This sounds eerily similar to the so-called startupscene in Denmark.<p>The events revolve around bankers, bureaucrats, lawyers and consultants trying to make a buck off the entrepreneurs. This is an evil spiral since nobody knows what the heck they're talking about, and drain the few startups of the money and resources they've got. The result is that there are very few startups that succeed, thus fuelling more of the same bullshit with the state giving grants to entrepreneurship events and programs that are promtly sweeped up by aforementioned consultants and lawyers.<p>And the state keeps pouring money into the black hole not understanding why the new Google doesn't emerge.<p>Two years ago Ernst and Young's highly publizised entrepreneur of the year in Denmark managed to give the first prize to a company which <i>two days</i> after the event was exposed as one of the biggest frauds in Danish history. A few years earlier the prize was given to a company with 500 employees that was founded in 1956.<p>I stopped going to these events years ago - they're a total waste of time.<p>It's a structural problem - if there aren't any successful entrepreneurs there's noone to turn for for guidance, no capable investors and no role models. Which of course leads to even less successful entrepreneurs.<p>Maybe this is a European problem?
The author makes a lot of good points. Its true that a lot of the officials who claim to be attempting to help entrepreneurs don't have any entrepreneurial experience themselves and that hurts their ability to help.<p>Unfortunately, the random bolding of words really detracts from the content of the author's writing.
Same deal with folks who introduce themselves as professional startup advisors. Be wary! The best ones seem to have tons of interesting stuff going in their lives already and just enjoy helping out young companies when they're in a position to do so.
This reminds me of 'TiE' (the Indus Entrepreneurs - <a href="http://www.tie.org/homepage" rel="nofollow">http://www.tie.org/homepage</a> )events in India. They have nothing to do with Entrepreneurs - just businessmen talking to each other about PR, boasting of some personal numbers and such.<p>If you see entrepreneurs meeting - it's exciting, energetic and people want to make things happen. While TiE events are lame, lifeless and hopeless.<p>Most of what they say - opposite of that is true for entrepreneurs. One dude was obsessed with his numbers - and suggested that so should every <i>entrepreneur</i>, his words went something like - your numbers are the value you add to your customers. Pathetic.
I'm Spanish and I couldn't agree more.<p>The scene is full of people who don't know anything about real entrepreneurship and that do this things because of the State subventions on these matters...<p>Oh and don't forget about the social media profets that focus more on buzz that on building things and the banks with abusive credits.<p>This country is really bad, specially for technology startups. The philosophy here is 'Can't touch it, no money'. That's why we got the real state bubble, that's why the government cuts the subventions on I+D, and that's why founding any kind of enterprise takes much money, time and useless paperwork.<p>Edit: typos
It's really unfortunate, but I think this is the reality in most places. Startups and entrepreneurship are now so visible on the internet that everyone is trying to get a piece. You have wannabe entrepreneurs everywhere now, and so there is also a cottage industry of snake-oil salesmen and unscrupulous "VC" operations that spring up to take advantage of the hype.<p>One of the beautiful things about being in silicon valley (having been here for 3 out of 12 years of my professional life) is that you inevitably run into people who know what they're doing and are happy to share their experiences with you. Once you get a little bit of this under your belt you can spot the posers and wannabes a mile off.<p>Even if you aren't in the valley, you can get still get enough information on the web now to really hit the ground running with a startup. Of course if you don't know what you're looking for, it's still a crapshoot to understand who's giving good advice and who's full of shit, but it's a far cry from 20 years ago, where if you were outside of silicon valley you might not even realize it was <i>possible</i> to start a tech company from scratch.
I found the situation to be similar in north america too (ontario, canada and michigan to be specific). There are people that show up to these events and sit on panels and have access to all sorts of funding. They say they can help entrepreneurs without having a single startup under their belt.
This tracks very well with Andrew's Mixergy interview of Spanish entrepreneur Juan Dominguez (<a href="http://mixergy.com/redcpa-viajar-juan-dominguez/" rel="nofollow">http://mixergy.com/redcpa-viajar-juan-dominguez/</a>), where Juan mentions that there are really no VCs in Spain, and the money sources there offer atrocious terms.