Two Views on Europe

I'm on a short trip to Europe to take care of some things. It's nice here: Well-architected buildings line pretty streets with cozy cafes and without homeless people.

But is it a good place for entrepreneurs? Two friends have sent me two articles with vastly different viewpoints.

The first comes from Foreign Policy: "Europe's Phiosophy of Failure". It points out the anti-capitalist attitudes found in Germany's and France's school textbooks. The author, Stefan Theil, claims that these textbooks portray capitalism as brutal, economic growth as a health hazard, and entrepreneurs as money-grabbing dictators. Having gone to high school in Germany myself, I didn't find this to be true. But times and textbooks may have changed since the pro-American 1990s.

The other article comes from BusinessWeek: "Europe's Crop of Billion-Dollar Babies". It features Giuseppe Zocco, co-founder of my favorite European VC firm, Index Ventures. Zocco talks about how "there are a lot of European companies founded in the past 5 to 10 years that can, with the right support, become billion-dollar companies." Can Europe build bigger companies than Silicon Valley with investors that have a longer time horizon? We shall see.

If you liked this, read: Why Startups don't Condense in Europe.

The French Invade Xobni

(This happened almost a month ago, but I haven't had time to write about it)

Matt mentioned that there would be "some French bloggers" visiting "later tonight". That sounded pretty innocent, but I had no idea that there would be so many of them.


Xobni still lacks the advanced conference room facilities of larger companies, but we do have a big-ass plasma screen and some leather couches. Thus, we packed our visitors into our "living room" and gave them the Xobni demo, followed by an hour-long Q&A session and some beers at the pub.


It turns out these guys were French entrepreneurs and bloggers on a week-long study trip to Silicon Valley. Jeremy Fain had organized for them to visit places such as Stanford, the San Francisco City Council, Microsoft, Google, eBay, Twitter and Xobni, all packed into a tight schedule.


I only wish this kind of trip had existed when I was back in Zurich - or that I would've had the idea to organize one.