Most European entrepreneurs follow a well-beaten path in the United States. They take their ideas to Silicon Valley, gather a team of engineers and MBAs, and set up shop amid the faceless maze of office parks. They play it safe.
A rare few, however, seek a bigger thrill. They pack up and go home, carrying their crusade for innovation - and their IPOs - back to Europe. There they battle with conservative venture capitalists and timid partners; they stave off prohibitive stock-options regulations in France; they endure hardships they'd never face in the States, all to prove they can make the high-tech revolution work in the Old World.
"The single biggest asset I brought back [to Germany] was the optimistic mindset," says German engineer Gerhard Fettweis. "Every single researcher [in the U.S.] has some loony idea he or she is working on. And a year later, just like that, they turn it into a company."
After four years in the San Francisco Bay Area, Fettweis decamped in 1994 and moved to the eastern German city of Dresden to assume a newly established chair in mobile telecommunications funded by telecom giant Mannesmann (dossier). Last June, the 37-year-old professor founded a chip company, Systemonic, to develop integrated circuits for mobile communications devices, so-called digital signal processors. He has $5 million in venture funding and a staff of 20. His company is a poster child for the East's economic revival since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Of course, he'd not be where he is now if he'd listened to his doctorate adviser in Germany, who told him in 1988 to embark on what Fettweis disparagingly calls "the classic German quest: Get a [research] assignment, perhaps take out a loan and then pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
The old-school engineer-cum-entrepreneur in Germany always planned for the worst-case scenario, Fettweis says. "Their exit strategy was to get bought by Siemens (SI) or, even more absurd, to buy back the stakes in their company. It still happens. If I hear somebody talking about approaching a bank with a business plan, they're already heading down the wrong path."
That's why he quit his lucrative job as head of a research group at TCSI (TCSI) in Berkeley, Calif., and went back to Dresden. He wanted to evangelize his students and colleagues, to convince them that they could and should start their own companies. "I was literally trying to get disciples," Fettweis adds, "to create the mentality, the hunger for a startup team."
He encouraged his students to spend one semester out of 10 abroad, advice that only half of them accepted, to Fettweis' disappointment. "We need more people to learn on-site in Silicon Valley to catch up in the next five years," he notes.
THE MARCO POLO EFFECT
You could call it entrepreneurial tourism. John Griffin, an American expat living near Geneva, calls it the "Marco Polo effect" - Europeans traveling to the United States to learn new ways of doing business.
"The idea is to go off to this exotic place, see what's going on," says Griffin. "You can't get it by reading or hearing about it. You have to experience firsthand the lack of fear, the feeling that building a company is a natural thing."
Griffin moved from San Francisco to Switzerland four years ago and now advises startups in Austria, France and Germany on the nuts and bolts of entrepreneurial financing. The 49-year-old former Hewlett-Packard (HWP) executive deals with the intricacies of structuring options packages in countries that until very recently didn't even consider the stock market a sound investment for individuals.
But aside from the urge to bring American know-how back home, Griffin says there's another reason why Europeans are returning to the old country: quality of life. "Europeans go to the U.S. and see how exciting it is, but then they realize that other things are missing. Things like culture, lifestyle, the well-roundedness of life are not as
