How to 50x the number of tech startups in Europe?
Yesterday night in Berlin,
@andreasklinger &
@dominik_scherm hosted a eu/acc get-together 🇪🇺with ~200 guests to address this pivotal question.
Personal takeaways from Andreas' amazing presentation, panel, and chats with other guests (focus on US vs. EU ecosystem):
🚫 NOT the main issues (against common beliefs):
· Lack of research or innovation: many successful US tech companies base large parts of their tech on EU deep tech acquisitions, or use EU talent as CTOs / engineers / … .
· Lack of education: Germany for example has great technical universities at almost zero cost to study.
· Lack of talent / brain drain: there are at least as many US people immigrating to the EU for quality of life than the other way around, if not more.
· Lack of a “Silicon Valley”: we have many excellent clusters for innovation, in various areas.
· Lack of potential ambitious founders: there are enough tech-minded people with an ambition to build something big and impactful (even though the “craziness” of saying “I will be the one to build the next billion euro company and rule the world” is a bit less common, admittedly – but that’s a cultural thing and that’s OK, not the main issue).
🧩👩⚖️ Problem #1:
Fragmented & complex legal systems
· A zillion different forms for legal entities in EU, no equivalent to the “Delaware LLC”. Makes it very complicated for EU VCs to invest big, across borders, in Europe.
· Also harder for foreign VCs to get into whole EU as a market, as they must to adapt to many different legal systems, instead of just one.
· Generally, founding a limited liability company is much in countries like Germany, compared to US – not a deal breaker for creating a unicorn, but still introducing friction when it comes to quickly building momentum, or just trying out sth. fast.
🧩💶 Problem #2:
Fragmented market
· US startups can, more or less, serve their products and services across all states, to a giant economy, from day one. EU startups usually aren’t that easily able to do business in EU neighbor states (esp. when they aren’t having a SaaS model).
· Language and cultural barriers are one issue in this context, but a main reason are also different legal systems, different tax rules, etc.
· Applies especially to companies in heavily regulated verticals, such as space tech or other sectors with a lot of specific national regulations and practices.
🌟🦄 Problem #3:
Lack of accessible role models & success stories
· In the US, founders go to Stanford and similar Ivy League schools to spread excitement and entrepreneurial spirit to students. Jensen Huang even has a Stanford building named after him. In EU, buildings are commonly named to honor people that are just retiring, or already dead.
· Exceptions exist, like Hasso Plattner Institute (
@HPI_DE |
@openHPI), or August W. Scheer having co-initiated @softwarecampus1 (talked to him in person during the program 🥲)
· But what about the unicorn builders under 50? Can we invite them to our top engineering schools more frequently and spread their success stories?
@Fraunhofer_IGD does it with their annual “Mein Weg Danach” talks, and it has the highest spinoff ratio across all Fraunhofer institutes, I believe.
Thanks
@ricvath,
@andrewztan,
@princessashinze,
@trentmc0 and everyone else for the great conversations, panelists
@emilkendziorra, Laura from
@tileboxio, Marcus from
Dunia.ai &
@b_johannsen for sharing your insights, and everyone at the event for the great learnings and inspirational conversations.
Now back to building! 🚀🇪🇺