smime

A few days ago I read a status update of Paul “Enki” Böhm on Facebook, saying “Paul Böhm just wrote an article about the european way to start companies: http://bit.ly/17SpzX” leading to an article on his blog titled Waterfall: The European Way of Starting Companies.

When reading it I immediately thought (knowing Paul) that he definitely aims at provoking thought and discussion, but at the same time I thought “Bullshit”.

He basically states that the European Way of starting companies is either to be put into business by the government and the predominant model is some sort of waterfall model, where changing your goals on a later stage is just not an option.

Let me make some remarks:

1. I don’t think that there is a “European Way” of anything, due to the huge cultural differences that apply. If you like to use that expression to differentiate from an “American Way”, I’m not even sure if that exists.
2. Pauls post doesn’t make it clear if he thinks that the governmental influence is only true for “big” companies, or in general. The examples he mentions (OMV, Volkswagen, Post and Telekom) are naturally (or historically) formed and controlled by governments, because in most cases they form some kind of monopoly, build their business on natural ressources that belong to the people of a state and thus have to be controlled by its government or they have simply been some form of economic stimulus used by governments to achieve certain goals (Volkswagen), where Entrepreneurs were very happy to have support by the government (remember that VW was an entrepreneurial venture).
3. It is true, that companies in Europe have always had much bigger support by governmental initiatives than in many other countries, the number and extent of grants available regularly blows away people from other countries. We could debate the real use and effects of that system, but that doesn’t in turn mean that big companies are “willed into existence”.
4. Paul also states, that those projects form some sort of network of actors, who then get their peers in other projects funded by grants, thus creating some sort of circle that only cares if you have been around and know enough people. That pretty much describes the US venture culture to me, if you’ve been successful once (meaning you cut a good deal) you’ll most probably get financed the next time and the network of the person financing you, will get you a good exit. Many companies and projects I follow don’t create (business) value (they are cool services but don’t generate a lot of money), but still their founders continue and do the next thing without a plan how to create revenue.

Their are enough examples of startups in Europe that took a different route. Started off with something insane or strange, changed their model a couple of times, and succeeded. Who thought that Red Bull, Inode or 3United would work? No one financed them, no one willed them into existence. And that’s just Austria. All around Europe entrepreneurs built something meaningful, with entrepreneurial spirit.

And although I respect and cherish hacker culture it is not the case that hacker culture is entrepreneurial culture in its essence. Many entrepreneurs succeed because they are persistend and try to achieve something no matter what it takes. I heard about the guy that runs the Sydney Harbour Bridge Walking tours. He tried for 8 years to get the city of Sydney to approve his idea and solved every problem that came up. He didn’t try, fail fast and tried something else. He tried, failed, tried again and again until he succeeded. He believed that he could control what was coming up.

To be precise I think that there are some commonalities between hackers and entrepreneurs, but to say that hacker culture is entrepreneurial culture in its essence, just seems wrong.

Although I completely agree with Paul, that it is necessary to give everyone and everything a try, and that we need to integrate that mindset more strongly into our culture, the analysis that led to that conclusion is just wrong in so many things. But Paul, I’d be happy to read the next try. ;-)