There are probably 10 events equivalent or larger than Le Web throughout the year, as well as smaller events every day. We regularly ran into Robert Scoble and other major blogs, and they were very keen on listening to us. Local event organizers were even eager to help make a Finnish Angry Birds event happen and to introduce us to hundreds of people!
Readjustment of Expectations
These elements fit with each other and form the ground for growth business to happen. The old continent often looks up to the Valley as a sort of Eldorado of IT. Countries such as the UK, Russia and Finland are trying to replicate its ecosystem, to stimulate their local industries. Silicon Valley is a hub. Its value lies in two generations of people with unique know-how that are given all the tools necessary to create growth. No amount of EU or taxpayer money is going to recreate this perfect storm.
Not Businessmen, Entrepreneurs
We Europeans think of entrepreneurs as businessmen. This might be valid for lifestyle, predictable businesses, but the job of a startup entrepreneur is different: to test assumptions, to learn, and to create something new.
A trader on Wall St. can make money circulate without ever creating anything of value. In contrast with a startup such as Kiva, the drive to fix real problems, make and impact and give to the community makes traditional business feel vain, and startups all the more inspiring.
Down to Earth
Hearing and meeting thought leaders such as Eric Schmidt, Paul Buchheit or Steve Blank gave me a lot of food for thought. I have yet to see a Nokia executive at a startup event; these people on the other hand were approachable, down to earth, and relaxed. The pursuit of quality people makes this a meritocracy. Quite the contrast with our local successes who tend to behave like suits. Talent takes precedence over nationality or title, which would explain why Loic Le Meur and Om Malik are so well integrated, and Carol Bartz isn’t.
Cultural Edge
We received better customer service from Taco Bell and the police department than from Stockmann, the top tier department store in Finland! One time, a bus driver was more comfortable at speaking than most startups I’ve heard pitching. It seems they are more comfortable with small talk with the customer.
This tendency to be more outspoken could also be seen in networking and pitching, where there was much less awkwardness than with Europeans. Though it rarely feels genuine, it certainly is more effective.
Bigger is Better
More events, money and startups, means more competition, making it all the more necessary to stand out by hiring outstanding people, being more ambitious, more risk-taking. Unsurprisingly, this seems to weed out the less passionate people, while encouraging others to put in sweat equity in their own ideas.
This is something I feel we Europeans aren’t very good at. It’s compelling to start in your home country rather than aiming big, because it feels safer. The last thing you want when you launch is to tailor to several languages, cultural differences, distribution channels and small blogs and other media. You can easily get complacent when you succeed in your own country, but if we mitigate risk, we place the odds against us from the start.
Access to Finance
The most striking difference was to see a fully fleshed out capital market, where hobbyist and professional angels, superangels, top tier VCs and smaller firms compete for the more attractive deals. This makes for a more fluid deal flow, with more standardized and competitive terms, with more contacts and experience on top.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more angels and VCs in the region than on the entire European continent. In 2009, business angels invested 160 times more than their counterparts in continental Europe. It is also unclear whether we have any superangels (e.g. we don’t). Like our startups, our VCs tend to aim locally or regionally. Many of them aren’t reviewed on TheFunded, so there is little track record to refer to. With major exits being few and far between, the amounts of money reinvested as well at the experience offered is less.
Still Insular
At times, the Valley feels like a bubble, its inhabitants sheltered from the real world. Foreign markets seem to be an afterthought, space for local startups and copycats. It is unclear whether foreign companies can realistically raise money from where they're at: though Accel invested in the Lithuanian company GetJar, and more recently Esther Dyson invested in Finnish Valkee, I was also told that some VCs would only invest in startups within a short drive.
U.S. legislation is not on the foreign entrepreneur’s side. For some odd reason, it is easier to get a visa by being hired, than by establishing a U.S. company and creating jobs. Hopefully, the Startup Visa can correct this in the near future. This process should be streamlined, as I believe many European startups have a lot to offer.
3 Choices
Silicon Valley is an unfair advantage for startups. Its ecosystem serves as an accelerator for world-class growth business. In comparison with Europe, lesser teams with lesser technology have access to more resources and will get further, faster. Ambitious European entrepreneurs face three choices: should we aim smaller and within our comfort zone, take greater risks in the Valley, or try the hard way in the old continent?
Photo by luigig
I wanted to learn how to breakdance so I paid some kid $15 to teach me out of my hard-earned newspaper route money. I saw him in the street, spinning on a piece of linoleum. He had three friends with him, all of them were good at their own particular style of breakdancing. One kid was good doing the backspins, windmills, and headspins. Another kid was good at doing all the above floor stuff: like popping, etc. Another kid was good at waving. Like his body was made out of rubber. I had lost a contact lens and was afraid to tell my parents they needed to spring for a new pair. So for the entire summer, way back in the mid 80s, I practiced breakdancing every day and I could only see out of one eye. Maybe the best summer of my life. Certainly the most embarrassing when I now think back on it.
In every spare moment I either hung out with my new friends, having no issues abandoning my other friends who weren’t cool enough to understand the finer subtleties of the windmill, or I practiced in front of a mirror. Its even embarrassing writing these words down.
Of course, like in all my remembrances, I thought that by learning how to spin on my back and do other random contortions with my body I would , of course, meet girls in clubs. I had gotten rid of my glasses and braces a year earlier so now I was ready. I was the new me. That’s what the braces were for, right? Now my teeth were straight and shiny. Good for kissing. But it didn’t happen because I still had “me” to deal with. The me that couldn’t talk to anyone or was too shy to ask anyone for their number.
Much later, when I applied to colleges I never mentioned this little episode in my life. I focused on things like “chess” and my stupendous performance as a “mathlete”.
But its all related to making money. I wanted to make money for the same reason I wanted to breakdance: because of lack of self confidence I felt I needed a crutch of sorts to increase my attractiveness to women. My insecurity was so high that only by being the best at something could I muster the confidence to say, “this is me, this is what I do.” If I wanted to pursue ANYTHING (and it has to be something I’m passionate about or it won’t work), I had to apply the following principles. Who knows if I ever really got good at anything, or mastered anything worth telling people about. But at the very least, I applied the principles below and got good at a few things. Good enough to make some money, good enough to have fun, good enough to have some interesting experiences along the way.
A) Teacher: Get a teacher/mentor. I’ve done this with everything from chess, to stockpicking, hedge funds, entrepeneurship, etc. You absolutely need a teacher in anything you do to help you quickly jump over the basic mistakes.
B) Read. Read everything you can. I have over 200 books about chess. I’ve read over 2-300 books on investing. In the early stages of the Internet I read every book that Tim O’Reilly ever published. I learned every programming language, everything about networking and security, everything about design. I read everything I could on entrepeneurship. I read so many books about Warren Buffett I wrote my own book about Warren Buffett (“Trade Like Warren Buffett” (2005) ) 200 books on a topic seem to be about the right number. You need to also study the present. Every day new things are developing in your field. You need to know all of them. If you are a lawyer, you need to follow every case. If you’re a doctor, every new breakthrough technology. If you are an Internet entrepreneur, every new twist on website development, on business model innovations, on the new businesses being started every day, etc.
C) History. You need to know the history of what you are doing. When Bobby Fischer was about 14 years old, after already proving he was a talented chess prodigy, he disappeared for about a year and studied every game played in the 1800s. By the time he reappeared he had developed some critical innovations to games played a hundred years earlier and handily won the US Championship, the youngest champion ever. In investing there are tons of books written in the 60s, 70s (Adam Smith’s “Supermoney” is a great example) and even in the early part of the century (Baruch’s autobiography, anything by LeFevre). I would study all of the so-called bubbles (I do not believe there ever was a tulip bubble or South Sea Bubble, for instance). Get software to model the markets so you can see the subtleties in the data over the past 100 years. It’s the only way to understand what is happening now.
D) Fail. Study your mistakes. Repeatedly. You can’t improve by only studying your wins. In poker, you have to analyze every hand you lost and why. In chess, you have to run your losses thorugh the computer, through your teacher, you have to spend hours studying the games and looking for your weaknesses: the weaknesses in your knowledge and the weaknesses in your psychology, which are part of every loss. Ditto for investing. You’ll always have losses. But the second you blame it on “bad luck” then you’ve gone from having a loss to becoming a loser. You don’t want to be a loser. Same goes for relationships. When it doesn’t work out, its just as much your fault as the other persons. Where did you go wrong? How can you be better? There’s a corollary to this, which is that in order to succeed, you have to fail at many things (not always, but most likely). You will probably fail dozens of times. There’s countless examples in history (Edison, Einstein, Lincoln).
E) Ideas. Generate new ideas. When you work at a company, its not enough that you be a good employee of that company (i.e. you do everything well that your boss asks you to do). You must actually BECOME the company. You need to act as if you are the force that brings that company to life. And every company, just like every endeavor you embark on, needs new ideas. Once you inject your own life force into an endeavor, then you inevitably will bring to it new ideas. You’ll develop new chess openings that match your style. You’ll discover a new risk arbitrage technique that matches the type of risk profile you’re comfortable with. You’ll bring a company or academic discipline into a new direction that nobody’s ever thought of before. You’ll start a new company where everyone says, “gosh, that was so easy. Why didn’t I think of it?” But in order to do that you have to first do all of the techniques above, then do everything you can to develop the idea muscle. Every day, making a list of ten to twenty new ideas in your chosen field.
F) Do. You need to not just “read” and “study” but “do”. If you want to write a screenplay, every day you need to write. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you must start write away thinking of services or products you can provide and sell people. If you want to invest, open an account and start buying stocks. Nobody is going to do it for you.
G) How long does it take? You need to be patient. I think to properly follow the steps outlined above its at least a three to five year process. Three years before you can say, “I understand this field”, five years before you can say “I can make a living doing this”, and eight years before you can say, “I’m one of the best in the world at this.” Its ok not to be the best in the world at something. But if you want to make a difference you need to put in the time, whether its art, internet, sports, etc.
Finally, you need to maintain. Everything I’ve ever done, I still keep track of and stay in at least “maintenance” mode. I’m not saying I’ve mastered anything. And I haven’t created billions in value. But if you threw out a piece on linoleum and wanted me to spin on my back, I can probably still do that, although when I do it in front of my kids they laugh at me.
p.s. My current favorite breakdancing video:
surface encounters surface encounters surface encounters review surface encounters surface encounters surface encounters review surface encounters surface encounters complaints surface encounters complaints surface encounters surface encounters review surface encounters review surface encounters review surface encounters surface encounters rock tops surface encounters complaints surface encounters surface encounters rock tops surface encounters surface encounters review
Larry Kramer: This Is Why Fox <b>News</b> Continues To Roll
People are getting lazy about forming their own opinions.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Small Biz Tech Primer
Technology is vastly changing the scope and reach of small business not only in the world of marketing but in all aspects of operating your venture. From tech.
Good <b>news</b>: School officials destroy girl's college plans over <b>...</b>
Good news: School officials destroy girl's college plans over knife mix-up.
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Alan Mairson
at 3:03 pm, December 15, 2010
Spot on, Mr. Winer.
My only question: Do you think the Groupon model would work only for *local* news organizations?
Since June 2009, I’ve been championing the idea that National Geographic magazine could organize an international Groupon-like buying club that would equip & empower an army of digital Davids — and give them a reason to join the National Geographic Society.
That is, instead of selling 5 million pairs of eyeballs to Nikon for a magazine advertisement, National Geographic should say to Nikon: “We just polled our members, who are fully networked, and 2,500 of them want to buy a new Nikon D-40 this month. How much per unit if we buy in bulk?”
Members would not only get a great deal. They’d be connected to other people learning to use the same gear AND they’d have a platform where they could contribute their work to the journal-ism of the organization.
You think that could work? Please see:
http://societymatters.org/2010/12/02/opportunity-awaits/
Ted
at 6:00 am, December 16, 2010
It all comes down to that last graf. But it occurs to me more and more that as news organizations still think of themselves as content creators, we’re ill-equipped to execute the next idea, no matter how simple, when going up against startups that take the best ideas and run with them from Step 1.
For example – the Groupon concept was out there before Groupon, and a lot of news organizations were offering half price discounts on any number of items – food, sporting goods, etc. They were on the cusp on executing exactly what Groupon has done.
Except for two things – they were outsourcing almost all of the execution to third parties, and because they were focused on their own localities, usually, they never really pondered the offerings on a larger scale. (Why would they? They were already outsourcing the parts they’d need to execute on a larger scale.)
Seems like we need to move from new business development to new business development. (Easy to say – hard to do.) And until we are more able to do that, we’ll continue to miss the opportunities that might be right in front of our noses.
Tom Crowl
at 10:36 am, December 16, 2010
RE “That’s the question news people never seem to ask. How can we create something that has a market? If they asked that question instead, they would restructure their activity. Because there are things similar to news that have generated huge wealth. Not hidden, in plain sight.”
The Market IS THERE! The problem is that the mechanism hasn’t been there to address the transaction problem.
This problem (which extends also into the political participation sphere especially) is directly linked to neglected scaling issues in this new landscape… and the capabilities required for Commons-oriented transactions in that space… and why that requires a viable, simple and secure MICRO-transaction.
The Commons-dedicated Account Network:
A self-supporting , Commons-owned neutral network of accounts for both political and charitable monetary contribution… which for fundamental reasons of scale must allow a viable micro-transaction (think x-box points for action in the Commons).
(I note that journalism is often a for-profit enterprise and that this presents a complicating factor. I believe this is an addressable issue.)
Re-Igniting the Enlightenment: On Building Landscapes for Decision
http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/12/re-igniting-enlightenment-on-building.html
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/culturalengineer
At its root, a civilization (or any social organism) is a product of individual and group decisions (ideas+actions) operating within the confines of the physical environment and natural law. we then see culture as the expression of this “social energy”.
Money was developed originally as a technology for the allocation of excess social energy where complexity (and loss of various forms of proximity) required conventions beyond the less formalized methods of a hunter-gatherer group.
I believe this suggest some re-thinking about the nature of money and capital (and capital creation) but that’s another story…
The point here is that the nature of this “social energy” in a scaled organism requires that the exchange of this energy NOT be bound by transaction costs or other complications IN AREAS RELATED TO COMMONS-DEDICATED FUNCTIONS ESPECIALLY…
These particular areas of exchange actually pre-date the need for or existence of the commercial transaction and require special attention.