Europe needs more capital, more mentors - US angel's view
Involved in a number of early stage funds and incubation projects, Dave McClure, is founder of Startup2Startup and GeeksOnAPlane, a tech tour that connects global tech entrepreneurs. He gave Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe his view of the start-up environment in Europe and sources of early stage capital.
Summarising his view of the European tech start-up market, David McClure said: 'I think there is a pretty active market still in Europe. Although, I think the popular perception is Silicon Valley is the centre of all startups and venture capital, there actually are interesting startups on the continent and in London as well. I think there is more to be discovered there. I think there are opportunities for people to do more early stage investing in Europe. There is certainly plenty of people at the venture stage in Europe who are identifying those opportunities but I think more is probably to be done at the seed stage and maybe even incubator level in Europe.'
'I think if you create the initial phase then more seed investment programs would happen. f you look at incubator programs as being less than $100,000 less or the equivalent in local dollars and then seed being maybe $100,000 up to a million or slightly more than that, those are spaces that I think in the last five years have been filled in by new entrants in Silicon Valley – and they’re just starting to play out in other geographies but haven’t fully fleshed themselves out as much as in the States.
There’s, again, two parts to that. One is the investment capital and the other one is the expertise. I think in Silicon Valley there is a ton of companies that are doing Internet businesses at scale now and people who have been second, third, and fourth level sort of at those companies have gone out and done other things.'
The full article is here, at TechCrunch Europe.