Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK gave an excellent speech at LeWeb '08 covering the european startup spirit. He says about the europe startup scene:
... in Rome I found Angel/Entrepreneurs like Gianluca Dettori of dpixel trying their damndest to get a startup scene going, resorting to throwing their own conference (TechGarage). In Istanbul I found blogger Arda Kutsal or Webrazzi writing about the Web 2.0 scene in Turkey - and there are more Turkish connections inside Silicon Valley than you might think.
Why does this surprise anyone? The Internet is as local as it is global (the world is where you are). Of course there are going to be amazing startups all over the globe. Everywhere there is an internet connection there is a person thinking: "What if I could have this?", or "What if we could do that?". These people will build amazing stuff.
So why is it that the common opinion is that it's going to be built in Silicon Valley? Great companies are not built by white educated men in their thirties. They're built by people. Creative, talented, smart, engaged and hard working people.
Right now we've got a generation of people are growing up who never lived without the Internet. They'll have a whole new perception of what the world is like, how small it is.
So lets stop talking about this amazing UK startup or that great Italian startup. Lets start thinking about this great company built by all these talented people who really understand what I need and what I want.
I'm bored with the locality of the world.
