he went on Harvard's annual WesTrek excursion to California, Ghazal figured he'd do consulting. Then he didn't know what to do anymore. "I sat down with my girlfriend and spent night after night talking about it," he says. "What's my unique selling proposition as a European?"
He decided to take his insight and his management tools back to Europe. "We figured the opportunity is much bigger back home," agrees cofounder Henle, a 28-year-old German who's now VP of purchasing at Vitago. "Our goal was to become players in e-commerce from the very start. Sure, we debated whether to start a business in the United States, like others from Europe do all the time."
Advantages, Henle points out, were a language and culture they're familiar with and the window of opportunity that's been left open by Europe's lagging adoption of the Net. Young entrepreneurs can pursue a niche without bruising competition and get huge exposure should they succeed.
Still, if they hadn't gone West first, there likely wouldn't be Vitago, which just closed its second financing round in the double-digit millions.
"The impulse from the U.S. and Silicon Valley in particular was absolutely necessary," Henle says. "It liberates you from that German mindset to get a job and climb the career ladder over decades. You realize people in Silicon Valley are just normal guys who were raised with entrepreneurial spirit and are not afraid to fail."
They needed all the motivation they could get, since implementing their vision of an online health-care store - without any experience in either industry - turned out to be a bumpy ride. Henle remembers meeting with CEOs of large firms who were very curious about their business model but couldn't act on it even if they wanted to. "They would tell us how fascinating they thought our concept was, but they'd say, 'We have 15,000 employees. No way we can do something like this that fast."
TempoSoft's Cesarini met with similar intransigence when he went looking for executives in their 40s or 50s who would drop their careers to join a startup. "It just doesn't yet happen in France," he sighs.
Vitago's founders even met resistance from their backers. Where American partners in an international venture firm would aggressively push for a deal, the Europeans were cautious, asking Vitago to think smaller and forcing them to negotiate longer.
If it works out, though, and Vitago goes public on Germany's Neuer Markt, its founders' decision to leave the relative safety of Silicon Valley for the European frontier could be right on the money.
