This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Bill Kennard. Bill Canard was the United States

ambassador to the European Union in 2009, 2013. He was also chair of the US telecommunications

regulator the FCC under the Clinton administration, and he now has a portfolio career in the private sector.

Bill, when it comes to entrepreneurship, technology, job creation, there's a widely held view that the United States is ahead of the curve and Europe behind the curve.

Would you go along with that? Is this a caricature, or are there really significant differences between the two

sides of Atlantic when it comes to these kind of areas?

Well, I think that that's generally true. The United States has been able over a long period of time

to create conditions for entrepreneurship that are, I think, unparalleled in the world.

There are a lot of reasons for that. A lot of it goes back to our regulatory structure,

our views about capital formation, our immigration policies have been fairly supportive of entrepreneurship.

I had the privilege of serving as chairman of our telecom regulator in the United States

at the dawn of the Internet age in the 1990s.

And so I saw the creation of a lot of really exciting companies that became

world leaders in technology. And in watching those companies grow, you could see that there was

almost a magical formula that created Silicon Valley in the 1990s. It was a combination of good

government policy, light touch regulation on internet services, and the ability of entrepreneurs

to tap into talent that was being produced from fine research

institutions in the area like Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley.

But one underappreciated component of that success was the ability of the United States and Silicon Valley in particular

to attract talent from all over the world, principally engineering talent. But from 1995

to 2005, a key period in the early evolution of the Internet, fully 50% of the founders or co-founders

of companies in Silicon Valley were foreign-born, engineers from all over the world, including

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