You are a European student with a passion to change the world with a great idea. You have evaluated your options and decide to resist the lure of the City. You see the success of startups in Silicon Valley and decide to give it a try here. You go to networking events and subscribe to blogs and start to look for a co-founder. You start to realise that it is tougher than you thought but does it really have to be this way?
There is a European disease that has many symptoms and probably the worst is we often don’t even recognise them. Firstly, there is an unwritten rule that we can’t be like Silicon Valley. We don’t have the infrastructure or the 50 years of experience to provide startups with the support they need. I think this fails to recognise that the world is changing. The web opens up the startup world to infinite resources across the globe. Of course, it is in the interests of the investment community to claim that business only happens in small groups of insiders. Ironically, the tech investment community has been one of the slowest to leverage the power of the net. Platforms such as Angel.co and kickstarter are starting to change the US scene. However, we have different needs in Europe.
In Europe we have to nurture earlier stage businesses. The whole market is less mature. However, the internet presents the opportunity to link startup hotspots with the resources they need. There is, for example, plenty of potential to link the best European startups with investors in the US who already recognise that startups over there are over-priced.
It has long been recognised that creating successful startups is about fusing the best human capital with the best advisors and supporting that with financial investment. The fact that this is all available in one place is becoming less significant. No one can tell me that we don’t have the intellect in Europe to create a Pinterest or an Instragram! What we do have is an extremely negative investment community that has little domain experience and little propensity for risk. This is backed up by mentoring networks that are stuck in a time warp and don’t understand social media and other trends.
It is these vested interests that shape the mindsets of young European entrepreneurs by pouring cold water on their business ideas. I am sick of attending ‘so called’ startup conferences and listening to ‘late stage’ investors spouting on about the state of the early stage market.
Over the next few years we will see a renaissance of startup activity in Europe. The main startup hotspots will create their own startup success stories. The best startups will gain visibility through platforms such as www.dreamstake.net and have access to funding from a far broader base. This is all part of a trend towards democratisation of the startup scene that includes crowd funding and crowd sourcing.
Now is the time to start a European startup!
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