The day Europe will stop being America's supermarket

I wrote this morning a long post on TechCrunch France about the fact that, for many reasons, Startups created in Europe are unfortunately very rarely designed to stay independant and that when successful, are acquired by American Giants. One of the main reasons is that Europeans are bad in timing and implementing international strategies. Another one is that most European startups are still local versions of services created in America. But this tend to be less and less the case. A lot of innovation is going on in Europe and we see more US VCs taking positions in Europe (like union square ventures).

This trend could lead you to think that American are very knowledgeable about what is going on in Europe. And i believe this is the opposite. Americans don't have a clue about what's happening outside the US. When something starts to become big at scale they get interested. Explaining the acquisition of Skype or Last.fm. There is a cultural factor that explains this form of arrogancy or lazyness: the domestic market size. There is already enough to get informed about in the USA. The rest comes after. In Europe we are by nature a sum of small countries in proportion and tend to have a more international culture. We are educated to learn about what's going on beyond our frontiers.

I am french, lived in several countries in Europe, travel quite often speak 5 languages and work a lot with Americans. I have a couple of observations.

I am most of the time disappointed by the conversation i have with americans when it comes to something that is not about america. Europe is just considered as a great supermaket in the web industry: a place where you can find great acquisitions helping you getting bigger or better. They ignore most of the great activity happening there and loic is right to point this out. But mostly i think they do not understand Europeans and their culture. They make easy pre conceived ideas, think that having lived in the UK is enough to justify knowing a little about Europeans and that their tourist activity is a good basis to understand what's going on. And that what i felt when i read Michael Arrington's post, on which i totally disagree: we have a different lifestyle based on enjoying contacts and taking time, and we are not obsessed about money as a religion. This does not make europeans lazy.

Europe has very strong players and local activity which does not get the deserved attention. I could draw an endless list of company's that do not get any blog coverage and that make many americans ashamed they ignored them so far. Just take Russia for example which is a stunning market with tons of web giants people have never heard of (ozon and others).

The new generation of entrepreneurs are aware that you don't build a business in your frontiers anymore. Things are changing, Netvibes, Deezer and Dailymotion were built out of France. Meetic also. And so many more. This trend will accelerate over time specially as cultural gaps are getting smaller and as people are living more and more outside their frontiers.

It is about time that america stops considering europe, as america's supermarket.

ps: i ll write another post about Israel that has a similar problem but for very different reasons