Interesting that these people only represent a single recent, original European startup: Skype. The rest of the companies are either old (SAP), not in Europe (Sun), or localized variants of things invented elsewhere (the ISPs, the Samwers). And even Skype has been acquired.
Being Danish I remember that in the early days of Skype they made the rounds amongst Danish investors and VC's. There were no takers (with the notable exception of Morten Lund who made a small investment and made a fortune from it). Nobody had any idea what the heck they were talking about, so they went abroad and got funding from more sophisticated and knowledgeable investors.
I think a lot of the reasons can be found in that answer.
I was interested to see what it's like for the US, so I did go through the forbes list [1]:
1. Bill Gates
2. Larry Ellison
3. Jeff Bezos
4. Sergey Brin
5. Larry Page
6. Steve Ballmer
7. Paul Allen
8. Michael Dell
9. Laurenne Powell Jobs (widow of Steve Jobs)
10. Mark Zuckerberg
If the definition of old is "younger than 20 years", this represents 3 startups (Amazon, Google, Facebook). If the definition is "younger than Skype", then only Facebook is left.
If you want to compare, you should make the cutoff be based on net worth, not simply take the top 10. Then you also get eBay, Tesla/SpaceX, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Square/Twitter among others.
Sorry, re-reading my post it was misleading because I didn't post my intention: I did not want to show that Europe is coming up with successful start-ups at any rate comparable to the US, SV obviously wins by a huge margin.
I was more interested if younger successful founders in the US faster take-over older founders. And they don't. A large part of the wealth of the older founders has been acquired past-IPO.
The conclusion (for me) is that to make it into the top 10 (whether US or Europe) and stay there, you gotta grow a company successfully for many years, like Microsoft, Oracle or Apple did in the US and SAP did in Europe.
Yes, the thing that always strikes me about the Forbes 400 is how old so many of the people are. Clearly the normal way to end up super rich is to have something that grows fairly rapidly, and then give it a long time to grow.
Yeah, but come up with another big time Euro start up success story, other than Skype or Spotify (Spotify arguably happened in Europe only because the labels would only allow streaming in small Euro markets at first as a test case). If you expand the list from 10 to 50 to lessen the dominance of the legacy players, the US list would be a Who's Who of start ups, and the Euro one a Who's That?
Yep, that's certainly an important company. I think you'd probably agree that it's not a household name, and other examples are few and far between, but I probably should have mentioned ARM.
I dare to say Xavier Niel has brought enough innovation with Free which is more than just another ISP. They came in with a low price, disrupting the market, because they pioneered cost-savings everywhere. For their broadband service, they even designed their modem/set-top box themselves, and built a lot of internal systems that other ISPs outsourced. Their service is very geek friendly, and as a consequence is a geek favourite. Now they're disrupting mobile service, even if it's not going as smoothly as desired, they forced all the other network operators to offer lower prices.
I find it interesting they have a very entrepreneurial YAGNI and fake-it-till-you-make-it swagger. They really do a lot with very few resources.
Yes! Free is a fantastic, innovative company that is actually bringing positive change to their landscape. A company like Free in the US would be like a fountain of icy water in hell.
There's no denying that the US is better at making tech billionaires than Europe, but the US list of top tech billionaires is hardly a picture of new thinking and innovation: Gates, Allen and Balmer are all from Microsoft (which, like SAP, was founded in the 70s). One would be Ellison (Oracle was founded in the 70s too). And one would be Dell (and making computers is something the British invented).
As I mentioned below, if you expanded the list from 10 to 50 or 100, the US list would be a Who's Who of start ups, and the Euro one a Who's That? Besides Skype and Spotify, unfortunately there just haven't really been very many mainstream start ups coming out of Europe.
Also, I'm not sure what Alan Turing has to do with Sinclair and Amstrad failing and Dell being successful. From what I understand of the early development of the computer, much more work was done in Boston, NY, and the Valley than in the UK.
I agree with everything you say, there is no doubt that the US is way better at producing successful tech startups.
But pg's point was specifically about how the Euro top ten was dominated by old companies and boring business models. My point is that aside from google, amazon and Facebook, the US top ten is not all that hip and fresh either.
I think he would more than qualify on net worth, but I'm not sure that he should be classified as a tech entrepreneur compared to the other people on the list. He made his original fortune in music, and Virgin Mobile is really just him licensing the Virgin brand to a bunch of independent pre-paid carriers. Also, I wouldn't classify an airline as high tech, and Virgin Galactic isn't really up and running yet.
Maybe that's not fair, though, considering Virgin Galactic really did seem to help kick start the privatization of space, at least in terms of popular press coverage.
Ah, I skipped right over "tech." Though I feel now that's kind of justified. A few these people started ISPs, admittedly those are about technology, but just barely. The technology was very rapidly commoditized, and then it became about business. I don't see any significant difference between that and Virgin Mobile.
The challenge in Europe begins on the university level. As an American who went to grad school in Europe (a technical university) - it was interesting to compare the differences.
It begins with the fact that at European universities, there's no real support for encouraging student entrepreneurship. In Sweden for example, they are making some headway with the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship and other inititiatives (side bar: here's a great lecture with Niklas Zennström, off Skype and Andreas Ehn, former CTO of Spotify - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R_E4GYfZK4)
There's a long way to go though!
Second is the cultural bias. If you are European (or have European friends) you will know that failure it treated quite differently in Europe vis-a-vis the USA.
In the USA, should you try a venture and fail, people say "well at least you tried!".
Or, you write about it in your grad school applications and get in. Then you have a fresh start.
Alternatively, you have a CV building experience. Often times, companies will look at your entrepreneurial zest favorably. Or, you can specifically apply to other startups who want people with startup experience.
Now, shall we compare that to the European experience?
European companies where you get the "evil eye" - at best you are looked upon with suspicion.
At worst, you don't even get considered.
The other issue is that many private universities in the USA are funded by wealthy business alumni. So there remains a strong relationship between industry and academia. The least of this is endowment money making its way to top VC's.
The last point is about cultural bias towards profit-seeking. In the USA, many socially conscious entrepreneurs see business and profits as a way not only to get wealthy, but to make the world a better place - create jobs, fund nonprofits, etc. The unhealthy notion that still exists in Europe (business owners are greedy capitalists that need to be bled dry), just won't work.
The best engineers and business dev/sales talent in Europe still seek out working for established companies. There's no "peer push" towards starting your own company. The elusive job security (which is quickly fading) is what people seek out.
Real entrepreneurs see owning a business as the secure option. Job employment and placing your future in someone else's hands seems insanely risky to us.
Family and friends deride the European entrepreneur who has this same mentality. This can affect relationships with loved ones and the like. Hell, even getting a mortgage or other normal activities is harder as a entrepreneur in Europe.
Of course, there's probably some hidden opportunity in these challenges as well. If anyone can think of any, I'd be curious to hear them.
