Question: What places in Europe would someone recommend an ambitious EU techie with no ties to move to (and possibly settle)? I figure the country needs to have fairly good internet and a decent political climate at the very least.
If you are thinking of starting something and need investment, London is hard to beat, with Berlin coming up second.
It's already booming compared to a few years ago, it is seeing some significant successful startups (Criteo, Blaclacar...), and the ecosystem is clearly growing at an accelerated pace, with new companies, new spaces, new schools, new events appearing all over the place.
In 2016-2017 a few really large incubators are to open. Like the one championed by Xavier Niel which will host 1000 startups in a gigantic railway warehouse converted to startup offices (I bet that neighborhood is going to feel that change!), or another one opened by the City that will host 300 startups.
All in all I expect a frantic activity in the next few years. Now with so many startups (and hopefully a few great ones in the lot!) the scramble for financing is bound to be pretty harsh.
- I did not talk about the government, but I don't think it's that bad in France compared to most places in the world. Sure, some places like the Nordics seem to have pretty decent governments but at the end of the day in almost every country in the world the government is going to suck and you'll have to succeed despite them.
- Paris is "expensive" but it's still a LOT cheaper than other comparables cities, eg. London. I won't even talk about NYC or Silicon Valley.
- The ecosystem is blooming right now, and if it keeps up as I think it will, that means a tremendous number of opportunities for an ambitious person willing to start a business or work with startups.
- Funding sucks. But then again it sucks everywhere on the planet apart from SV so that's that. At least people who have worked in France can live on pretty decent unemployment checks for up to two years while they bootstrap the business so that's helpful enough.
They usually just fade :-/
Besides, politics in the area is very much still living in the past (to the extent it's largely driven by nostalgia rather than by what's reasonable), when mining, steel and big state-run companies dominated the economic landscape. Politics being run by largely anti-business socialists for decades now doesn't help exactly either.
Corruption is rampant, there's no vision and in general people there don't seem to care as long as their favourite football club's still playing. It's a shame really. There's a lot of potential there that simply goes unused.
[edit: grammar]
It hosts Philips, ASML, TomTom, Shapeways, NXP Semiconductors, DAF Trucks and quite a few other high tech startups.