

Why are there not more successful startups in Europe? - nicoschuele
http://blog.nicoschuele.com/?p=149

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teahat
Some other contributing factors: cultural attitudes to failure, and as a
consequence cultural attitudes toward entrepreneurs, heterogeneous audiences
(the USA has ~300M people speaking mostly the same language), far less
advanced ecosystem - success breeds success in terms of both experienced
founders, broader angel investment, stronger networks etc.

Of these, I suspect the cultural attitude toward failure is by far the most
significant. I think the USA breeds more successful startups primarily because
it breeds more startups, due to failure being viewed much less negatively.

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nicoschuele
Point taken. But see, here in Switzerland, even before speaking of attitude
towards failure, the simple fact of saying you are working on building a web
startup... ...gets you considered as an unemployed failure. That is one major
cultural difference.

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Peroni
Successful European startups:

* Bebo (remember them?) - UK

* Mojang - Sweden

* Mind Candy - UK

* Spotify - Sweden/UK

* Rovio - Finland

* Shazam - UK

* Habbo - Finland

* Miniclip - UK

* Badoo - UK

To name a few.

 _EDIT:_ How could I forget Skype? Estonia.

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nicoschuele
Yes. They are successful and I acknowledged it. Now, compare any one of these
to the success level of Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

~~~
Peroni
Every one of those companies defines the word 'successful'. I'd suggest your
title should read "Why are there not more insanely successful, multi-billion
dollar startups in Europe?"

~~~
nicoschuele
You are correct. On the other hand, spending at least 9 hours on the web daily
for the past 10 years, there are some in your list I've never heard about. It
is a fact that Europe produces less ubiquitous successful ventures than the
US.

