[toyg]

One main difference between Europe and the US is that wealth concentration in America is much, much higher than in Europe.

This is one of the main forces behind the VC scene: for a multi-millionaire, throwing a few hundreds here and there to some young gun is nothing, even if you lose them all you'll still have your Porsche and your boat.

In Europe, wealth is more distributed, which means that, for many, a bad investment of a few hundred thousand euros can make a real dent in the family fortune. We have less poor people, but less uber-rich people as well, it's a trade-off; it so happens that this trade-off works well with heavy industry but less with the super-dynamic "business at the speed of light" of this new millennium.

This is not to say we should cut some slack to the uber-rich (most of them come from aristocratic families and don't deserve to be where they are anyway), but rather that we need to find different, european ways of generating seeding resources for startups, and that's a bit of a bitch.

[gaius]

I would say liquid wealth. There are plenty of very, very rich people in Europe, but their wealth is tied up in land, property, art, etc that can't easily be "invested".

[Drbble]

Goldman Sachs can securitize those for you, easy. The US economy was entirely built around houses that no one lived in

[zerostar07]

I don't think it's so much a lack of funds, but a lack of motivation and an entrepreneurial focal location. Unfortunately europe's riches are typically not entrepreneurial and state-subsidized entrepreneurship fails. Maybe the successes of a first generation of entrepreneurs will create such a hub.

There used to be great entrepreneurship hubs in Europe... in the 1500s. Wealthy europeans are more likely to invest in experimental art than experimental businesses nowadays.

[smsag]

We've got billionaires in Germany, too. But those guys do invest their money in shitty financial products or odious investment deals (lookup Schickedanz Quelle). As starting a company is a matter of attitude so is investing into startups.

There are platforms like seedmatch for example which generated 100k in 46 minutes from various people, so there's light at the end of the tunnel.

[RyanMcGreal]

It seems that some kind of mutual fund could be a way for a large number of people to pool enough modest individual contributions of wealth into a fund big enough to seed a large number of startups.