"European Geeks Are As Talented As American Ones. Innovative thinking is not the natural birthright of US-born coders alone."
Wow. It required starting an entire incubator to realize that? Given the number of European born innovators in the US it should have been obvious that being European itself is not a hindrance. If they'd looked to Y Combinator that would have noticed Paul Graham's heritage; they might also have noticed Paul Graham residence.
"3. We Underestimated The Bureaucracy. We all knew that bureaucracy in some European states, and across Europe was high."
Interesting case study of a company that was a leading trophy company in the US in the 70's or 80's that had a model that worked. They had a single production location that shipped nationally across the United States.
They thought they could do the same in Europe, immediately running into problems as they quickly found they would need a distributor in each country which would take a rather large chunk out of their margin. They still proceeded and found that everyone had different tastes, the Italian's liked something flamboyant, the French preferred something classy, the English wanted something Iconic and the German's wanted something Minimalist. In the US, everyone wanted the same thing. In short, the company went bankrupt in both regions due to the errors made in Europe.
There are language differences, cultural differences, tax and regulation differences, additional costs of multiple companies to be setup during expansion and the list keeps going on. Startups stuggle to scale in Europe for very clear reasons, it's much harder to do so. With a small team and little resources, a company can address the entire United States, in Europe they simply can't (of course there are a few lucky exceptions).
So as a European, what has Europe needed for the last two decades to be competitive? Quite obviously, it is to level the playing field and remove those barriers to zero. Until that happens, European Startups will never be able to scale to the size or with the speed of their US competitors. While I think European founders are as smart as American founders, by the points above, does that even matter?
Easier translation such as http://www.reverbeo.com (Friends of mine) will take care of the language barriers on web businesses.
Higher levels of customisation on both software and hardware will take care of the stylisic differences.
But the regulation challenges require EU intervention and we've been waiting a long time for them to do anything.
You can have infinite asumption about the Bureaucracy in Europe, especially in Germany and still be overwhelmed by it. On the scale of an incubator like HackFwd you reach entirely new levels of legislation that simply don't exist in other countries and which don't become visible until you approach them.
The statement regarding innovation isn't meant as a sudden realisation that is the result of an experiment, more as an motivational piece. Europeans (and again especially germans) often have a self-esteem issue if they are to draw comparisons to the Silicon Valley hackers, going as far as "time spent in the valley" is a metric some people measure their worth in.
HackFwd is one of Europe's best incubators and it is only in their best interest to keep the brain-drain of top-talent to a minimum, statements like this are meant to help here and in other areas. The people behind HackFwd are well-known names that will have the same interests going forward so this comes as no surprise.
Wow. It required starting an entire incubator to realize that? Given the number of European born innovators in the US it should have been obvious that being European itself is not a hindrance. If they'd looked to Y Combinator that would have noticed Paul Graham's heritage; they might also have noticed Paul Graham residence.
"3. We Underestimated The Bureaucracy. We all knew that bureaucracy in some European states, and across Europe was high."
See above.