Hacker News Reader

Comment by PanickedOmlette | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, there are too little VC's and angels in Europe. If you take a look at a startup map of Vienna (or most major cities), you are gonna cry. The biggest "startup" is dict.cc...yeah.

That's why I am considering moving to CA after I get my degree. Though I am not sure yet.

View on HN

Agreed. The biggest problem is funding. I'm working for a startup right now that's (to overuse a phrase) killing it, but I cannot imagine us getting here without a large amount of capital to get off the ground.

We'd have been stuck in garages without the money to really hit the growth curve hard.

I'm a Canadian expat in the US, I cannot imagine starting any sort of capital-intensive venture in Canada just because the investment money does not exist.

If you're building something that doesn't require a lot of funding, by all means do it wherever makes you most happy. If you do need a substantial amount of money though, your options are limited.

This. It is a huge pain to raise money at the lower levels in Europe. That I know of, something like a convertible note does not exist, or at least hardly anyone would offer one. The process can also be much longer, even if you find someone interested in making an investment. The pattern for new European startups seems to be, get as far as you can without taking money and then find a way to get to the US to raise.

That is an odd conclusion. Vienna is a nice city, but even for European terms it is not exactly a hotbed of innovation and start ups. Try Berlin, London.

There are lots of people doing startups in London but fundraising is still much harder than in SV

Yeah, I'll maybe go to Berlin in the end. Still, it seems everything is happening in the US. But what do I know :)

Fellow Austrian here. I was in your exact boat about 6 months ago. Startup "scene" in Vienna is sad. Immigrating into the US is hard so I looked at Berlin and London.

For now I'm living in London. I considered Berlin, but I think the English practice here is invaluable. My English was already quite good when I came here, but it's improved LOADS. Also there's much more going on in general (culturally, socially), and there's more and bigger startups here (e.g. compare HN Who's hiring / startup city rankings).

> If you take a look at a startup map of Vienna (or most major cities), you are gonna cry. The biggest "startup" is dict.cc...

Don't look at silly maps (URL?) that are pure fiction. dict.cc is a popular website, but not a classic startup (apparently no ambitions to commercialize) and 11 years old.

Recent highly successful startups from Vienna are e.g. Runtastic and 123people.

A reasonable number of bigger startups have come from Europe, though some later move to the US once they get particularly big and/or acquired. Some examples that come to mind: Skype, Spotify, Unity, Mojang, Opera.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com