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Why are there not more successful startups in Europe?
- teahat 13y agoSome 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.
- nicoschuele 13y agoPoint 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.
- Peroni 13y agoSuccessful 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.
- nicoschuele 13y agoYes. They are successful and I acknowledged it. Now, compare any one of these to the success level of Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
- Peroni 13y agoEvery 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 13y agoYou 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.