一如东柏林区的其他酒吧，St Oberholz咖啡馆现今已是生意兴隆：正门非主流的涂鸦，狂放不羁、前卫时尚，野兽男孩，时时欢唱。乍看之下，这里并不像商贾巨子出入的地方。然而，细细想来他们出现在这里也不足为奇。现今，欧洲的文化环境确实让企业家难有作为，想让他们起步投资一跃缔造金融帝国就像穿孔、行为艺术想要颠覆主流文化一般难如登天。
Oberholz咖啡馆已经成为柏林年轻人们创业起步的聚集地，这里走出各类企业涌向柏林大街小巷。客户通常在一楼，在“工作专区”程序员们和他们的老板混杂在一起。一旦获得投资，他们便“移师”二楼，那里咖啡馆提供廉价的办公场所。小有成就之后，他们甚至可以租一套咖啡馆提供的公寓，通常是比较简陋的。迄今已组建5年的音乐网站SoundCloud早期创业时便是从这里开始的，购物网站Brands4friends同样如此，正日益发展壮大的电子书共享平台Txtr仍旧保留着咖啡馆的一套公寓里的业务。
白手起家，这样一个地方再好不过了。真正的玄机在于，柏林那些初出茅庐的年轻人在其他地方很难获得机会。他们难以找到一个职业经纪人，因为欧洲的高管们极度规避风险。新建公司很快便意识到，那些老牌欧洲公司不愿意同小公司合作。绝大多数投资也不会对他们感兴趣，政府条令也使他们处处碰壁。当他们失败的时候（多数如此），他们没有重整旗鼓、卷土重来的机会。在欧洲，商场失败意味着永恒的污点，正如道德缺失一样。
廉颇老矣，尚能饭否
数据显示，欧洲大陆上的新企业在发展壮大过程中存在问题。全球创业观察组织编制的各国参照数据显示：2010年，“早期阶段”的创业家仅占意大利成年人口的2.3%，德国为4.2%，法国为5.8%。欧洲国家这一水平低于——通常都是远远低于——美国的7.6%，更不用说中国的14%，巴西的17%。
除了数量不多，企业家对欧洲的前景也表示担忧。安永会计师事务所的一项研究显示：去年，同美国、加拿大、巴西企业家相比，德国、意大利、法国的企业家们对自己国内的创业前景缺乏信心。极少有法国企业家认为政府为他们提供了好的商业环境，而巴西则有60%的人认为政府做到了这一点，日本这一数据为42%，加拿大高达70%。要问那座城市会创造出下一个微软或者谷歌，安永公司的研究人员首推上海，其后为圣弗朗西斯科、孟买（尽管，平心而论，伦敦也有希望）。
尽管如此，欧洲的街头小店、理发店等却数不胜数。欧洲所欠缺的是发展迅速、规模壮大的创新型公司。2003年，欧盟委员会引用的一份研究表明，欧洲同美国企业之间的代沟明显，美国有19%的中型公司发展迅速，而欧盟国家平均水平仅为4%。一直致力于推动全球企业发展的考夫曼基金会给出了一份合理的解释：美国能够比欧洲创造出更多就业机会，其原因在于美国人自主创业能力强，创业后公司发展迅速，诸如网络零售商亚马逊、拍卖网站eBay。至于提供就业机会，新公司有着无与伦比的优势。他们不大可能会像已有的大公司一样将劳动密集型业务外包至亚洲。
伦敦经济学院的商业历史学家莱斯利汉娜说道，世界大战后，欧洲辉煌难再，战争的破坏使得欧洲人比以前更加谨慎。1914年前紧密联系在一起的市场再次变得四分五裂，这也阻碍了新公司的发展壮大，尤其是在欧盟建立单一市场之前的数十年间。博鲁格尔智囊团成员尼古拉斯·维纶、托马斯费力伯恩的一份报告显示：世界500强企业中，1950-2007年期间，欧洲新生大型公司仅12家，美国同期则有57家上榜。而在1975-2007年间，欧洲则更少，仅有3家；其中，两家来自英国、爱尔兰——与欧洲大陆相比，他们更亲美。欧洲大型私有公司大多建于1950年前，通常都是很久很久之前的事了。
欧盟委员会上下都在感慨，如果欧洲能够有更多的创业人员，也不会沦落到如今这步田地，大型企业奇缺，欧洲本来可以有更多成功的新科技公司。创业不必非得由互联网为导向，但在过去的数十年里却是如此。德国向来注重技术教育，但却从未有过一家全球范围内有影响力的营销互联网公司，这足以说明问题的严重性。
前纳普斯特董事长康拉德希尔博斯在去年的一次讲话中反问道，“为什么谷歌不是德国的？”企业文化中缺乏承担风险的魄力是一大原因。由一个瑞典人和丹麦人共同组建的互联网可视电话公司Skype，瑞典网络音乐服务公司Spotify，英国在线银行Wonga的现状都表明情况并不是想象中的那么糟糕。但是，欧洲的企业家在互联网行业仍鲜有机会露脸。老谋深算的以色列高科技企业老总、天使投资人瓦尔迪说：“尽管情况已有所好转，这一行业仍处于半休眠状态。”
牛犊不多，难成红牛
欧洲企业家成功的案例也可谓是寥若晨星。其中，最为成功非西班牙的阿曼西奥•奥特加，在组建Inditex集团之前，这位服装业巨鳄13岁时曾在一家制衣作坊打工。而红牛创始人迪特里希•马特希茨来自奥地利，法国的泽维尔-尼尔于今年向手机用户提供超低费用拉开了一场革命，当然，还有英国的理查德·布兰森。然而，能够上榜的人屈指可数，许多欧洲企业家——理查德·布兰森爵士不算在内——都很低调。奥尔特加从未接受过媒体专访，关于他的报道似乎只有两张照片。瑞士宜家公司（IKEA）创始人英瓦尔·坎普拉德竭力遏制自己任何富人气息。
大量青年才俊选择离去，硅谷有大概5万名德国人，据估有500人在圣弗朗西斯科海岸同法国人一起开创自己事业。在那里，他们发现的最宝贵东西是失败的自由。如果你的公司在法国栽了跟头，比如曾一度飞速发展的商务职业社交网Viadeo创始人丹瑟法蒂一失足便再难回首。
欧盟委员会试图找出限制企业发展的罪魁祸首。去年，他们研究各国偿债制度后发现许多国家对待破产的企业家就像诈骗犯一样，尽管有极少量破产的企业家涉嫌诈骗。许多国家将破产的企业家收监入狱，长达数年。英国在12个月后才会免除破产者的债务，而美国这一过程通常要快得多。在德国，失败的企业家要等上6年才有再次翻身的机会，而法国竟然长达9年，德国大型公司的高管们破产后甚至会面临终身禁令。
原因之二，融资困难。慕尼黑Earlybird风险投资公司的亨德里克布兰迪斯表示，想要从朋友、亲人、甚至“智取”获得至多100万欧元（合120万美元）原始资本并不困难。像诸如德国桑威尔兄弟、奥利弗、马克、亚历山大这些科技企业家便在第一次网络泡沫期间赚得钵满盆盈，并随后相继成为天使投资人，资助创业。在过去5年，德国的种子资金已经翻了五倍。
公司若想将一项创意付诸实施需要150-400万欧元的启动资金。当然，这笔资金仍旧严重不足。像养老基金这样的团体投资人便把欧洲的风险投资视作高风险的资产类别。2000-2010年期间，在爆发互联网泡沫之后，欧洲的风险投资公司相继出现亏损。欧洲风险投资从2007年的82亿欧元降至2011年的41亿欧元，其中，大部分还来源于政府而非私人投资。
对此，有人认为如果欧洲有足够雄心勃勃的企业家，并且有很好的创意，那么资本便会从美国及世界其他地方涌入。这一观点不无道理，但投资人与其将资金投入国外小公司，倒还不如资助本国的公司。因此，公司创业资金大多还是要依靠本国。
资助第三阶段，当公司有望筹集至多2000万欧元，看上去小有成就时，想要获得美国人的投资的机会就大大增加——虽然他们需要依仗大靠山以降低失败风险，此时，美国的资本还是更倾向于投资国内企业家。无论如何，欧洲大部分企业家都在第三阶段前停滞不前了。
原因之三，劳工法成阻碍。如果新公司想要从致命过失、或者波动需求中幸存，他们便需要在必要时迅速裁员降低成本。但是，这在任何一个欧洲国家都是不现实的。法国智能手机芯片制造商Swquans通讯于去年在纽约证券交易所上市，总裁乔治卡拉姆说，对美国风险投资人来说，欧洲辞退员工复杂繁琐、代价不菲，这让他们望而却步。波士顿一家基金会近期从一个想在美国创业的法国企业家撤资，这也迫使后者不得不返回法国以获得投资。
对于小公司来说，支付高额的解雇补偿金（近期解雇员工通常都需要支付6个月的离职金）是个沉重的负担。对于这一敏感话题，一位不愿透露姓名的法国企业董事长表示：“在圣弗朗西斯科和社会主义制度的中国，我只需要补偿1至2个月的工资。”高额的解雇补偿金还使得新公司难以招募到能够将他们引入正轨的职业经纪人，经验丰富的高管们并不愿意放弃自己已有的成就。
2005年，西班牙视频网站Mobuzz创始人阿尼尔梅洛眼睁睁的看着自己的刚起步的公司陷入金融危机的困境，却又无能为力。他本以为破产能让他有机会东山再起，但在同商业债权人谈妥一切后，西班牙社会保障部敦促他代表公司向其员工支付5年以上的解雇补偿金。那时，梅洛便几乎打消了再次创业的念头。但是，他却在劳工法相对宽松的瑞士创立了自己的新公司，致力于为手机用户降低漫游关税。
此外，创业者发现在欧洲很难使用创业的基本手段：股票期权及免费赠股这一新建公司吸引人才的筹码。复杂的法律条文认定给予新员工免费股票是非法的，一名正试图从谷歌挖墙脚的创业人如是说，一旦挖脚成功，后者便需要将自己在谷歌的股票如数交出，所有人都建议他不要那么做。这也就进一步限制了企业家们在风险行业发展步伐，因为他们很难招募人才。
以上种种限制条款使得欧洲大陆创业者几乎毫无作为，只有“坐观垂钓者，徒有羡鱼情”。少有人赞同为一个疯子在车间里卖命会比一位百万富翁工作更有前景。法国人相信如果谢尔盖·布林的父亲在离开俄罗斯后去往法国而非美国，那么布林便会成为象牙塔里的电脑科学家，而不是谷歌的合作创始人。
诸多不利因素，柏林、伦敦、赫尔辛基及其他欧洲大城市少有企业闪光便在情理之中了。如果有少数企业能在这一恶劣的环境中幸存，如果不是条件限制，他们如何不能发展壮大？
渴望自由
尽管需求受到抑制、融资困难。或许，大萧条及欧元危机意味着欧洲风险认知的长期性变化。对高管们来说，当大公司们裁员收缩时，开始创业无异于赌博。阿根廷连续创业家马丁法萨夫思奇在西班牙相继开办了一系列电信运营企业，他表示自2007年金融危机开始，他的旗下的Fon无线网络公司风险招募变得更容易了。他想招募的工程师曾一度因为西班牙电信、或Prisa媒体公司而鄙视他，现在，这些公司正在裁员，高素质人才更倾向于加入一个新公司。
去年，西班牙企业家发起了一场主题为“为什么你不该将自己的公司移到硅谷”的讨论会。法萨夫思奇指出，因为欧洲软件工程师的工资水平要比加利福利亚低70%，成千上万的年轻人正在四处找工作。此外，欧洲很少有律师会找新建公司麻烦，许多公司都受到良好的保护，那些竞争力不足的行业也已准备好迎接挑战了。
对此，政府也在逐步加强重视。西班牙IESE商学院创业中心领导人马修表示，几年前，企业家不是政客们最关注的问题；现如今，政府首脑及皇室纷纷参加商业活动。政府正在尝试各种办法，促进商业创新。不管效果怎样，各行各业都有相关的咨询服务。与此同时，政府出台相应计划促进创业，减轻学者对商业的憎恶，传授小学生企业观念。近期，德国及其他国家由政府出资成立专门机构，输送有志创业的欧洲人前往硅谷学习，他们深知成功的企业家通常都精于循环利用资金、合约及经验，待学习完毕后便返回祖国学以致用。
同样，法国政府也向创业者提供帮助，卡拉姆便受益于一项向研究提供税收减免的措施。但是，法国真正的问题在于苛刻的劳工法。对创业者来说，没有什么比政府减轻这一法令为企业带来的阻碍更有用了。慕尼黑路德维格马克西米里安大学的创新研究、技术管理、创业协会主任哈霍夫表示，在过去13年间，为刺激创业德国政府采取了四大尝试，但大多以失败告终。
问题在于，想要为刺激创业做些实事的政府机构通常迫于职权所限，能以为企业家解决实质性的问题，比如劳工法条令。另外，欧元危机可能会使之前的阻碍因素有所改善。前意大利首相马里奥蒙蒂表示，他将会他成立公司所需的行政管理费从之前的10000欧元降至1欧元。此外，意大利、西班牙两国都在采取措施在一定程度上降低企业解雇职员代价。
柏林的飞速崛起及国际号召力——近一半企业创始人不是德国人——为人们上了一堂生动的实物教学课，吸引企业家的环境因素究竟是什么。政府计划没有提供任何帮助，柏林实在太穷，难以在关于创业的常规项目上投入资金。但是，这里生活、工作成本却相对较低，对外国人尤其是志在创业的人来说这点很重要。英国则与之形成鲜明对比，在移民人数一度刷新历史记录后，英国便严格限制移民。
一家有机食物网店创始人菲利普调侃道，在St Oberholz咖啡馆及其他酒吧、共享办公室、咖啡会，还提供隔音间，向顾客提供保密服务，以便客户接私密电话、错失交易后痛哭等等。在未来几年里，所有的欧洲企业家可能都会因为各种原因而痛哭。但是，政府完全能够伸出援助之手，让他们不再哭泣，步入正轨。
THE St Oberholz café in eastern Berlin is as hip as any of the area’s bars: graffiti-covered doors, in-your-face art, edgy fashion and the Beastie Boys in the background. It is not at first blush the sort of place to look for magnates in the making. But their presence makes a lot of sense. Europe’s culture is deeply inhospitable to entrepreneurs; wanting to grow a start-up into a behemoth is quite as countercultural as piercings and performance art.
The Oberholz has become a centre for Berlin’s young start-up scene, which has enterprising types flocking to the city from all over the world. The clientele starts out on the first floor, where computer programmers mingle with potential bosses over coffee in the “ko-work-ing” area. Once they attract capital, they move upstairs, where the café rents out office space cheaply. A business taking off may move into one of the café’s apartments, often using the beds as desks. SoundCloud, a five-year-old audio-sharing website, spent its early days at the Oberholz, as did Brands4friends, an online private-shopping club. Txtr, a fast-expanding e-book platform, still has programmers in one of the apartments.
It is an enticing place to begin a business. Which is all to the good, because Berlin’s fresh-faced hopefuls will get little enough enticement and encouragement elsewhere. They will struggle to hire professional managers to help their firms grow, because European executives are extremely risk-averse. Their young firms will quickly find that established European companies tend not to like dealing with tiny ones. Most sources of capital will shun them. Regulations will shackle them. And when they fail, as most are sure to do, they will not be allowed just to dust themselves off and start all over again. In Europe, a business blow-up leaves a lasting stain, akin to a moral failure.
The giants are all ageing
Data show that continental Europe has a problem with creating new businesses destined for growth. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which compiles comparable data across countries, in 2010 “early-stage” entrepreneurs made up just 2.3% of Italy’s adult population, 4.2% of Germany’s, and 5.8% of France’s. European countries are below—in many cases well below—America’s 7.6%, let alone China’s 14% and Brazil’s 17%.
Few in number, European entrepreneurs are also gloomy about their prospects. A study by Ernst & Young, an accounting firm, showed last year that German, Italian and French entrepreneurs were far less confident about their country as a place for start-ups than those in America, Canada or Brazil. Very few French entrepreneurs said their country provided the best environment; 60% of Brazilians, 42% of Japanese and 70% of Canadians thought there was no place as good as home. Asked which cities have the best chance of producing the next Microsoft or Google, Ernst & Young’s businesspeople plumped for Shanghai, San Francisco and Mumbai (though, to be fair, London got a look in too).
For all this, Europe produces plenty of corner shops, hairdressers and so on. What it doesn’t produce enough of is innovative companies that grow quickly and end up big. In 2003, analysing Europe’s entrepreneurial gap, the European Commission cited a study which showed that during the 1990s, 19% of mid-sized firms in America were classified as fast-growers, compared with an average of just 4% in six European Union countries. The Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship around the world, argues convincingly that one reason America has outstripped Europe in providing new jobs is its ability to produce new, fast-growing companies such as Amazon, an online retailer, or eBay, an online auctioneer. And in terms of jobs, new small firms have an added advantage. They are less likely than existing giants to outsource a lot of their labour to cheap providers in Asia.
Europe was not always so laggardly. When Britain’s industrial revolution spread to the continent after 1848, ambition and access to capital could take a young man far. August Thyssen founded ThyssenKrupp, a German steel group, Eugène Schueller founded L’Oréal, a French beauty empire, and A.P. Møller set the course for A.P. Møller-Maersk Group, a Danish shipping giant. The vast majority of Europe’s big companies were born around the turn of the last century. So was much of the German Mittelstand, and clusters of manufacturers from Lombardy to the Scottish lowlands.
After the world wars, Europe never regained this fecundity. The devastation made Europeans more risk-averse than they had previously been. Markets that had been closely linked before 1914 fell back into fragments, says Leslie Hannah, a business historian at the London School of Economics. That limited the ability of new firms to build scale and grow into giants, especially in the decades before the European Union’s single market. According to an analysis of the world’s 500 biggest publicly listed firms by Nicolas Véron and Thomas Philippon of Bruegel, a think-tank, Europe gave birth to just 12 new big companies between 1950 and 2007. America produced 52 in the same period.Europe has only three big new listed firms founded between 1975 and 2007. Of those, two were started in Britain or Ireland, which are closer to America in their attitude to enterprise than continental Europe. Europe’s big privately held firms, too, mostly date from before 1950, often a very long time before.
If Europe were more entrepreneurial, says everyone from the commission down, it would not have been such a poor producer of big businesses. And it would have produced more successful new technology firms. Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be channelled through the tubes of the internet, but over the past few decades a great deal of it has been. That an economy so copiously provided with the technically educated as Germany’s has not produced a single globally important business-to-consumer internet company suggests a big problem with entrepreneurship.
“Why was Google not made in Germany?” asked Konrad Hilbers, the former chief executive of Napster, an online-music service, in a talk last year. The lack of a risk-taking entrepreneurial culture was part of his answer. Firms such as Skype, an internet voice- and video-calling firm founded by a Dane and a Swede, Spotify, a Swedish online-music service, and Wonga, a British online lender, suggest that the picture is not as bad as it could be. But Europe’s entrepreneurs are still underrepresented on the internet. “Though there are some signs of life,” says Yossi Vardi, a veteran Israeli high-tech entrepreneur and “angel” investor, the region is “semi-dormant”.
Too few Virgins; not enough Red Bulls
Europe does have entrepreneurial success stories. The richest is Spain’s Amancio Ortega, who started work for a clothes store at the age of 13 before going on to found Inditex, a fast-fashion empire. Austria has Dietrich Mateschitz, who started Red Bull, an energy-drink maker. France has Xavier Niel, who this year started a mobile-phone revolution by offering consumers extremely low prices; Britain has Sir Richard Branson. But the list is short. And many European entrepreneurs—Sir Richard not included—hide their success. Mr Ortega has never given a media interview; there appear to be just two published photographs of him. Ingvar Kamprad, the billionaire founder of IKEA, a Swedish furniture retailer, assiduously avoids any hint of plutocratic airs.
Many aspiring entrepreneurs simply leave. There are about 50,000 Germans in Silicon Valley, and an estimated 500 start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area with French founders. One of the things they find there is a freedom to fail. If your firm goes under in France, says Dan Serfaty, the French founder of Viadeo, a fast-growing business-networking website, you don’t get a second chance.
Trying to discover what holds back entrepreneurs, the commission last year examined insolvency regimes and found that many countries treat honest insolvent entrepreneurs more or less like fraudsters, though only a tiny fraction of bankruptcies involve any fraud at all. Some countries keep failed entrepreneurs in limbo for years. Britain will discharge a bankrupt from his debts after 12 months; in America it is usually quicker. In Germany people expect it to take six years to get a fresh start, according to the commission; in France they expect it to take nine. In Germany bankrupts can face a lifetime ban on senior executive positions at big companies.
A second important hurdle is finance. Getting seed capital up to €1m ($1.2m) from “friends, fools and family” is pretty easy. Technology entrepreneurs such as Germany’s Samwer brothers, Oliver, Marc and Alexander, made fortunes in the first dotcom boom and then became angel investors in such very young start-ups. In Germany seed money has roughly quintupled in the past five years, says Hendrik Brandis of Earlybird Venture Capital, a venture-capital firm in Munich.
For the €1.5m-4m that firms need to work an idea up into a real business model, though, money is in desperately short supply. Institutional investors such as pension funds regard European venture capital as a bad asset class. European venture-capital firms lost money during 2000-10 after the bursting of the dotcom bubble. The total money invested in European venture capital halved from €8.2 billion in 2007 to €4.1 billion last year. Much of it now comes from governments rather than from private investors.
Some people argue that if there were enough ambitious entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas in Europe, the money would come from America and elsewhere. There is some truth in this. But investors who put money into very young firms tend to prefer operating in their own language and culture, so start-ups depend mostly on backers from their own country.
For the third stage of funding, when firms are looking to raise up to €20m or so to build on what looks like success, American money is increasingly available—though since they depend on big hits to offset dozens of failures, American funds are still more likely to back entrepreneurs at home, where such things are known to happen, or in high-growth emerging economies. And anyway, most European entrepreneurs have hit the buffers long before they get to the €20m stage.
The third big obstacle is labour law. If young firms are to survive near-terminal mistakes, or fluctuating demand, they need to be able to reduce staff costs quickly and cheaply when necessary. That is far harder in many European countries than elsewhere. The complexity and cost of firing people in Europe is a big concern for American venture capital, says Georges Karam, the chief executive of Sequans Communications, a French chipmaker for smartphones which went public on the New York Stock Exchange last year. A fund in Boston recently pulled its investment in a start-up which its French founder had intended to begin in America but then had to bring back to France for family reasons.
The cost of paying out large severance packages (six months of severance pay is typical even for very recent hires) can be a huge drain for a small company. “In San Francisco and in China, a communist country, I pay one to two months,” says a beleaguered French chief executive who does not want his name attached to such a sensitive subject. Big severance packages also make it much harder for start-ups to recruit the professional managers that can take them into the big league. Experienced executives are loth to forgo such reassuring goodies by resigning.
Anil de Mello, who started Mobuzz, a Spanish online-video firm, in 2005, watched his fledgling company implode with the onset of the financial crisis. He thought bankruptcy would give him a new start. But after business creditors were dealt with, Spanish social security pursued him for five more years to extract repayment of severance money it had paid to the firm’s employees on his behalf. Mr de Mello nearly gave up being an entrepreneur entirely. Instead he started his next company—devoted to bringing down roaming tariffs for mobile-phone users—in Switzerland, where the labour laws are less of a deterrent.
And European business founders find it difficult to wield the entrepreneur’s main weapons: the stock options and free shares that make start-ups attractive to employees. The legal complexity of giving new hires free shares is prohibitive, says one entrepreneur who is currently trying to poach someone away from Google, which routinely hands out Google stock units. Everyone advises not doing it, he says. That further limits entrepreneurs’ ability to tempt people into a risky career move.
All these limits have left the continent with a dearth of the sort of entrepreneurial successes which would serve to inspire others; very few people think that going to work for a loony in a garage offers a long-shot at millionairedom. Parisian opinion is convinced that if Sergey Brin’s father had picked France instead of America after leaving Russia, the son would have become an ivory-tower computer scientist instead of co-founding Google.
With the odds so stacked against them, the flickers of enterprise seen in Berlin, London, Helsinki and a few other places offer cause for seemingly disproportionate hope. If the requisite wild spirits can survive in these conditions, how might they flourish if not held back?
Yearning to be free
Though they have suppressed demand and made financing ever harder, the great recession and the euro crisis may also mark a long-term change in Europeans’ perception of risk. For executives, joining a start-up is less of a gamble when big companies are shedding staff. Since the crisis began in 2007, says Martin Varsavsky, an Argentinian serial entrepreneur who has founded a number of telecom companies in Spain, it has been noticeably easier for his current venture, Fon, a global Wi-Fi community, to recruit. The engineers he wanted to hire used to spurn him for Telefónica, a telephone giant, or Prisa, a media company; now those firms are firing people, well-qualified people are more willing to join a new company.
In a presentation to Spanish entrepreneurs last year called “Why you should not move your company to Silicon Valley”, Mr Varsavsky pointed out that salaries for software engineers are currently 70% lower in Europe than in California. There are millions of young people looking for work. And Europe has far fewer lawyers waiting to make life difficult for young firms and lots of protected, uncompetitive sectors ripe for disruption.
Governments are paying attention. A few years ago entrepreneurs were not a priority for politicians, says Mathieu Carenzo, head of the centre for entrepreneurship at IESE Business School in Barcelona. Now, he says, government heads and royalty turn up to promotional events. States are trying all manner of tricks to boost business creation, for better or worse, and there is a whole industry of consultants devoted to the task. There are schemes to create clusters of start-ups, to get academics to hate business less, to expose schoolchildren to entrepreneurial notions. Germany and other countries have recently set up state-backed agencies to send enterprising Europeans straight to Silicon Valley, knowing that successful founders often recycle their money, contacts and experience into start-ups back at home.
The French government has done some useful things for business founders; Mr Karam cites a measure that offers tax relief on research. But France’s real problem, he goes on to say, is its rigid labour law. Nothing governments offer by way of assistance, say entrepreneurs, is as helpful as simply removing the hindrances they currently impose. Germany’s government has made four big attempts in the past 13 years to help entrepreneurs, says Dietmar Harhoff, the director of the Institute for Innovation Research, Technology Management and Entrepreneurship at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, but they have mostly failed.
The branches of government that try to boost entrepreneurship are not powerful enough to do anything about the real problems for entrepreneurs, such as labour rules. Again, the depths of the euro crisis may allow change that was previously stymied. Mario Monti, Italy’s prime minister, says he will lower the administrative cost of starting a company from €10,000 to €1. Italy and Spain are both taking steps to make it somewhat easier to fire workers.
Berlin’s rapid rise and international appeal—about half of the business founders in the city are not German—make it an object lesson in what really matters in an environment appealing to entrepreneurs. There has been zero help from the state; the city is simply too poor to lavish money on the usual schemes. But it is a cheap place to live and work, and it is relatively easy for foreigners, who are especially likely to start companies, to set up shop. This is in contrast to Britain, where targets for net immigration have been slashed after rates rose to record levels.
In the St Oberholz café, among the bars and shared offices and kaffeeklatsches, there is also a soundproofed cupboard. It offers a place to make private calls—and to cry when you miss a deal, jokes Philipp von Sahr, the founder of an online store for organic food. Europe’s entrepreneurs, like all entrepreneurs, will do their fair share of crying in the years to come. But their governments could do a great deal to help them get out of the cupboard and back into the game.
