Many sides to it. Fully agree on what Christian says about European startups raising too little and not being able to execute on their vision because of that.

Many sides to it. Fully agree on what Christian says about European startups raising too little and not being able to execute on their vision because of that. At the same time agree with entrepreneurs raising this little, as the valuations often are much lower than in the US and there is less investor selection available. Then coming back to investors, the low valuations are often correct, just because there are much fewer exit opportunities available. Just count how many European exits there were last year. No exit opportunities means no sense to exit into startups as an investor, because your chance to get the money back is much less. For Estonian (nation of 1.3m in Europe and one of the poorest in EU, extrapolate from that) related startups, 2013 was the best year ever, with 32mEUR raised by 40 teams. 20% of that money came from Estonia, 80% from Europe and US. There has been almost double growth between 2011-12 and 2012-13. So the growth in European tech and investment ecosystem is definitely there.