Foreword

The fact that there is a book about European technology founders is a milestone and one we should take a moment to celebrate. Just like Founders at Work (Apress, 2006), Jessica Livingston’s US-focused predecessor, this book takes you inside the mind of some great European tech founders and helps you gain insight into the highs and lows of creating a business. If the next generation of European founders can make new mistakes rather than old ones, this book will be worth its weight in gold.

When you read some of the stories in this book, it’s easy to feel we have made amazing progress over the last 15 years in Europe—especially since this book covers only the tip of the iceberg. There have been many great companies built and many great outcomes. But in the next 15 years, if we aspire to the creation of businesses capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of new jobs and $10 billion in new revenue and enterprise value, we need to do more than just recognize, support, and reward innovation. We need in Europe (including Israel) to learn how to develop the conditions to create serious scale.

Right now, Silicon Valley is peerless at both supporting innovation and creating serious scale. There’s been no master plan, but the 60-year interplay of government as an early catalyst; academia and established companies as early customers and sources of talent; and of course, investors willing to take risks and a long term view, have given entrepreneurs fertile ground to sow seeds and try to grow monsters with dragon’s teeth ready to conquer the world.

You need every element of this ecosystem working perfectly to create monsters—and Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Twitter, VMware, and Zynga have all been recent beneficiaries there.

In fact, the capacity for serious scale is almost part of the muscle memory of Silicon Valley’s residents. As a newly-minted founder, you have unparalleled access within a 10-mile radius to a living ecosystem of talent and investors who have been part of businesses in almost every technology sector. Some of these went from start-up to superstar—HP, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, and Google—the list goes on and on, each one at different speeds and with different approaches, creating tens of thousands of jobs, over $10 billion in annual sales, and over $100 billion of enterprise value.

Of course, there are examples of extraordinary value creation driven by visionary founders who were able to build great organizations in the last 30 years outside of Silicon Valley, including monsters like Amazon, Dell, and Microsoft. Even in Europe we can point to SAP. Start-ups can grow to monstrous scale in spite of their environments, but the chances of success—which are slim to begin with—increase vastly with a supportive and a cohesive ecosystem.

The good news for Europe is we are now producing great founders in abundance. There are teams determined to go out and create monsters. They have been inspired by the likes of ARM, Autonomy, AVG, Business Objects, Checkpoint, Playfish, MySQL, LogMeIn, Skype, TomTom, and QlikTech. In fact, if you go to almost any European city, you can find independent start-ups like Criteo, Fon, Gameforge, Klarna, Moleskine, Privalia, SoundCloud, Spotify, vente-privee, YOOX, and Wix, all capable of global category leadership, creating thousands of new jobs, $1billion in new sales, and billions in new enterprise value. In London alone, you can see companies like ASOS, Badoo, Betfair, Graze, Just-Eat, King.com, Mimecast, Moshi Monsters, PhotoBox, and Wonga.

This is serious progress. But the straight facts are that while we are unquestionably masters of invention in Europe, we don’t yet have the ecosystem—or perhaps the attitude—to really support our current and future generation of founders to create serious scale.

We are on a long journey, and to succeed we need more than just great founders; they are only the baseline for success. We will also need patience, vision, and long-term thinking from every part of the ecosystem to get to a place where we can produce monsters to conquer the world. For me, the big question is if we are truly able to do this.

—Saul Klein, Founder of LOVEFiLM and The Accelerator Group