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The Curious State of Startups in EU | ✉️ #55

Promotional graphic for MKDEV Dispatch #55 featuring a smiling person holding a small dog, with text "The Curious State of Startups in EU" and paper plane graphics on an orange background. Promotional graphic for MKDEV Dispatch #55 featuring a smiling person holding a small dog, with text "The Curious State of Startups in EU" and paper plane graphics on an orange background.

Hey! 👋

I’ve visited Bits & Pretzels 2024 this year. It was an inspiring event - so inspiring, that I already got tickets for the next year. It’s a rare event where I didn’t feel that everything is organized around selling me something. Instead, it felt like a true - and huge - gathering of fellow founders, startups, investors, all with the common idea of building something. The motto of the event is “Kickstart Europe”, so I’d like to think aloud here a bit about the themes I’ve observed during the event.

Government helping startups

First of all, it was clear during the event how much German government - and EU in general - wants to invest and motivate founders. Ministers of finance and economy (later one in a T-Shirt calling to “startup Germany”) gave their keynotes during Bits24, and many booths at the venue were organized by government or municipal startup programs, investment funds and so on. EU gives up to 80 mln eur to deep tech startups, German Accelerator guides new business on all steps of the road, Bavaria tries to promote itself as the state of the founders (Gründerland Bayern).

On some level, it makes sense. The “contract” in most EU countries is among the lines of “bigger taxes, but also more state support for the people”. Idea of expanding this notion to also support entrepreneurs sits somewhere among these lines.

Environmental, climate-friendly and sustainability-focused startups

There was a startup pitch competition at the event, with final 4 startups competing for some kind of prize. Interestingly enough, 3 out of 4 finalists were building products and services in the area of renewable energy (winner, ecoplanet), sustainability (ecoLocked), reducing carbon footprint (Clearly), using new kind of environment friendly materials and so on. The other startup, Futurail, wants to make trains in EU fully autonomous.

While there were hundreds of different startups present at the event, of all kinds - including 3 AI-based CV scanners - only the startups in this particular area go to the finals of this particular competition. It didn’t feel like a coincidence, and there is clearly a big interest paid to such companies.

Investors are willing to invest again

Finally, you could see that the amount of money investors are ready to invest today is much, much bigger than in the least couple of years. Nature is healing, startup founders don’t have to go door to door begging for their first round, investments are flowing again. This will help many companies to kickstart themselves - and, eventually, Europe.

So what?

There is this famous graph:

Table comparing the founding years of various companies, highlighting older companies like Siemens (1847) and newer ones like Google (1998), with averages at the end (118 years for older companies, 46 years for the newer group).

Most of the most valuable EU companies were founded more than 50 years ago, while the biggest US companies are much, much younger. So then the idea is, we need to do something about it in Europe and create our local Apple, Facebook, Nvidia and so on. While I saw a lot of inspiring companies and founders at Bits & Pretzels 2024, I was not entirely sure if the general direction will lead EU to creating it’s own Apple, Meta, Nvidia or Amazon (not direct competitors of those, but of the same scale).

While I appreciate EU giving more money to the founders, I’d appreciate much more the if operating the business in general would feel a bit easier - if I didn’t have to hunt for an appointment with a notary for different tiny things, be anxious about complex inter-community tax rules, examine another set of regulations (now primarily around AI) or in general spend much less time on different kind of paperwork, bureaucracy and so on. I’d like all of this feel a bit more of a breeze, and a bit less of a burden. In the end, if a company is to receive investment money, this investment should go towards building and selling the product, and not spent on lawyers, notaries and tax advisories.

Naturally, I deeply care about the environment for a simple reason that I have to live on this planet. But I can’t stop thinking that an intense focus and push for startups in this area is the way to kickstart Europe. Is optimizing and improving our impact on the environment a good thing? Absolutely. But is it the way to build next Apple? Probably not.

And finally, investment money. I can’t stop feeling that in many cases, the whole startup journey in EU is meant to end with acquisition of a startup by one of the US big tech firms. It’s almost like the whole idea of, for example, deep tech companies, to eventually be sold to Meta, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and so on. I’d like to see more companies focused on becoming The EU Startup, that will positively explode into a huge enterprise.

Don’t get me wrong though. Never before I felt more optimistic about the future of new companies in EU than after visiting Bits & Pretzels this year. But all of us need to be bold and brave and keep the main goal in mind. Kickstarting Europe and start-uping Germany should not be only about iterative improvements or optimizations of existing processes. It’s also about innovating much, much faster - and without any compromises along the way.

What We've Shared

  • ​What skills do you need to make Gen AI work? Here's a discussion from the previous episode of DevOps Accents with with Álvaro Sáez from HechicerIA.

  • ​DevOps Accents #47: The Art of Tech Blogging with Ivan Velichko from Iximiuz Labs. Our guest for this episode of DevOps Accents has taken tech blogging to a whole new level. You may know him as Iximiuz or Ivan Velichko. We discuss how tech blogging was born, how insightful content is created and consumed by tens of thousands of subscribers, and how a hobby becomes a career. We also discuss his Iximiuz Labs, an indie online platform for learning Linux, containers, and Kubernetes that offers interactive online playgrounds, hands-on tutorials, and fun DevOps challenges.

And on the website we have articles from Pablo on two topics:

What We've Discovered

A random reminder

Main categories of articles on our website include:

Check them out for your specific needs!

The 56th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, October 25th. See you next time!