good in Silicon Valley. So they say, 'I'd rather go back and try to do exciting stuff at home.'"
But before there's a true shift in the status quo, Griffin adds, more entrepreneurs will have to make the trip to America. Once the entrepreneurs reach critical mass, he says, change will build on its own.
To push things along, the European VC scene needs to evolve as well. Financing is now about where it was 15 years ago in the United States. "Three years ago they were 30 years behind," Griffin says. "The catch-up rate is ever-accelerating." [See "Old World, New Economy,".]
Why does Griffin put up with the laggards? For the same reason Europeans go home. "If you know the recipe to make bread, you can apply it anywhere," he notes. "It's the business equivalent to technology transfer. Besides, I like life much better over here."
LE COLD SHOULDER
Croissants, cobbled streets, free schools - nice perks, sure, but not enough to lure every European back across the Atlantic.
"Honestly, most of my friends don't go back after spending three, four, five years in the Valley. After that much time, you've become a local," says Pierre Cesarini, CEO and founder of Paris-based software maker TempoSoft. He lived in the Bay Area for nine years, rising through the ranks of Apple Computer (AAPL), before his wife finally talked him into going home.
Repatriation was a double-edged sword for Cesarini, 36. "I knew things were slowly changing, but I had lost touch with France," he says. "Going back was about as hard as first coming to the States in 1989. I knew more people in the U.S.; I could have put a team with global experience together faster and come up with funding more easily."
Instead, Cesarini got "le cold shoulder" from the risk-averse financial community in France. "They want to see not just a business plan," he adds. "You need to have a team, a product, customers. But if you have all three and still seek VC funding, I think you did something wrong."
After knocking on doors for a year, the determined Frenchman finally scored $5 million for his idea: software for enterprise workforce management. "I think that was a first in France, to get that much funding without a line of code, without a customer," he declares. He launched TempoSoft in April 1998 and now has 40 employees in France, the U.K. and the U.S. Sales are expected to hit $10 million this year.
Cesarini sees an upside to leaving the easy access in Silicon Valley for the stodgy ways of his native France. "The odds are much higher," he says. "You have to accomplish more in a much more fragmented market; you have to deal with three or four countries in the first year, otherwise you will be perceived as a local company. On the other hand, valuations in Europe are 10 times under what you see on the Nasdaq. There's enormous potential."
FRONTIER EUROPE
Youssef Ghazal, Clemens Henle and two other students from Switzerland and Germany took their Harvard MBAs and their Silicon Valley exposure and went back to Europe to get seed money as fast as they could.
The four had been runners-up in their school's high-profile business-plan contest with a scheme for Vitago, their European knockoff of Drugstore.com, and immediately had East Coast VCs banging on their dorm-room doors. Instead, they moved to Munich a few months after graduating last May. Why haggle with European financiers instead of taking the easy U.S. money? Because the payoff is bigger in the less-crowded European market, explains Vitago cofounder and CFO Ghazal, 32.
The Austrian investment banker gives a lot of the credit for his initiative to Silicon Valley, where he got religion within a week. "You feel like a martian walking around there," he recalls. "Everything is new, everybody is talking shop all the time. It's hard not to want to do something immediately, too."
Before
