Europe, I love you.

Too many startup founders I meet are obsessed with copying what goes on outside of Europe. We forget our strengths. The things that give us incredible unfair advantages. An unfair advantage is anything you can use in your favor, making such a difference, that it seems to be unfair.

Break down these geographic barriers.

One example of this is geography. I’m always surprised by how many Europeans don’t take advantage of this. We live in a place where any major city can be reached, by plane or train, in about 2 hours. More or less. London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, there are cheap flights and good access to these places. But people still live inside their geography.

When I divided my time between London and Paris, people were surprised that I treated the two as one working geography. A Eurostar journey made an event in the other city feel comparable to a long commute from the suburbs. The useful question was how long a journey took, not whether it crossed a border.

Travel can be expensive, but it may cost less than accepting a structural problem where you live. Skype’s early organization illustrated this: it combined engineering in Estonia with a London headquarters. The team placed each function where it made sense, instead of treating borders as the limits of the business.

So why think about these debates, will Paris or Berlin be the next startup capital, all of that? Why should that be a question?

First of all, none of us will really get anywhere without the others. We need to have a European mindset. That doesn’t mean it’s simple. Multiple locations and operations in several countries bring local problems, paperwork and delays. You definitely add challenges. But overcoming them is worth it, because you gain a larger footprint, a larger pool of potential employees and a larger pool of customers.

You do not have to be as big as Skype. I once spoke with founders who had opened their company’s bank account in Germany and found the process straightforward. The lesson is not that one country’s banks are always better. Banking requirements, eligibility and service vary. Compare the options that your business can legally use across borders instead of assuming that the nearest provider is the only one.

Different countries offer different strengths in company law, administration and access to capital. Compare those systems instead of assuming that every part of a business must be organized in one place. The role Delaware plays for many US companies illustrates the broader point: legal geography and operating geography need not be identical.

Tax obligations and legal requirements still need to be understood for the actual structure and activities. The point is to examine the available options, not to assume that living in one country requires doing everything there.

Geography becomes an advantage only when founders treat Europe as a practical business opportunity. That takes a change in mindset: look at the people, services and markets you can actually access, rather than seeing Europe as an abstract idea.

Get comfortable with the fact that your team and your market aren’t in the same place.

Another thing we forget is how to find B2B clients. People in Spain complain about working with local corporations, and I hear the same in Italy, Romania and France. Depending on what you sell, you aren’t restricted to your local market. If you develop software, take a wider look. My advice to a SaaS company is to build its team locally and look across Europe, North America and the world for its market.

Use data to figure out where you want to go into. If that’s the US, great. If your data says you should go into Poland, hey, that’s the best place. And maybe expansion isn’t even a matter of geography. Be willing to launch into the Internet Nation. The Internet Nation is that portion of the population, in France, in Europe, worldwide, that is into the world of entrepreneurship online, and speaks English. It’s an active group that you can reach out to, without any real barriers, and that can significantly widen your available market.

The point is to recognize our advantages, especially what we take for granted or see as a disadvantage. Take paid time off. A benefit treated as normal in one country can be a powerful recruiting perk in another. Europeans sometimes see vacation as a sign of weakness or an obstacle to hard work. But there is a difference between being productive and being stupid. Working all day and achieving nothing is stupid. Taking time off while doing good work is productive. If we push ourselves to be truly productive, European traditions of time off can be an advantage.

B2B sales are forever.

One comment that came up in a conversation was “As a B2B company, we’ve found that selling in Europe is harder at first, but once you’ve sold once, they stay with you.” I liked this because it really expressed something that is true: in the United States it’s easier to get a sale, but it’s harder to keep your position. In Europe, it’s harder to get a sale, but because the rate of change and innovation is slower, it’s easier to keep your position for a long time.

At the same time, you have to be very careful with this, because it has the tendency to make the market weak. You can fall into the mindset of the “no need to change anything”. But if you combine the advantage of maintaining your enterprise client base relatively easily, with avoiding the disadvantage of complacency, you create a magical thing that can be a home run. You can get a big win from understanding both sides of this aspect of European markets.

There is a desire in Europe for the Robin Hood type figure.

The solution that comes sweeping in, taking away from the older, established interests and giving advantages to the consumer. And it’s no secret that we in Europe are in a part of the world where there is a lot of tradition, conservatism, bla bla bla. One of the reasons behind that is that the countries in Europe are oftentimes so small, that it’s easy for a big company to lobby for specific advantages and privileges. There’s always such a proximity between people who run the government and people who run big companies. But it develops big gaps between what people want and what companies are delivering. As an entrepreneur, that gives you a lot of opportunities to focus on what customers really want. You can move into the market and provide a much better experience, if you’re able to survive the backlash of regulation and vested interests. You can create new market segments, and you’ll be able to do it with the help of the people.

Captain Train and Citymapper illustrated this approach in their early growth. Their teams improved services that established providers had left frustrating, with a strong focus on the consumer. That product discipline is the useful lesson.

Save the consumer!

The number of problems we’re facing could potentially lead to a lot of solutions. In Europe, that sense of facing many problems often ends up in pessimism. And I think that this pessimism is actually a huge opportunity. In Silicon Valley, there’s almost the opposite problem, in that there is so much optimism that it can be hard to pick an idea and run with it. In Europe, though, everyone tries to understand why you’re going to fail. If you’re able to overcome that mindset, you can be in an extremely strong position as an entrepreneur.

This is the same situation as when, if you’re going to start running, you should practice running on sand. Because running on sand is hard, and if you practice doing that all the time, when you’re finally not stuck in the sand anymore, you’re able to run very fast. Building a startup in Europe is exactly that, you’re running on sand. If you push through, you’ll find that your company is well-trained and able to face a great deal of challenges.

That pessimism can also help you to figure out where the real problems are. We’re always repeating that founders should find a problem to solve, rather than a brilliant idea. It’s easier to see a problem in a pessimistic environment.

European entrepreneurs become very efficient with capital.

When capital is harder to raise, entrepreneurs get used to spending less. That matters because capital cycles go up and down. When fast money runs out, founders who have never operated without it can be unprepared. European examples such as BlaBlaCar showed how much could be built with careful spending. Save’s early revenue growth relative to its cash burn offered another example. The lesson is about capital efficiency, not a promise that any company will keep succeeding. Treat limited capital as a constraint that can make you and your business stronger.

Leading the way of lifestyle.

People who are not from Europe look at France, Italy, Austria, Sweden… they see a certain lifestyle. Let’s take that perception seriously enough. This isn’t just a question of luxury, either. You can make a good living in the luxury industry, everything’s pretty, there are businesses that you can develop. But I’m not sure it’s really what entrepreneurship is about, since we believe that entrepreneurship is ultimately about providing exceptional service at scal e. If you want to truly scale, luxury isn’t really what you’re aiming at.

The idea of a lifestyle doesn’t have to mean luxury. All over Europe, you can find a sense of detail and service that is exceptional. As a startup, you can take advantage of that. You don’t have to just copy and paste the things that you see coming out of Silicon Valley, where things are much more robotic, there’s less soul there. There’s a reason that Airbnb, when they saw how their team in Paris was able to handle the customer experience both in terms of hosts and guests, had that team start teaching their other teams all around the world. The sense of delicacy and attention in their Paris office was the best, and so that was the model that Airbnb spread throughout their company.

Captain Train also offered a useful example of care. It was not a luxury service, but its customer support team tried to act like Ralph Fiennes’s concierge in The Grand Budapest Hotel: attentive to every need of the guest. Applying that care and attention to detail helped the startup stand out to customers and other companies.

That question of lifestyle doesn’t end with your business, it also has to do with your happiness. Many people will ask me, where should I start my company. And the answer is wherever you want to live. That’s the most important thing, the business questions can be worked out, but the type of life you want is something that you have to listen to carefully. Motivation is your drive. Depending on who you are and what it takes to make you happy, motivation will be affected by where you live. We had a debate whether or not it was a good thing as an entrepreneur to be on unemployment and paid, and use that time and money for your startup. Some people said that unemployment benefits were a good thing, since it gives you some measure of freedom and security, others said it was better to have a job and work on a startup, others said that it would be better to have nothing and be desperate and really push yourself to succeed with your company. And my answer, like with where to work, is that it’s not that simple. Each of those situations has its benefits. For me, personally, I like the desperation of having to do something, because if not, there are checks coming due next month that won’t get paid. For me, that’s a motivator and it is exciting and it makes me more efficient. But not everyone is like that. I can definitely say that I’ve seen many people take their time on unemployment, and acted like a tourist for 18 months. But you can have a story that shows how someone has used that time and that security to actually build something too.

Are you aware enough to figure out how to build the infrastructure that will get the most out of you?

That infrastructure is extremely personal. One infrastructure isn’t objectively better than another one. Maybe unemployment isn’t a good motivator for you as an entrepreneur, but maybe it’s an advantage for your employees. Maybe, since your potential employees have European unemployment benefits, you can offer your early employees equity rather than a salary. That’s just one idea. It’s an example of how you can look at a situation and not ask whether it’s good or bad, but how can you turn it to your advantage.

Europeans have found other ways to give life meaning. Think of writing a book. It may never find many readers, but writing it can give someone a purpose beyond their paid job. Blogs, social networks and other forms of creation extend that possibility. The value is not limited to how much money the work earns.

As technology changes the place of work in our lives, the question of what gives life meaning outside a job becomes more important. Europe’s long debate about leisure, culture and social protection can be an advantage here. A society needs more than an answer to the question of how to keep everyone busy.

So use all of these advantages. Every city in Europe has its fans, there are people who love Berlin, who love Paris, who love Rome. Just take a look at the list of films by Woody Allen, and you’ll get it. No one loves Palo Alto, I promise. People love the people they meet in Palo Alto, they love the work, they love what is going on there, but no one is ever going to say, oh, I love strolling through Palo Alto. In Europe, there are people who dream of our cities. All sorts of people would love the opportunity to be working in our cities. And that can become a worldwide advantage in terms of hiring talent, if you know how to use it correctly.

We are underutilizing our European infrastructures. Many of the barriers that we think we see, if we really look closely, we can see that there are ways around them, and or that they aren’t actually barriers at all. And the best is when we see how the things that other people see as barriers can actually be unfair advantages for us. That’s how you play the big game, and that’s how you build big companies.

So look around, be honest with yourself, and stay cool.