And I certainly don’t thing you have to move to SV to be successful. If I did – I probably wouldn’t feel so successful anyway. Did you read the interview where folks in SV who were worth around $10 mill said they felt poor in relation to some of their neighbours. None of them sounded happy, or satisfied with their levels of success.

Here are my thoughts on it…

Since the 90s I have been working with technology companies in Europe and the US, with start-ups and mature companies. There is far too much of a push in the US to get to market when taking VC money. Time-and-time again in companies put forward products that are not scaling well or are not fully ready as the competition is high. In Europe the pace is a little slower and calculated with a focus on getting things right. Europe also has a good safety net to provide health care and other human needs that make taking a risk on building a product less painful. I prefer the European model, which became the pattern in the Bay Area from 2001 to 2004 and some great products emerged in that time.

Mr j.

Firstly, there is no doubt that there are more start ups close by in Silicon Valley, so there is a networking effect. However it seems very odd to me that a guy looking at web2.0 startups can’t apreciate the opportnities the web has for communication. Look at this blog post. You are probably getting opinions from all over the world.

Secondly, and this is probably the cruncher for some people, there is no doubt that you get more money for a venture capital in Silicon Valley. I have to say that in my opinion the stupid amounts of money they are touting around, only show that the investors have no idea of what they are doing or the ebb and flow nature of the web.

One thing I did notice in the posts though was the comment about Dropsend, as it was interesting that it is making good money (probably more than most other startups), but not as much as it probably could. I have recently looked closely at all the competing products. Dropsend to me has always worked the best, and I have been an irregular user for a while. We were going to buy in a service that allowed us to send large files around our corporate network and elsewhere, which at the moment is a pain. The one thing Dropsend didn’t do was allow us enough customisation to make it look like the email was from us. I know that we were willing to pay US$200ish per month for the right service but couldn’t go with you guys, in fact didn’t find any reliable service we could go with in the end. Just thought I would get in my 2c worth, as there must be lots of companies like us struggling with this problem!

And no we are not going to run to silicon valley thank you very much. We can make it big time and here in London.

It really makes for a lot of lost opportunities.

Amazing that China, India and so on are only attracting major investment relatively recently as if they all suddenly became smart. Unfortunately geography is still holding back some great ideas.

Still, we keep trying :)

The beauty of things like FOWA and, well, the internet is that it’s hopefully starting to break that down, so it doesn’t really matter where you are, just as long as the idea flies.

And I say keep the comments, most people are capable of independent thought and can decide who they agree with, allowing discussion rather than stifling it is a plus in my mind.

Even if I disagreed with Ryan, it wouldn’t put me off any of the conferences or web products, because I’m not an idiot.

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/10/12/dear-vcs-look-at-the-idea-not-the-postcode/

Interesting that this topic has come up albeit in two different ways.

Start-ups need all the support they can get.

Sometimes it might seem like serendipity that you get a piece of cracking advice from a developer with the same problem, that you bump into a VC who intros you to an angel, that you end up having coffeee with Google’s head of acquisitions. Then again maybe it’s part of the ecosystem / community / hub.

Ryan needs to be congratulated for creating a wonderful forum for the community to get together and maximize their serendipity.

Two pleas

1) Lets remember that you you can build great businesses without them riasing £10mm from VCs and gunning for $1bn valuation.
I feel strongly about this

2) Lets celebrate what we’ve got in Europe and stop sticking the boot into our ecosystem. I think it’s never been healthier:
I feel strongly about this

http://adactio.com/journal/1129/

The thing is, Mr. Graham is simply following the advice given to all struggling writers: write about what you know. He studied painting and then became a hacker so he wrote about hackers and painters. He had a startup in the valley so his worldview on startups is anchored in the valley. That’s all well and good but the problem is that he extrapolates his personal experiences into universal truisms, unable to tell the difference between his own subjective reality and the objective reality outside the valley.

Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against existentialist solipsists but they’re probably not the best people to take advice from.

Since then as Ryan points out, many people have invested in creating an ecosystem outside of the Valley. It is far from perfect and probably another 12-18 months before we start to really see a more mature European ecosystem.

IMHO some of the key success factors in the Valley were the arrival of serial entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman who flush with cash from their own exits bridged the equity gap between seed and VC funding. This enabled many more startups to grow.

We are beginning to see those same type of second generation serial entrepreneurs/investors in Europe e.g Atomico (Skype), Brett Hoberman (LastMinute), Hugo Burge (CheapFlights), TAG (Robin Klein) etc. which has led to the successful funding of WAYN, Reevoo, Moo, Trusted Places etc.

Hopefully the Last.FM founders and Jyri at Jaiku (who sold out to Google) will join this growing band of entrepreneurs come investors.

So lets see in a years time, hopefully Ryan the balance of Valley v European speakers at FOWA will be more towards Europe/World in flavour?

Maybe even blognation and our work to help uncover global startups might even be recognised by Carsonified?

Sorry, from what I remember it is a complete failure. Did you not try to sell it for a long time?

It’s making a profit of $13,000 per month. Hardly a failure.

Yes, we tried to sell it but it didn’t work out. It’s not becuase it was failing, it’s because we wanted to build a new web app.

Now we’ve decided to put a full time manager on DropSend and I can’t wait to see how much it grows!

Next time, before you comment, try to get your facts straight.

Sorry, from what I remember it is a complete failure. Did you not try to sell it for a long time?

It’s not healthy for the industry to be so centralized in one place.