Why are there not more successful startups in Europe?

blog.nicoschuele.com

2 points·nicoschuele··6 comments

Some 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.

Point 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.

Successful 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.

Yes. They are successful and I acknowledged it. Now, compare any one of these to the success level of Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

Every 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?"

You 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.

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