

The State Of Investments In Europe: A Review Of The Last 5 Years - AndriusWSR
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/20/the-state-of-investments-in-europe-a-review-of-the-last-5-years/?ncid=facebook_social_share

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buro9
> At first glance, the increase in speed from seed to Series A in Europe from
> 424 to 205 days appears to be a good sign. However, remember that the
> average seed investment in Europe in 2013 was $150,000 compared with
> $500,000 in the U.S.

>

> We suspect that the reduced time between rounds in Europe unfortunately
> signals that entrepreneurs are being forced to refocus on fundraising more
> quickly at the expense of building and scaling a product and the business.

I believe this is true, my own anecdotal experience backs it up. We're a
London based startup ( [https://microco.sm/](https://microco.sm/) ) and we
raised our initial £150k for our friends and family round which enabled us to
build the platform and get to 43,500 users.

But... we're now in a tough spot with the runway end looming, and have to
return to fundraising. I'd much rather carry on focusing on the product
development and improving awareness of our offering. But instead it's a drop-
everything and go focus on raising money... which in-turn kills a little of
our momentum.

It feels like the European adversity to risk manifests as smaller investments
that result in the startups not having as much time to mature their offering
and build that momentum before constantly going back for more investment.

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troels
Unrelated, but your site displays an SSL warning, because you have mixed
content. Might want to fix that.

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buro9
The site does not include mixed-content.

However the page does have a form for a mailing list via MailChimp, and that
form submits over [http://](http://) which triggers Chrome to state that give
the mixed-content indicator.

The detail of the error is that the form itself should be submitted via
[https://](https://) (I agree), but to my knowledge Mailchimp only takes
[http://](http://) and the destination page itself would submit over
[http://](http://) and show real mixed-content if you tried to POST via
[https://](https://)

~~~
troels
Ah .. that's why I couldn't spot it at a glance. It works fine with mailchimp,
if you just replace http with https. I just tried it.

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bowlofpetunias
The cliche "there is no country called Europe" very much applies in this case.
Seed investment happens almost exclusively on the national level, with local
investors and start-ups who's initial target is the local market, regardless
of how big their long term ambitions are.

The local investment and startup scenes vary wildly across Europe. Not to
mention the wildly different states of the various economies.

