Are Europeans Too Lazy to be Software Entrepreneurs?

Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis caused a blogostorm with his candid treatise on making every startup dollar count. The controversy is not especially surprising when his list of tips for thrifty includes such items as “fire people who are not workaholics” (which provoked so much ire that he felt compelled to change it to “fire people who don’t love their work”). Some went as far as to label Calacanis a “prick“, with the obligatory observation that they’ve never heard or his company, but love to death the products of cooler companies who pay for their employees to go backpacking.

I’ve seen both approaches in action in my day. More than one startup founder has told me that they keep the hours reasonable because they “don’t want to burn out their staff.” Sorry, but what I heard was “I’m too lazy to work long hours so I can’t expect my staff to.” Of course, it depends to some degree on your ambitions. If your goal is to earn a good living with a bunch of smart, like-minded folks tackling some not-too-intractable problem, with plenty of free time to bungee jump from helicopters or make erotic origami, that is doable. But if you want to create a world-beating company, Mike Arrington has it nailed: your odds of succeeding are long enough without four-day weeks and ambling trips to the local juice bar five times a day.

Besides which, software geeks don’t have the same view of life/work balance as most people. In their response to Jason’s post, 37signals explain that:

Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

Probably the guy who wrote this is a graphic designer or something, since for all the real programmers I know, the most interesting subject imaginable is the software project they are currently working on. That’s why our social skills suck so bad. When we run into someone who isn’t a geek, we have no idea what to talk about. Naturally this gets old eventually, and even the pocket protector set ends up settling down, getting a dog and starting a family. Ever wonder why most startups are populated mainly with 20-somethings?

Which brings me to my real point: in light of this state of affairs, does Europe have a chance in the software biz? I’ve been working in European software startups for 15 years (and running them for 10). Having grown up in America, I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of obsessiveness when it comes to driving the company’s success. Programmers on this side of the pond work a lot harder than, say, post office clerks, but traditionally it’s still been a far cry from the mattress-under-your-desk workathon of the American startup nerd. When Arrington mocked the idea of “three weeks vacation” I had to smile. Over here, the big question is whether we can beat our staff down from five to only four weeks.

The good news is that the situation is changing. I’m seeing more and more startups built up around the American model. Globalization, more awareness of “cool” company cultures like Google’s and a few European home runs (such as Skype) are helping to reshape attitudes on this side of the pond. Lack of precedents for success, paucity of venture capital, stifling regulation and excessive risk aversion have conspired with our generally sedate work habits to lock Europeans into second-class citizen status in the software world. As we overcome these obstacles, I expect we’ll mount a much more credible challenge to America’s technological dominance.

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Who Are You 2.0?

In a recent post, Richard MacManus is asking on the excellent Read/Write Web blog how many of the 15 selected European startups we know from the StartUp2.0 competition.

Being a French CEO of a UK company living temporarily in the Czech Republic (+3 to my euro-creds - and don’t get me started on my Belgium ancestors…), I had a look and amongst the list of 15, I recognized… one: Properazzi the European property search engine from my friend Yannick Laclau.

What does this tell me: am I out of touch with the latest European trends or does my brain automatically filter out any news site pitched as “a sharing social network for the ______ niche”? Whatever the answer is, I wish the best of luck to these new European entrants.

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AllPeers Finalist of Red Herring 100 Europe

Thanks to Red Herring for naming AllPeers a Finalist of Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region.

Red Herring’s editorial staff rigorously evaluated more than 700 private companies through an analysis of financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development.

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LeWeb3 Video Archives

Our friends at Vpod.tv have uploaded the video archives of all the presentations from LeWeb3 last week in Paris. Just search for the “leweb3″ tag, sit back and enjoy.

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Top 10 Ways to Take an European Company Global

We are now only a couple of weeks away from the BIG European conference LeWeb3 organised in Paris by my fellow Frenchman Loic Le Meur from SixApart.

I’ll participate to a discussion called “Can European companies go global?”. The answer is obviously “yes” but what’s more interesting is to figure out “how”. I will of course draw some conclusions from our own experience at AllPeers and in preparation for my talk here are my top 10 strategies an entrepreneur from a small European startup should follow:

1- Solve a global problem. At AllPeers we are addressing the issue of easily sharing large (quantity of) files with Friends, Family, Colleagues. Email was invented for text, FTP is for uber-geeks and web-based offers require uploading your private files to the cloud.

2- Target a global niche/community. Of course in our case, this is the very active Firefox community. Be the indisputable leader in your niche before trying to reach outside of it.

3- Release early, often, incorporate feedback from your early users and then launch. This is what we are doing indeed since the very first private beta in March of this year and the feedback we are receiving is extremely valuable as we are building the product to a level we feel it is ready for mass adoption.

4- Run a corporate blog in English. Be open about your progress. Thanks to this blog, we were picked up by TechCrunch and then everybody else.

5- Keep your costs down. Even if there is a bubble, even if money seems to grow on trees these days, have a culture for keeping your costs as low as possible until you start accumulating revenues. Having our development center in Central Europe is one of our biggest asset.

6- Plan localization from day one. The last thing you want to do is to have to rewrite your basic code to be able to go outside of your home market.

7- Build a multi-cultural team. Out of 14 people, we have 7 different nationalities in the team allowing us to compare and challenge how certain markets will react to certain messages.

8- Be original. Don’t import an existing concept. Sorry but this is just too lame.

9- Communicate on the US market. Journalists from other countries are reading the US news too and they will contact you directly.

10- Aim big. Be ambitious. The more difficult the task is, the more rewarding it is when it’s a success. I guess this is about self-esteem.

Extra bonus point: keep your sense of humor, it’s the universal language!

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Le Web 3

I will be participating to a panel entitled “European entrepreneurship 2.0: can Europe compete against Silicon Valley?” at this year’s Le Web 3 in Paris, France December 11th and 12th.

It is a two days conference to discuss the next generation web and mobile services, communities, old and new media. Last year the event gathered 450 web entrepreneurs, key players and bloggers from 25 countries.

A great panel of speakers with a European focus has been gathered (Niklas Zennström/Skype, Martin Varsavsky/Fon,..). The program is online here and will be updated as additional speakers are confirmed.

1,000 participants, bloggers, VCs and angels, startups, journalists and internet passionate are expected there. The conference is in English. Register now to join us to what might be one of the best conference for Web 2.0 in Europe.

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Business 2.0

Thank you to Business 2.0 for putting us on their map of the most interesting internet start-ups in Europe. You can actually read the whole magazine online. This specific article is on page 108.

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Look East and You Could Find….

I am probably not taking a risk by saying that the US will continue to be a hotbed of innovation for the foreseeable future, nor can I be very wrong if I say that South East Asian will produce more innovation than it does today. I may raise a few eyebrows, however, by saying that I believe “Eastern Europe” will produce some of the big technology hits of the next decade.

My firm has been looking at companies in “Eastern Europe” for a couple of years and it strikes me how many terrific ideas and great people we have come across. While the number of companies being created is still not important, it is the desire to try to create that strikes me – entrepreneurship by any other name.

I frankly thought it would take much longer for us to see entrepreneurship point it nose in the east. After all, 50 years of communism does take some getting over. The page has, however, turned. Allpeers and Quintura, an investment my firm is about to make, are both good illustrations of the region’s potential to innovate.

Look hard enough and you could find that diamond in the rough.

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Jamón, Jamón

We got back last night from Innovate!Europe. Having worked in the software industry in Europe for the past 15 years (and as an entrepreneur for the past eight), I’ve been frustrated frequently by the lack of respect accorded to European technology startups. It’s been common for companies to set up a U.S. corporation just so that they can pretend to be American, since the assumption has been that European software companies are not to be taken seriously. Access to capital, effective marketing of new products and connecting with potential partners have also been major problems for new tech businesses on this side of the pond.

All this to say that it was incredibly uplifting to be at a conference with so many exciting startups and clueful venture capitalists. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the European software industry has finally arrived. Much of this is doubtless a result of Skype’s high-profile success. The States, and especially Silicon Valley, have always had the advantage of slews of well-known precedents for eye-popping IPOs and trade sales which serve to motivate the next generation of entrepreneurs. Now (finally!) Europeans have a company they can look to when they start to worry about whether it’s really possible to create a worldwide brand and achieve a grand-slam home run of an exit without being based within spitting distance of Highway 101.

Besides driving the message home that there are many more success stories of this type to come, the conference was impressively well-organized. I don’t know whether it was the relatively intimate atmosphere, the layout of the conference area, the frequent breaks for mingling, the use of special “connectors” (i.e. gregarious PR people tasked specifically with preventing introverted geeks like myself from hiding in the restroom until all the scary people go away) or a combination of these, but we met a fantastic number of smart, interesting folks who I’m sure will be the engine of the coming European software juggernaut. I sincerely hope that many of these encounters will turn into lasting friendships.

After an excellent weekend in Barcelona prior to the conference, we got an insider’s view of Zaragoza nightlife thanks to a portfolio company of one of our investors that is located in the region. In true Spanish style, they invited us to join them for dinner at about 10pm on Tuesday night. We knew we were in trouble when the gins-and-tonic we had ordered as aperitifs arrived in glasses the size and shape of a goldfish bowl. The rest of the meal presented a similar paradox: far too much to eat/drink, far too good not to. So we did.

The following day we were not the freshest and most alert entrepreneurs in attendance. This didn’t present us from heading out again that night to Casa Colas, another restaurant recommended by the aforementioned porfolio party animals/culinary sadists. The dinner was originally conceived as an intimate tête-à-tête with Mike Arrington, but we managed to rope in the what eventually seemed like every conference attendee still in Zaragoza.

Special credit goes to Andrew Carton for deploying his impressive linguistic abilities and managerial talents to ensure that even the non-Spanish speakers in the crowd were amply fed. We then milked the Zaragoza nightlife for all it was worth and staggered home when what appeared to be the last open bar in town finally closed. An hour of sleep, a frenetic packing session and at least one aspirin later we were on our way to the station for the early train back to Barcelona and thence to Prague.

Hair of the dog that bit you?

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