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The challenge of building a strong startup scene has been faced by several different communities around the world, which aimed at building something that looked like San Francisco. The Silicon Valley dream has always been what many people have tried to replicate in other locations around the world. That’s what London, Berlin, Tel Aviv, New York have built in the past years.
The truth is that Entrepreneurship doesn’t mean San Francisco or California. Entrepreneurship is more connected to creative and innovative people and in order to have them, you need to build an environment that lets them express their creativity. If you have an environment that fights against those principles, you will never have a startup scene, because the creative people will simply move to other big cities.
A major example is Italy, where high taxations and a politics based on tomorrow and not on the next thirty years have never helped tech entrepreneurs. The country has faced many different form of successful entrepreneurship, but tech has never been there. The lack of support, taxes and capital hasn’t helped the formation of a group of innovators.
The key to start building a strong startup scene is to have a point of reference. It can be a cafè, a park, a Computer Science department or whatever aggregates people; because the most beneficial thing about a startup scene is that people can help each other grow. That’s why it’s fundamental to start having a place to meet and discuss what it is next for the scene.
In the case of Manchester or London, Techhub really boosted and started a tech scene. Mike Butcher, the Editor in Chief of Techcrunch Europe, and Elizabeth Varley launched it in June 2010 with the aim to build a cheap and accessible environment for tech people and entrepreneurs. Techhub rents desk for £375(+VAT) a month for 5 days a week. However Techhub doesn’t just offer a place to crash and iterate over your product, but a network of people.
Techhub, especially in Manchester, has taken the place of the cafè and become a point of reference for other people. What they also offer is a set of events through the week that can help startups building their product and networking with “the right people”. What started as an humble project, has become a point of reference to start building a startup scene in Europe. For this reason, Techhub has now expanded in Riga, Swansea, Bucharest, Berlin and Bangalore.
In the same way, events, such as Silicon Drinkabout, are those that shape startup scenes around the world. Drinkabout is a “regular after work drinks for startups every Friday, usually at a venue in or around Old Street & Shoreditch”. It started as an event in London and now it’s present in New York, Manchester, Amsterdam, Copenaghen, Toronto, Sofia, San Paulo, Dublin and Berlin. This event has enabled thousands of entrepreneurs to network and build strong relationships that have led to new startups.
The most important thing that starts a startup scene is the network of people behind it. If I want to start a company, I have an idea and a Co-Founder, the next things I am looking at are a good place to work, a network of people who can help me and capital, if I get traction. If these three element do not exist, people will be more likely to move, in the same way Soundcloud did and founded one of the most successful European companies in Berlin.
San Francisco is still probably ten light years ahead with the mindset, the opportunities and the network of people. If you fail, you live in a place where other companies are constantly recruiting, so there is always a plan B. However Silicon Valley is not the only source of innovation and the more other people start building communities around the world, the more we see that the same structure can be built in other countries.
