More on the bay area and european startups

If you’ve seen my early post about the SF bay area as a center of innovation world (particularly on the web 2.0), you know where this is going, but there’s a good post by Tom Coates at Plastic Bag that says exactly what I’ve said months ago (even if he’s limited to the UK). But seriously: where the hell is europe in the startup world?

Because I’m not even talking about Portugal (my country, as you may know) where apparently everybody seems to pay more attention to investing in stuff like the EuroMillions (only to lose all of the money put up) instead of thinking about proper ways to create new things. I’m talking about Europe here. I know there’s a whole lot of people who are smart enough to start enticing projects and startups. They just don’t really do it. Why, I’m not sure – fact is, it’s just not happening.

In my previous post, Evan Henshaw-Plath (from Odeo) commented that the emergence of interesting projects from the bay area sucks up all creative thinkers to one tiny little area (the SF bay). At the time, I was sceptical about the whole idea. Now, and it hasn’t been that long, I know he was right. Since I got into the job market again, I’ve had quite a few offers (a few a day, still), and let me tell you 70% of those are from the US. Is there a tendency here?

Now, many of you probably know that during the time I considered creating a startup for web 2.0 R&D, I pondered a lot of aspects particularly about how much globalization has an impact on project success and usage trends. Mainly because it seems like people are more easily made aware of products coming from the US, because that’s where internet big media companies are located. I personally believe (and the long tail model backs up my belief) that there’s really an audience for smaller select products that target smaller audiences (you know – success, in tiny little circles). Why then, aren’t we taking the chance?