Y Combinator Clone in Vienna, Austria launches

btw, I don't know if it's just me but I don't know why people are so worked up over these copycats. When the second university in the world was founded, maybe people accused them of copying the first university, but in the long run it's been good for mankind. Of course, if all the orgs want to talk amongst each other and pay royalties to YC, that might also be interesting.

europe probably has just about as much cash, and as much education as the US. but according to the aho group report (http://ec.europa.eu/invest-in-research/action/2006_ahogroup_en.htm), named after the former finnish prime minister esko aho, the ICT field, despite having some of the lowest initial investment costs in all of high tech, is the most severly underdeveloped.

the reasons for this, he muses are both a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, and a lack of funding in the pre-seed areas.

i'd like to believe the first point is not an absolute. we have great people with the skills and desire to create cool applications. on the other hand you can't just walk up to a rich friend here, who'll give you cash if your idea is great. there are no rich friends, and even if you know one or two, they haven't made their cash in a startup, or even in the off chance that they have, they're a business guy. businesses are started by business people here. if you want to start a business, you have no chance to get cash from someone from your world, who has been on that path before.

so you're left with public funding, and public funding involves politics. but public funding doesn't work for tech founders either - the lisbon goal of 3% GDP for r&d mostly goes into empty tech parks and research centers by big corporations. incorporating a limited liability company here requires at least 17000 euros, with a liability of up to 34000 euros.

if you want to apply for any kind of funding, you require months of meeting bureaucrats and writing applications - a different one for each place. these people will tell you after months your projects are either not innovative, or they won't work. but the budget is there, so people claim everything is alright. then they fund projects by friends, or stupid things with avatars running around in browser plugins.

the only places to get entrepreneurial information are bureaucrats. you're very unlikely to know anyone who started his or her own tech business without sheer luck and without their own money. there's no place to get advice, except other people who are on the same path right now. you usually don't start businesses before you've saved a significant amount of money and are probably well beyond your 40s. also people will discourage you, because it is seen as very risky.

we are adressing these problems both by creating non-profit community centers where you're surrounded by like-minded people, and to which we invite people we think of as insightful, and by actively lobbying for better legislation to support startups, and by making access to initial cash easier. of the few techie-founders we have here, most are single-founders, because it is really hard to convince two friends to found with you if they can barely pay their rent while studying and working at the same time.

for the argment about our capability to accurately judge the merit of the applications i have to say: you're unfairly postulating that we're unskilled because we have no huge successes to show yet. i have a hard time to counter that argument right now, but trust me, we're working hard to do just that.