Skip Silicon Valley: Why Smart Startups Start In Europe

Yes VC is less abundant, but if your plan is absolutely dependant on VC, maybe something is wrong.<p>In Europe, you get other valuable things, like a vibrant place, health coverage, etc. I&#x27;d put Canada in the same bag.<p>IMHO, the ideal plan is a fully owned company (ala O&#x27;Reilly) which pays for its own growth. You&#x27;ll still be able to find outside investment later- except <i>you</i> will make the terms, instead of getting pennies.<p>Call me selfish (and that&#x27;s a compliment to me :-), but I&#x27;d prefer the money to be in my pocket than in the VC pocket.

Counter-point: <a href="http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/entrepreneurship/advice-for-us-entrepreneurs-who-move-to-europe.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;english.martinvarsavsky.net&#x2F;entrepreneurship&#x2F;advice-f...</a><p>&quot;Another legal obligation that is very common in Europe and unheard of in the USA is state-mandated severance pay packages. This is a direct impediment to start ups, the reason being that most start ups fail and in the USA there is an understanding of this. In the USA employees demand stock options as upside should the start up succeed knowing that there will be no severance package should the start up fail. But I have yet to find a place in Europe where employees or governments truly understand this. Not only are forced severance pay packages a problem because most start ups fail and they still have to pay them, but also because start ups are constantly trying out people and the concept of trying out people is very costly in Europe. In some countries like France, forced severance packages of people who have been with you say only half a year can be as high as double their earnings during that time. For most Europeans stock options are considered a scam to pay them less.&quot;

I can&#x27;t get past the first paragraph of this article. Anyone who kicks off their argument with three sentences of continuous name-dropping is not worth listening to.

I&#x27;m European, but I think that the U.S. is (sadly) definitely better for startups, for an obvious reason - huge market. Expanding to other European countries requires lot of work and energy (different laws, language, culture etc.). In the US, no such friction exists. Another thing is workforce mobility, it&#x27;s lower in Europe (because of laws, language, culture).<p>Lack of VC is not the core issue IMHO, I guess it&#x27;s just the consequence of smaller markets. Biger markets = bigger VC money.

I don&#x27;t get the logic of trying to do something difficult (starting a business) while intentionally choosing to do things which make it even harder (starting in small countries in Europe which don&#x27;t have a domestic market, without decent VC, and in a hellishly expensive city to boot (London).)<p>If I were, say, Czech, I&#x27;d seriously consider doing stuff in the Czech Republic for a while, if I could bootstrap, then raise capital globally (maybe with a small office in the US if that helped). But I sure wouldn&#x27;t go from the US as a USAian to Europe to start something unless it was inherently a European-local business.

I&#x27;m currently bootstrapping a startup in London [0].<p>The problem for technical people creating startups in Europe isn&#x27;t just lack of capital. It&#x27;s risk-adverseness and occasionally classism. Unless you&#x27;re creating a pure internet startup you will need to work with other businesses and your first issue is in convincing them to take a risk on you; if you&#x27;ve not got an MBA from x University, some friends in the industry and a couple of entrepreneurship awards it&#x27;s only harder to do this.<p>The other ways up are really silly. Incubators that want you to social proof yourself with a number of popular advisors, etc. Also known as &quot;You have to be in to get in.&quot; Or the weird government schemes that will give you a nice loan to pay-off, or the very dodgy-looking startup schools which want you to pay a fee to have them parrot obvious advice at you &quot;Be Lean! Be Agile! Fill Out This Canvas!&quot; The only important things are the right connections and an opportunity to prove yourself and what&#x27;s there is often about legitimising the institution above giving the player an opportunity to legitimise themselves.<p>But, as with all things, just because something&#x27;s difficult doesn&#x27;t mean you shouldn&#x27;t try. Better to try, fail and learn than to continue as a bystander.<p>[0] <a href="http://getawayapp.co" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getawayapp.co</a>

You can&#x27;t scale a typical startup in Europe.<p>If you rely on pageviews alone, maybe, but your audience then is English anyhow, as local language stuff just doesn&#x27;t bring enough eyeballs.<p>If you rely on selling shit, then any US startup has a homogenous market of 313 million people, one legal framework and (roughly) one tax framework. In Europe? You&#x27;re quite literally fucked.<p>A startup, by definition, is supposed to grow quickly. Which is inherently harder in Europe. Not starting in the US is quite frankly asinine.<p>&#x2F;European myself, working for US startup, moving to US

It&#x27;s a fashion company. Europe probably makes sense for fashion.

&quot;to build our fashion ecommerce start-up&quot;<p>Well there&#x27;s your reason. IMO it&#x27;s important (or at least a factor) to be close to your domain. London or NYC or Los Angeles are your choices if you want to be part of the fashion community.<p>This article is applying that generally, when it&#x27;s just a specific market choice.

For most software-based startups it comes down to a few things:<p>* Ease of hiring (remote workers increase the pool of available talent)<p>* Infrastructure (including availability of payment solutions, ease of setting up a business, etc)<p>* Access to finance (which may not be necessary if bootstrapping, or bank loans are available, which is especially promising in the UK with the Enterprise Finance Guarantee)<p>Unless you&#x27;re VC-hungry there aren&#x27;t really that many barriers to creating and running a successful company in the EU. Perhaps the biggest drawback to Europe is the culture, which is less startup friendly and slightly more risk adverse compared to startup-centric locations in the US.

To get a true perspective on the startup&#x2F;tech scene in London then the next HN London meetup should be top of your agenda - <a href="http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/events/125382282/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;HNLondon&#x2F;events&#x2F;125382282&#x2F;</a>

s&#x2F;Europe&#x2F;Boston&#x2F;

Sadly, there are too little VC&#x27;s and angels in Europe. If you take a look at a startup map of Vienna (or most major cities), you are gonna cry. The biggest &quot;startup&quot; is dict.cc...yeah.<p>That&#x27;s why I am considering moving to CA after I get my degree. Though I am not sure yet.