Irony of European Startups
BY ANA BARJASIC:
Everyone seems to be riding the European entrepreneurship wave. It is almost impossible to choose from all the offer out there – coworking spaces, incubators, accelerators, private and public funds, events, announcements, booklets and other tools magically turning ordinary people into successful business owners.
The most advanced organisations nowadays strive to be one stop shops comprising everything mentioned above, offering free beer and after work parties on Fridays and other “perks” to attract their prospective customers-entrepreneurs. Market is saturated with so-called experts, who in a lot of cases don’t even have a basic experience of creating a company. All that matters is community building, how many desks were rented out and naturally the media coverage.
So where are the real experts? They dont have time to babysit wannabe entrepreneurs about the font color in presentations or the body posture when pitching. And unfortunately, this is about as far as one stop shops get in most of the cases. Substantial, relevant and specific advice on business models or financials is pure alchemy. Entrepreneurs are left alone, and yet with so much offer around…
On the other hand, raising funding became a goal per se. The entrepreneurial success now equals funding, but it often stops there. Until the money is spent, ofcourse. But then again, who can blame entrepreneurs for wanting a fancy office space and a huge salary, listed as mysterious marketing and sales costs when presenting funding needs. As rare as it is to find professional experts who really know what they are talking about, that rare it is to find mature entrepreneurs.
Even with so many different tools tailored for entrepreneurs, in many cases free of charge, startups still complain that there is no investors in Europe. There is no capital. There is no support. Does another tourism IT platform really need that 100, 200, 500K to be developed? Do you really think that there is no “innovative” project similar to yours that an average investor didnt see in their career minimum 10 times?
Policy world calls this phenomenon investment readiness. There is a real challenge for startups in bridging the gap between their limited knowledge and experience as combined with support by limited experts, until a few reach the level to be ready for investment and business sustainability. A whole middle layer structure is missing there, but it is also up to entrepreneurs to figure that middle layer out based on the information they have.
There is no such thing as easy success falling from the sky. The world owes you nothing. Believing in success is not enough. Even if you win lottery, you will need to pay tax for it. There will always be people trying to take advantage of you in any stage of your project. But there will also be always something to learn. Doing the “homework” and being modest is a recipe that never failed, especially if an alternative to your project can be found in less than a minute on Google.
