The More Europe Project: Two Weeks In Europe

I was in Europe for two weeks in September, and a large number of people asked about the More Europe Project. It seems that my European friends are interested in seeing how its going, and whether I am in fact going to be spending three months in Europe next year, as I expressed at the outset as my desire.

Well, I'd like to. But neither my typical marketing activities (almost exclusively blogging) nor the opnBC/Xing sponsored More Europe Project have led to much that is concrete.

So, after two months of flogging this horse, I wonder why?

I think it has to do more with the small number of social application start-ups in Europe than anything else. Yes, I know all about Last.fm and Plazes -- in fact I saw Felix Petersen of Plazes in Lisbon a few weeks back -- but aside from those two (and of course openBC!) there doesnt seem to be much going on, really. (Oh, I am using Fred Oliviera's Goplan, a Basecamp competitor. and he is based in Portugal, now. Shouldn't forget that.) On the other hand, I was in San Francisco the other day for Office 2.0, and I saw no less that 25 companies demoing their applications. I had invitations from companies in Mexico, Canada and Israel for meetings, but nothing in Europe.

I mentioned Paul Graham's Startup Mistakes post yesterday, but didn't zoom in on number two on his list:

2. Bad Location

Startups prosper in some places and not others. Silicon Valley dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York. After that there's not much. Even in New York the number of startups per capita is probably a 20th of what it is in Silicon Valley. In towns like Houston and Chicago and Detroit it's too small to measure.

Why is the falloff so sharp? Probably for the same reason it is in other industries. What's the sixth largest fashion center in the US? The sixth largest center for oil, or finance, or publishing? Whatever they are they're probably so far from the top that it would be misleading even to call them centers.

It's an interesting question why cities become startup hubs, but the reason startups prosper in them is probably the same as it is for any industry: that's where the experts are. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the same business. Who knows exactly how these factors combine to boost startups in Silicon Valley and squish them in Detroit, but it's clear they do from the number of startups per capita in each.

I think that Europe is sort of a black hole for social application development. For some reason, there is just not much happening. Are there other stealth startups that I just don't know about? Is it Graham's hypothesis? Have all the inventive Europeans already departed for San Francisco? Is it lack of VCs? Surely not education; is it a cultural issue? People in Europe being less likely to quit their day jobs?

I don't get it, but the results of my little experiment suggest that Europe isn't happening.

The only good news is that my two weeks in Europe have led to discussions about coming back: a possible event in London in the spring (more to follow), Reboot (I'm definitely going back to Copenhagen), another SHiFT in Lisbon (that was a blast, and too short), and a possible trip to Lift in Geneva (I missed the first one). So, I will be spending at least a few weeks over there, but not working with innovative little startups.

sponsored by OpenBC/XING.

tags: openbc, facebook, the+individual+is+the+new+group, more+europe+project, social+networks, XING, fred+oliviera, goplan

Comments

[Stephanie Booth]

I can't for the life of me remember where this was (and it was a couple of months back), but I'm sure I saw something somewhere about how Europe was becoming the huge reservoir of shiny web2.0 startups. If I lay my hands on it I'll be sure to send it your way.

[Stephanie Booth]

Right, I'm not sure this was it, but here's a taste:

http://www.cocomment.com/teamblog/?p=107

[Markus]

There are actually quite a few applications based in Europe - not all of them might fit your notion of a rockin' startup though... Two pointers to lists I compile:

the 50 most popular apps from Germany

apps filtered by language (try german, spanish and french) at the MoMB (only betas and pre-betas are listed, multiply it with 5 to get a raw estimation of current apps for each country)