

There are almost 100 active startup accelerators in Europe today - robinwauters
http://tech.eu/research/29/there-are-roughly-100-active-startup-accelerators-europe/
We just launched Tech.eu, a new digital publication covering European tech innovation in depth, and one of our first posts is about the sheer number of startup accelerators currently operating across Europe today. Hopefully this submission isn&#x27;t regarded as too promotional - we just figured Hacker News might be interested in this sort of thing :)
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DanielBMarkham
Last week I was having a conversation with some local college folks who were
setting up our own entrepreneurial courses. I pointed out that this is really
a new area.

"No it's not," they assured me. In fact, we're behind the curve.

They missed my point. Yep, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and every other big
college has had an entrepreneurial track for some time now. The problem is
that there's no feedback loop in place to tell if they're actually doing any
good or to determine what needs adjustment in the material or presentation.
Yes, the knowledge is out there. It's the _performance_ that's never been part
of the equation. Hell, I can teach you about damn near anything, and do a
great job of it, as long as there's no measurement on the value of the
education you're receiving. Once you start measuring traction, however, it's a
different story. And startups are about nothing if not traction. If you don't
have traction, you don't have a startup, you have a hobby.

I feel the same way about these accelerators, and the hundreds more around the
world. Good luck to them, and I'll do anything I can help, but I am doubtful
these will amount to much without some tight feedback loops and control
systems in place. Perhaps a good, open, world-wide system of sharing lessons
learned. We have a long, long way to go.

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skrebbel
Are there any recent European tech startups that deserve to be called a big
success?

Spotify is on my list. Maybe Soundcloud. Some of the Rocket Internet
businesses(1) maybe, but is Zalando really a tech business? Was Zappos ever
one?

I bet I'm forgetting one or two more though. Either way, it's not going to be
very impressive.

I overheard someone say a while ago that the hottest startups in the
Netherlands are all incubators.

[1] Rocket Internet is a company that starts startups that copy the concept of
successful USA-targeting companies and does the same in Germany, then Europe.
Zalando is a Zappos ripoff, there's also Paymill (Stripe), and a whole bunch
more.

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mjn
Copenhagen Suborbitals is my favorite recent successful European tech
endeavor, but it's organized as a nonprofit rather than a startup. Kind of
interesting to think about when to use that model versus the startup model; I
don't have solid conclusions on that.

A few others: Unity (the game engine company, Denmark) was founded in 2004 and
got big around 2008-09. Not sure if that counts as recent enough. Flattr
(Sweden) is kind of niche-popular. One of the better attempts at
micropatronage, I think, though I'm not sure I'd call it a _big_ success.

If you count cloud infrastructure, OVH (France) is growing massively.

If you count games, Mojang (Sweden) and Rovio (Finland) are printing cash.

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kken
It's the typical european approach: Spread your funds everywhere and evenly
until not enough money is left to create something with enough punch to make a
difference.

You can observe this approach in many places:

\- Research. (Take a look at the recent billion euro graphene project. A
billion is not so much if you divide it between 140 universities and spend it
over 10 years)

\- Education. (What was the name of the really good German university again?)

\- Industrial clusters. (The US has a place for airplanes, one or two places
for semiconductors, a few places for cars. What about Europe)

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urlwolf
... and I think it's safe to say, none of them is remotely close to
Ycombinator in value delivered to startups.

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jds375
It would be interesting to see some statistics on their performance. Depth can
be just as important as the breadth.

