Our embedded blogger, Jakob, continues reporting on his journey with the European StartupBus

This final blogpost written on the bus as we approach Paris is an example of how insanely productive one becomes when you’re surrounded by talented, inspiring and right down and dirty awesome entrepreneurs.
Thom Van Der Veen – Resident Startupbus video/film guy – partly creative and definitely partly nerd and I created our very own startup last night. Deprived of sleep, high on caffeine and spaced out by the start up vibe here on the bus, we designed, created and launched a website in a mere 30 minutes sometime after midnight.

And here it is…

This is obviously totally random and we have spent very little time on it. But it provides an excellent example of how the startup buzz gets under your skin. Since last night when we started working on this we had both been working on our more formal projects since 6 am that morning.

(The DudaDuda team hard at work)

Now that we are approaching Paris all the teams are getting ready to pitch at LeCamping in front of a panel of judges and when the winner is announced it’s time to party and then get ready for Le Web11.
As far as Dudadadu goes – stay tuned for more mind-blowing hustling and hacking – and btw don’t use firefox to open our landing page – the music doesn’t load. #minorissue

Our embedded blogger, Jakob, continues reporting on his journey with the European StartupBus

On the ferry crossing from Denmark to Germany some of the Buspreneurs took a break from hacking, designing and hustling. We started talking and of course the only thing we want to talk about is other start ups.

This led to an interesting conversation between two of the Busprenuers, Imran Ghory and Christoph Richter and myself.

Christoph is an Austrian startup junkie, entrepreneur, developer currently working on a start up in healthcare. Imran founded both CoderStack and AnalyticsRock and is the creator of the web-comic Theory of Geek and is in general an all-around-full-blown hacker based out of London.
We started talking about European start ups vs. American Startups and primarily of course Sillicon valley offspring. This topic is heavily debated and it seems we’re all trying to crack the code of what makes the perfect start up and thus we look to Silicon valley for inspiration and can’t help compare European start ups to their American counterparts.

According to Christoph a major problem in Europe is that we as Europeans are not born to be risk averse. People need convincing that they should follow their dreams and not act as a flock of birds doing what everybody else does. This seems to be symptomatic for EU start ups versus American. There might be lack of formal education in actual entrepreneurship – we must aspire to engage new generations and share success stories and also failures of start ups so that people might have the chance to decide for themselves whether or not they want to chose to become an entrepreneur.

Imran noted that one must also realize that the level of risk might not be as high as it’s often depicted. This affects the angel investments here in Europe. Simply put – Angels in Europe need to take more risks. At this point Christoph noted that Dave McClure once grabbed the microphone at a conference, stood up at said:
‘Look if you have a car that’s worth more than $ 20.000 bucks you have something to invest – so invest you pussies.’

The conversation then turned to exits. Why is it we seldomly see big European exits?
We discussed the fact that many start ups in Europe tend to use their home nations as test markets and might grow big in their respective markets and then either fail or have a small unnoticed exit. One could call it the home market trap. One of the causes of this, Christoph noted, might be that European Start ups tend to have slow progress because burn rate should be covered by income and income comes easier when you know the local people.

All in all a very interesting discussion that led me to write this blog entry – take what you can from it and think about how we here in Europe can spread the value of start ups and improve our connectivity and thereby grow together and not as separate entities or start ups.