| Why do you believe Europe isn't doing well with startups? It might be true that Europe isn't doing well with web startups reaching stratospheric valuations in no-time, but Europe is full of startups doing well, and starting companies in Europe is not particularly hard (co-founded several; been one of the early employees in a couple more). And in many countries you can practically get government grants thrown after you if you put in a minimum of effort into applying. You have some points with translation, but where you see problems, I see opportunities: Translations can be done cheaply enough that being aware of internationalization issues and cultural issues can create enormous benefits in the form of erecting barriers exactly against US companies. I've worked with a number of US companies on i18n issues, and I've yet to find a single one where the US team understood the European concerns (I still shudder to think of the one multinational who thought that it didn't matter if all their past invoices changed if they changed their invoice template, to, e.g., change their VAT registration number). I also don't agree with about culture. Well, sort of: What you say is true about the US too. Most people don't want to start companies badly enough. Or they would have. At least a huge number. Lots of people do though, we just don't have a single geographical area as small as the valley where it's all concentrated. There are hundreds of internet startups in London alone, for example. And I don't buy that you have so few success stories in the Netherlands, though perhaps you're not aware of them as they're not in "as hot" sectors. E.g. consider Bibit - a payment processor funded in Bunnik, that was acquired by RBS and merged with (London founded) Streamline/WorldPay (who has also acquired half a dozen other European startups in the payment space over the years), just to take one of the top of my head that I've personally dealt with. (And a bunch of the people from Bibit are now behind Adyen - another Netherlands based payment processor startup) Though there is definitively cultural differences. The "fail fast" approach that many in SV takes is definitively less popular, not least because in many countries here for many types of jobs, having a failed company on your CV, at least as a founder, is seen in a more negative light. And this probably explains a lot of the perception too: Many European startups takes longer to grow big and may never even aim to grow as big as an equivalent Valley startup, and so may often be seen as a medium to big established company by the time mergers and acquisitions happens - it's easy to fly below the radar for the entire lifecycle of the company as an independent entity. |