 being guided so the so-called incubation centers are very important. At this moment you have quite some local incubation centers but specifically for European startups once you go out of your own country and you go to the US or Asia or even another European country you kind of become a startup with a proven product which you still have to re-incubate another country so the entire incubator space is it changing and it's becoming virtual hubs of what they call incubators and accelerators. I won't go into detail about that. What can we do better or where can we help? Where can we do something because there is something happening in Europe. Nili Kruse talked about I didn't hear it but I just saw an article on TechCrunch where they're saying okay Europe is rediscovering that they also can invest in startups and make big startups so what can we do better? I think there is a fundamental lack of respect for entrepreneurs. I live half of my time in California and half of my time over here kind of switched between the two countries and as an anecdote when I started a company here two years ago in Los Angeles I got a letter from Schwarzenegger who was a governor at that time perfect that you chose Los Angeles or for your hub and please come over and I had all help I wanted. When I came here in Brussels I had a letter from the techs administration that there was a problem with something on the address so it was it's a small anecdote but for me it was there it was kind of the paved red way into being entrepreneur and the hero culture that is allocated with it in California and here it is well I do give you the address because you might be stealing something from us so we have a fundamental issue between but we don't have to overdo it but if you have if you want a culture of innovation you have to drive that culture innovation and it starts at universities it starts at funds it starts at accelerated start at the government it starts at the European Union if you want to have a really strong culture of innovation we'll have to recreate one. I also think that facilitating and accelerating the speed of internationalization is crucial. Most web startups in Europe if we have somebody from Google on the panel and I was looking at the acquisitions that Google did over the last years about 150 I think there's four from Europe that's an issue you know if you don't have a lot of acquisitions and you don't have a lot of exits the venture capital won't follow so we have at this moment a quite striving entrepreneurial culture in Europe you have a lot of things happening in Berlin and London and Amsterdam everywhere but there's a lack for seed capital and there's a lack for international success and if all of these if these local startups want to succeed we have to facilitate and doing easy international business we all have fairly small markets and it's incredibly complex over the last two years I've been stumbling to start to launch in various countries over Europe it's really difficult to give a complete other example we launched an office in Singapore and in Singapore I have an account manager of the government who works for two years I'll have all administrative legislative and regulatory support for free and I have one guy who's doing it all paid by the government now after two visits we started the office now they even have a seed capital program from the government where they do times five the capital that you locally raise so if you raise 100 000 euro with local capital the government adds 400 000 to it and kind of a convertible model so you don't have to do your valorization upfront there's always a discussion on startups how much is something worth but you know in Singapore they said three or four years ago we have so many corporates here now now we want to go for entrepreneurs and they're really putting it to it and I think Europe can and should do that as well we have to be born global we have to also talk about sharing experience but I'll leave that to see for later on and then I think we need ambitious financing and support okay there is some funding and there is some some programs but it's not ambitious if if I look what happens in Silicon Valley at some moment they choose their future winners there's 150 YouTube's and then they choose this YouTube is going to be the winner and they have a large fund allocated to it I once was chairman here of a social network which is called Netlog they did pretty well one of the leading ones here in Europe with we didn't find any real money in Belgium's way to go to Switzerland to find don't know if it's public but a couple of million and then a couple of weeks later Facebook raised 180 million for big funds behind it and you know is game over for all the social networks at that time so we get just outspent in a lot of businesses so if you want to do that we have to go much more ambitious and also go much faster especially in this in this early stage in the seed equity part and there I think there is the part that I started with and if it's my own company or others doesn't matter that much it's the principle of crowdfunding I think Europe should adopt it very quickly because it can mean it can mean a difference it goes too slowly now but if you can do the crowdfunding in a good way I think there's a huge envy and huge ambition for a lot of young people and a lot of 40 year old people who are kind of a second career who want to start crowdfunding and what can you do or where can we really use a lot of help there's that pan-European crowdfunding is really tough so until 100,000k it's kind of similar everywhere there's a directive that kind of coordinates it but everything between 100,000 euro and 5 million is as different as either no regulation or something different in the 30 countries and that's really impossible so if you really want to break through there and we need some kind of coherent regulatory framework so that crowdfunding for start of this well organized has enough consumer protection but has enough uplift and that combines the first two points and certainly there's a lot of co-investment to be done I see a lot of experiments with small and mainly creative works where the government just co-funds there's a lot of funding initiatives well if some crowdfunding project get a lot of fan support and some experts and they raise some money you can just allocate and co-invest in it and last but certainly definitely not least is tax incentives there's a lot of tax incentives into investing into risk domains a lot of countries are doing it on game development here Belgium is doing it really great in the film industry there's a striving film industry because we have a tax shelter UK is applying tax incentives to angel investment if you can apply that instead of paying taxes you can support the young entrepreneurs that can make a real difference besides crowdfunding the incubation networks I talked about it an acceleration funds which helps us to be ambitious ones that startups can become one of the the leading ones so that's my story for this morning thank you thank you very much thank you Bart so you have now decided to accept the socially shunned profession of entrepreneur have successfully through crowdfunded somehow managed to achieve the capital and have a fantastic idea that you want to put into practice however from experience I can say you're going to make a lot of mistakes on the way you don't necessarily have to make all of them yourself so the way to avoid that is obviously to share knowledge and that's what the next two speakers will be talking about Steve please thank you very much hello everybody and thank you for very thank you very much for inviting me here today my name is Steve Croson I work at Google I've worked at Google since 2005 both in Europe and the US and I'm going to be very quick partly because I can summarize most of what I wanted to say is what Bart said I I fully endorse everything that Bart was saying and it covers some of the same ground I've been working at Google on everything from maps to search to Gmail both in in Europe and in the US and in 2011 I started a group at Google called the Google Cultural Institute which sounds like it we're building on a hill somewhere and it has a fancy name but actually we're just a group of engineers and we work on ways to give the culture sector tools to unlock the value of their digital assets one of our projects is a project called the Google art project in some ways I described it earlier to Bart as we're trying to bring big data to the world of culture and and and to see what happens so the subject today is dear to my heart not only because open data and open content are very live subjects in the cultural sector and we place ourselves very much within that movement but also because prior to Google my whole working life was spent as a sometimes struggling European tech entrepreneur including as a supplier of open source software solutions to the public sector and so I want to give a personal perspective on this question based on my experience both at Google and as an entrepreneur so I doubt there's anyone here who dispute our starting point which is that you know the revolution the internet has absolutely revolutionized commerce and entrepreneurship there's a recent McKinsey study which estimates that you know in European growth and in mature come mature economies generally 21% of the growth in the last five years is down to embrace of the internet and in particular the SMEs tend to grow twice as fast when they adopt the the internet and I think that the you know there is on a positive note the internet remains a powerful force for lowering barriers to entry and thus for stimulating competition and we shouldn't forget that as a graduate student in the 90s I remember the incredible experience of suddenly being able to access all of this scholarly information on the web for the first time without having to go to a library or a museum something which we kind of take for granted now because we've all been living with it for a very long time but actually it's a very profound change in human society and is still with us and to echo something from the previous session you know there is a lot of there's always some forward and some back there's always openness and then there's there are steps backwards whether there's steps backwards from for corporate reasons or for governmental reasons or whatever the reasons but the general trend I think is that the genie is out of the bottle and you know openness is is clearly the future and open access to information in particular whether education or cultural or commercial is an incredible stimulant to human activity and achievement so what what about the role of of government and the role of regulation what can we do so the first thing I would say from at a European level is to talk about implementation of the services directive we've already seen through the open market massive stimulation of cross-border trade we have a generation probably two generations now of students who've been brought up going to school in one country undergraduate in another country and postgraduate in a third country you see themselves as Europeans many of these people are now our generation of entrepreneurs there is absolutely no lack of entrepreneurship in Europe at that level in you know in London Berlin Paris Amsterdam but also in many many smaller hubs around Europe I myself started up a company in Brighton England where there's a big tech hub there just in a relatively small town and you know five years ago I might have said that the the barrier to turning those entrepreneurs into world beaters was finance and it's true that there's still somewhere to go and I definitely echo what Bart said about making big big bets but there has been a lot of movement in finance in the last five years and the situation is a lot better than it was five years ago not least because of innovations such as bots and but what I would the the one thing that I always see and I know that I was guilty of my this of myself as an entrepreneur is that there's always a temptation to settle for survival to say okay I've got my business I know what to do I'm regional I have moderate success I'm going to settle survival for survival or for being you know bought by a national