Getting loans is hard, especially if you're one of the working poor. Starting a company that doesn't die after a few years is harder. When you're one of the 40% of Americans who can't cover an unexpected $400 expense, if you company fails you're fucked. The social safety net in the US is a joke.
Yes, it's a trade-off. Less regulation and more freedom and flexibility at the cost of more social risk and personal responsibility. That's the American way.
I was simply stating that truth, not defending it nor saying other realities can't exist. But there is always a trade-off. What part of that is so controversial?
Perhaps things have changed and the balance needs to be shifted now. That's a great discussion to have, but let's actually have a discussion then.
It is easier to start and grow a business when there are less regulations around employees. Every employee in America is also free to walk away from their job without any notice. These are both facts and have allowed for vast commercial growth and innovation in America (and in countries with similar setups).
Whether you (can) take advantage is completely orthogonal to the original question of why the USA is "an aberration in this regard", and I would rather not devolve into yet another rehash about fairness and opportunity.
maybe the reason why so many want to start they own business is because u can get fired for no reason. being it's own boss gives you at least the freedom to not always live in fear of being fired if you do something that the company does not want, like getting pregnant, i have read enough stores of companies firing pregnant women and i cannot believe it's legal to happen.
in europe at least that part is gone, you start your own company not out of necessity but out of motivation.
Do you think it's easier to start a company and that is has less risk than just finding another job? Also have you seen the world-leading benefits at places like Google?
America just chooses more freedom than government mandated security. There's some slight trade-off but it is nowhere near as problematic as media makes it seem.
"Just buy your own factory" as a response to the power imbalance between the workers and the owners of the means of production is the controversial statement.
The actual quote is "nobody is stopping you" - because that imbalance means it's easier for you to also own the means of production. It's unequivocally true, and enjoyed by 10s of millions of small business owners and entrepreneurs which form the heart of the American middle class. It answers the why posed by the GP.
But yes, different places are different and life isn't fair. No need to cutoff any discussion of various economic systems and environments for the same basic retorts.
No, the imbalance doesn't make it easier for you to own the means of production at all. On the contrary, it allows for systemic exploitation that makes social mobility harder and increases the wealth imbalance over time.
Depending on your target industry, "a factory" can be as simple as some old yet reliable drill presses and lathes, and then hiring a machinist or two. How is the flexibility to do this "controversial"?
https://youtu.be/xXze8_SzW28?t=431 <---Granted he's got Youtuber money and other gun-sales related money to help, but the concept is the same....he's bootstrapping a factory after purchasing the relevant capital infrastructure using his own money.
> Granted he's got Youtuber money and other gun-sales related money to help
This is the difference. Most Americans don't have access to this capital, or access to means of borrowing this capital, and if they do have the means then they might not necessarily be able to shoulder the risk.
It's not like the capital just fell into his lap from a friendly Wall Street banker. Those businesses are ALSO self-started (to the best of my knowledge), especially his Youtube success. He's a prime example of someone working hard, spending less than they earn, accumulating resources, and then expanding that into ownership of the means of production as well as employing others.
It's not for everyone. Sure, most people have no appetite for the level of risk involved even if they can scrape together the money to buy some revenue-generating asset (I know a guy who left the Marine Corps as a truck driver...moved back to Japan, bought a truck, and then opened a moving company). Most people don't have access to capital....nor will most people ever have the intellect to write tight software code, no matter how many government-backed Code Bootcamp Initiatives there are.
To bring this back to the original point though, telling someone to bootstrap a factory, which is demonstrably doable in the American economy even today (for flexible definitions of "factory"), shouldn't ever be a "controversial" piece of advice. Especially on an pro-entrepreneurship site like YC/HN.
You don't. You start small and work you way up while offering whatever collateral you can until you get that big loan. Save up earnings and use a downpayment or buy insurance. That's how business growth works.
There are 10s of millions of business owners in America. Ask any of them how they did it.
The total amount of land is relatively fixed on human time scales. Given that, everyone who owns a factory (or any land) does make it more difficult for you to own a factory.
That’s quite a stretch since 95% of the world population lives on 10% of the land. [1] We can also build vertically, and space is a whole new frontier that is seeing lots of interest lately. I don't see this as a serious limitation. Opportunity is endless.
Start by making things where you live right now. In fact that's how many HN users are producing value as we speak.
Finding and controlling land to expand your business is not a serious limiting issue. You have effectively infinite headroom before you need to worry that you can't own a factory on Earth because too many other factories already exist.
I understand the policy and I don't think it is an entirely unreasonable way to combat wealth inequality. The only point I was trying to make is that it feels disingenuous to be surprised a company has a say in the severance they pay.
I do think there are a few places where this policy breaks down. For example, the additional transaction cost makes hiring decisions "stickier." I think this hurts the employee as well as the employer.
I don't quite understand the power imbalance here. My employer requires my labor and I am willing to trade my labor for money. If I'm not happy with the arrangement I'm free to find someone else to trade with.
> I don't quite understand the power imbalance here
There's only a power imbalance if workers are prevented from organizing, or if they (for whatever reason) refuse to organize. Or if they workers are very easily replaceable.
Obviously, if you're one of 200 workers, you can't negotiate evenly with the ownership as 1/200th of the company's workforce. Same goes if you're an unskilled worker who is easy to replace. However, even then, if you organize with all 200 of your co-workers, you are closer to a balance in negotiating power since it would be hard for said company to replace all 200 workers at once.
Here in Sweden we don't see it as making things harder for employers, but making them act in fairness.
Swedish worker unions sees the success of the business as success of the employees and will help get there for example by fair to both sides collective agreements.
This means for example that unreasonable demands from employees will be blocked, and if the employer needs to cut down employees cannot refuse.
But there is no inherent reason the business itself is the locus of responsibility to the worker (other than obvious things like worker safety on the job.)
Why not, for instance, make the loss of a job be covered by saved union funds that are generated by the union as a whole? The only reason the business is tagged as the responsible party in Europe is historical cruft.
If it's specified in their employment contract, they absolutely do. A severance package is really at the root of it just something laid out in an employment contract that says that absent cause, an employer needs to compensate the employee for terminating the contract. Clauses like that are super common in all kinds of contracts.
The main difference, of course, is that in countries that require this sort of thing, it's required - but requiring certain implicit terms in employment contracts is a regular thing in the U.S. as well - there's all kinds of regulations and case law on what sorts of employment contracts are valid. Saying that something like severance is a necessary requirement is a difference of degree, not of kind.
if you need to get the other party to sign a contract granting you a contractual right, doesn't that rather make the above poster's larger point though? Especially since that contract is the place where the salary and work are agreed upon. If I don't have a right to force you to work for me as a servant, then I need to get you to agree to do it willingly via some kind of contract.
Are notice periods, minimum wages, and restricting discrimination on protected grounds unjust as well? All of those are forced onto employment contracts in the U.S. (if not explicitly, then implicitly) regardless of whether employees or employers want them to be.
I live in the UK. Here the obligation is symmetric. All my recent work has been on 90 day terms. That is, if either I or the employer wish the contract to end normally that requires 90 days of notice unless both parties agree otherwise.
My most recent employer decided their costs were too high compared to projected income, so they gave me 90 days notice back in 2019.
At that point I knew that in 90 days I won't have a job. I could start looking for a new job, able to tell any prospective employer that I can start on day D+90. I would still get paid, as usual, and my employer was entitled to insist that I continue to work as usual.
In fact of course they gave me garden leave, I guess that's probably an alien term in the US too? Garden leave means that the 90 day term still applies, you still work for them not anybody else, and they still pay you fully - but your employer thinks it would be best (for example because they're scared you will sabotage things, poach customers, or steal trade secrets) that you do not come to the office or use their computers and thus you cannot do your job.
I'm very awkward so I pointed out that they're short of cash, rather than having too many engineers, and so since I wasn't doing anything else I kept working, although I will admit I wasn't exactly the most motivated team member since I knew I was terminated. They had to go re-enable my git access, AWS access and so on, which had been severed when I went in to be told I was fired. Very amusing.
Now, let's roll back to my previous job. I'd been essentially head-hunted, I informed that employer that I'd be leaving, triggering the 90 day notice. I was actually at their offices at the time, (I usually work from home) and I informed them that I'd be available until close-of-play to negotiate the exact details. They got right down to the wire but eventually sent someone to work it out, and we agreed I would spend the notice period spinning up people who'd been brought in to learn what I do, and that I wouldn't take my vacation days, but I would actually leave on D+85 not D+90.
Gardening leave is quite common in the US. No sure whether the term itself is known, though?
Paying out a notice period is very different from severance pay. I can assure you that AirBnB does not have a 14 weeks notice period.
(American companies also pay you out the notice period, and some send you on gardening leave, if they want you out of the office. But notice periods in America seem to be generally shorter, like 14 days, for most more junior jobs. In the UK one month seems to be more standard?)
Moreover, as a condition of employment, many (most?) US workers must sign an “employment agreement” which is essentially a legal document written by the company, for the company. It’s like an employment contract except with terms that only benefit the company.
Legally speaking, you always have a contract when working for someone. Even if it's implicit and oral only.
You even have a contract when you are buying a piece of candy at the newsstand.
(At least in the common law world. In eg German law technically you have one contract for the piece of candy, and one contract for each individual coin you are handing over. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_principle_(law) Germans are a bit crazy.)
Huh? Literally the first sentence in that article starts with
> At-will employment is a term used in U.S. labor law for contractual relationships [...]
Emphasis on contractual.
Or am I missing something?
A contract that can be dissolved at will is still a contract. Just like you can cancel your Netflix subscription at will, and it's still a valid legal contract.
Employees stay longer because the safety net grows.
Less likely to speak poorly about you after leaving
More secure in their job. More emotional invested.
What are your reasons for not? Even if google stops selling at home they will keep the server alive for a grace period.
I had a friend who ran a bitcoin market. When the market shutdown he was responsible for customer records for 7 years and had to pay a company to secure access in case of requests.
You own a widget factory and I buy widgets from you. All of a sudden I don't need widgets, and I no longer need your products and stop paying for them.
You may have bought raw materials, hired people, set up a warehouse and stocked it with products anticipating my orders, but I don't understand why I should be obligated to pay for your products if I no longer need them.
All contracts generally include terms for termination of the contract. The tone of indignation is in the US, employers determine them unilaterally and employees don't have the bargaining power to do anything about it.
In many countries, there is no concept of 'at will employment'. It is not surprising that HNers from such countries would be incredulous.
Employment law in Europe, for example, frequently requires the severance terms to be determined at the time the employee is signed up. The employment agreement is a contract, and will be signed by all positions in the firm. In many cases, the severance terms are based on law.
Among other differences, for example, a German President is personally liable for the financial obligations of their company. If the company goes bankrupt, so does he.
Can you provide some references for your claims? Don't know much about Germany but that sounds totally made up as limitation of liability is the key concept behind the invention of companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_mit_beschr%C3%A4n...
I would imagine if a director breaks the law, only then he could be personally liable. And in that case I would imagine Germany does have higher standards than US.
"If the company is in crisis special obligations arise for a managing director the breach of which may lead to a personal liability of the managing director."
So this is quite a bit different and more limited than "If the company goes bankrupt, so does he." and closer to "I would imagine if a director breaks the law, only then he could be personally liable.", for example Adam Neumann might have had problems if WeWork was a German GmbH.
"Among other differences, for example, a German President is personally liable for the financial obligations of their company. If the company goes bankrupt, so does he."
Not really. Directors are not generally held liable for debts incurred by their companies in Germany. However, they can be held liable if they are found to be in breach of their duties as directors. Also, the onus of proof is reversed in some cases (e.g. the director needs to prove he wasn't in breach of his duty).
>Among other differences, for example, a German President is personally liable for the financial obligations of their company. If the company goes bankrupt, so does he.
In US new enterprise have a very high failure rate, how do entrepreneurs survive in such environment?
They are protected by US corporate law. The debts of a corporation are the responsibility of the corporation. A corporation (Inc.) is treated like a person from that perspective. If a corporation runs out of money and cannot pay its debts and declares bankruptcy, the management is under no obligation to cover the debt, and the debt holders are out of luck.
A CEO (and other company execs) can be held personally liable only if there is fraud or other illegal acts. Mismanaging a company, or even simply working hard and not succeeding, are not illegal.
American firms can take on much more risk, so we tend to see both many more failures and many more successes.
I think you answered your own question. In the US, entrepreneurs are not personally liable. Now, that's not the same thing as saying that failure won't reflect badly on their reputation. But it is definitely a lot easier to have a comeback career if you don't have to declare personal bankruptcy.
It seems that much of HN has very little knowledge of (and interest in) business operations and employment law in other countries.
I see your question as genuinely inquiring about this stark difference from what is common in Europe and other countries.