Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy, best known for her book on the ‘new’ Silicon Valley and a recent interview with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg, has been in London this week interviewing startups for her various outlets as well as sending video back to the Tech Ticker show on Yahoo! Finance. Lacy is a smart reporter and a keen observer of startups and the entrepreneurial species, so it will be fascinating to see what she comes up with following her trip.
In the meantime her new blog has some interesting thoughts on the scene in London which are worth reading for the “outsider’s” point of view. For instance she observes that the Skype/Joost founders may well have taken their eye off the ball (as I and others have observed); that some VCs (like Index) are importing a ‘Valley model’ of investing; and London/UK entrepreneurs are not playing a ‘game’ as many are in the Valley. These are interesting points, and do speak to the very distributed nature of the scene in Europe. We’re also all very nice – which might be debatable, but it is true that a lot of European entrepreneurs are keen to help each-other out while the market remains quite early and relatively non-competitive. (And hell, we’re just like that, right?) As one Irish entrepreneur said to me recently, that fact that there are startups in Europe at all, especially the smaller markets, is a triumph of sorts.
Meanwhile, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld recently found, there is no one Silicon Valley in Europe. We’re a lot more complex than that…