I have coached solopreneurs for some years now in Germany and it is still a “I don’t get any more work so I might as well try this” doing – only a few said “oh, I always wanted to try this.” This is only slowly changing and as rabble said, the culture around you is important too.

But what I can see is an awakening of feeling european – please don’t forget how big the US in size is compared to some countries of 3-4 million inhabitents.

Internet is changing this slowly, and especially with services accessible worldwide, we try to see this as opportunity and start thinking locally.

There are easy ways to setup the office, to get programmers, to outsource the HR and business aspects to another company, get angel investors, deal with VC’s, make deals, and eventually either sell the startup or go public.

Is that all a good thing? I guess so. The quality of life is better other places.

But in the US we can get equiptment, we get servers fast. Odeo’s about to get a whole load of big file servers, and we can get them from a company a few blocks over who we know somebody who knows somebody there. Amazon ships fast, there are no import duties which consider computers as a luxury, the computer stores have everything we could need.

Want to do a mobile deal? We can just arrange a lunch meeting with half a dozen people who either work in the city, by which we mean a 1 square mile area, SOMA, or down in silicon valley about 45 minutes away.

Odeo picked up somebody from Audio Feast, that ment that we had build in access to somebody who knew the space. He moved from aol to audio feast to odeo, all within the same space, with the same contacts, same industry. This means the startups inherit a history which provides depth and resources to their work.

Personally i’d prefer to take August off, but at odeo we wont’ be doing that, we’ll have a few days off here and there, but it’s a different, and perhaps unhealthy work ethic.

When comparing the US with europe, or other parts of the world, remember you aren’t really talking about the US. You are talking about San Francisco, Seattle, Boston…. Three of the most expensive and politically liberal / progressive parts of the US.

Evhead tried to start a couple companies in Nebraska where he is from and failed. Only when he moved to san francisco was he able to generate traction. Flickr was started in Vancouver by people who had lived and worked for years in San Francisco, they were then bought by yahoo and moved back down here.

Why san francisco? There’s a huge arts community, it’s a multicutural city, it’s a city where the city council and the political community is left leaning. It’s a city which respects freaks. There is currently a city endorced movement to rename of the bridges from the “bay bridge” to the “emperor nortan bridge” after a crazy excentric who lived on the streets in the 1870′s. It’s the city which was the center of the american counter culture, hippies, and anti-vietnam war movement. Dating back in to the 50′s san francisco was a home to beat poets and cultural outlaws. Every august a significant portion of the city’s tech workers / hipsters goes out in to the desert for Burningman where people consume lots drugs as part of an enourous week long participatory artistic happening.

The cutural rebellion which is instutionalized in san francisco is part of what makes it cool and accepted to venture out in to crazy startups. One crazy person might create exploding fire eating artistic robots, another might try and create a new kind of web publishing app.

I think that has a lot to do with why it happens in san francisco.