This post originally appeared on Jesper’s blog, he is a danish Bocconi graduate, who is in the process of launching his own TLC startup in Italy.

Following the interesting and lively debate about the Italia startup environment kicked off by he founders of Mashape and followed up by Stefano Bernardi, I want to add my point of view of the startup environment in Milan as I have experienced it. Particularly, I like a lot of the ideas and comments to the two blogs about an Italian eco-system and how we can improve the conditions for startups and entrepreneurs in Italy.

My perspective is after finishing a graduate degree at Bocconi and working on a startup idea in the Italian ICT sector for the past year. After two years at Bocconi it is hard to come away with any other conclusion that it is every young Bocconi students’ wet dream to either work in fincance, consulting or for a huge multinational corporation. That can be fine as well but it means that you’re an outsider if you want to start a business and while the US celebrates failure, it is scorned upon in Italy.

It is true that a major problem in Italy is the culture, and most Italians never fail because they never try. I had no contacts in the industry we’re trying to start a company in and yet I have received advice and help from Italian top executives and successful Danish entrepreneurs as well as been introduced to Italian VCs and angels. My experience has been that people are extremely helpful when you approach them as well-prepared and with an open mind.

First of all, there is only one elective in English at Bocconi focused on entrepreneurship and having taken that elective it leaves a lot to be desired. The ideas people had for startups and business plans were mostly very poor and showed the classical mistake to focus much more on the idea than the execution (Italian restaurant in Dubai anyone? Also we have no competitors were often considered to be a good thing).

The problem as Stefano pointed out, is simply that the pool of potential entrepreneurs is extremely small. Therefore the ideal strategy is to bring as many of these people together as often as possible.
What really disappointed me in my experience with the University here is the complete lack of interaction between the different universities. Why aren’t there common classed for CS students from Politecnico, business students from Bocconi and the Design students from Marangoni for example? Interesting things happen when people who think differently meet and I think this is vastly misisng in Italy! In a similar vein, the startup scene in Italy has seemed very un-international to me. Although it is silly and a waste of energy to dream of a Silicon Valley like eco-system there are nice things about Italy: people are friendly and helpful, the weather and food is good and the living standard is high compared to many countries. Certainly, Italy could leverage this to do much more to attract e.g Eastern European and South American talent but for that to happen the culture has to become more international.

Finally, Bocconi like many European business schools suffer from the problem that they view entrepreneurship from a very academic perspective and except for the interesting guest speakers students would be better off reading the list of popular startup and VC blogs. Instead of these courses being taught by accomplished entrepreneurs they are often taught by dry academics and it is easy to lose your hope if you only listen to this type of people. Our professor hated our idea and since it was the only idea that would require VC he also considered it far to risky and big for us to undertake.
This in many ways sums up my experience with entrepreneurship at Bocconi: An Italian restaurant in Dubai is considered a better idea than a business model with several successful exits in other European markets.

p.s a great and much needed initiative to encourage more startups is also to reduce bureaucracy. David Welton’s initiative to reduce the costs of creating an SRL. Read about it here and sign the petition here.

This is the first article by Floriano Bonfigli, founder of We Innov8. Expect to see quite a few more by him over here.

You may have already heard about this: start-up companies have been a major contributor to U.S. job creation. In fact, the Kauffman Foundation released a report in January 2009 showing that over the 1980-2005 period, companies with 1 to 4 employees accounted for a large percentage of new jobs in any given year, about 20% on average. Moreover, if the jobs coming from new firms were excluded, the U.S. net employment growth rate would have been negative on average.

Last July, the Kauffman Foundation released a new report. They looked at employment in new companies as they age, by tracking cohorts of firms started from 1977 till 2000. There are some good news coming out the document. The first is that for a given cohort of start-ups reaching the five years mark, the employment level is 80% of what it was when they were launched. It does seem that jobs created by start-ups do not tend to disappear that fast, despite being highly volatile. As several studies show, fewer than half of all new startup survive to their fifth year, and this rate is already a huge improvement over the previous years. However, the jobs lost at failing or reorganizing ventures are partially balanced out by the ones created at growing firms.

Given the recent crisis, the Kauffman Foundation has also investigated how recessions affect total employment in start-ups. The second good news is that new ventures do not appear to be affected in the long term if they start in a recession. They indeed hire fewer people in the first years, but they are likely to catch back up to firms not launched in a recession cycle, as they reach the five years mark. On the contrary, prolonged or serial recessions do seem to affect total employment. In particular, ventures that go through periods of three recession years showed about 10% less employment, with reference to their start-up years, than ventures facing no recession in their first 5 years (obviously). Thus, companies starting now are less likely to be hurt than the ones started at the beginning of the current recession. As long as the U.S. economy keeps growing and eventually ramps up out of recession!

This is just a short review of the report. If you want to go dig deeper and take a look at the charts, you can download the .pdf document right here.

The guys over at Grasshopper have a nice infographic about EU vs US about entrepreneurship. Click on the image for a full size view.

Another bunch of great startup and venture capital articles found around the web..

• Working with VCs part 1 : its not summer camp (nor should it be)

on Leaving The Flock

• The Capital Raising Ladder

on Read Write Start

• 14 startup pitfalls to avoid
• Shocker: Study shows VCs plan to invest in fewer companies

on Venture Beat

• The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

on Wired

• The Five Most promising Dutch Startups

on Tiburon TV

• There is only one currency: it’s called value

on Khuram

• Ten Commandments from Entrepreneurial ‘Evangelist’ Guy Kawasaki

on Knowledge@Wharton

• The Start-up Guru: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham

on Inc.

Bonus: List of Entrepreneurs on Twitter

Bonus video: The real time investor

Starting today each week you will find this post: Startup Weekend Reading. Every friday I will post links to the best articles on entrepreneurship and startups that I found during the week, so you don’t have to smuggle around hundreds of twitter feeds and guess all the tinyurls.

Here we go.

• What Venture Capital Can Learn from Private Equity

on BusinessWeek

• Customer Development Process & Sales Learning Cycle ( SLC )

on Nrao

• Advertising Yourself: Building a Personal Brand through Social Networks

on Knowledge@Wharton

• Why Iteration is a Powerful Way to Build a Startup
• Do You Need to Be a Developer to Found a Web Startup?

on The Netsetter

• Startups: Check Your Leadership Style

on Startup Professionals

• Top Quotes To Inspire Entrepreneurs

on IncomeDiary

Plus: McKinsey & Co. Report: Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing PDF. (Right Click, Save as).

Feel free to share links in the comments.

“Are you crazy?” “Are you starting your blog with a post linking to competitors?” That’s the first question that someone may ask me after reading this post.
Well, the main goal is to help startups, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts providing news, interviews, articles and other resources. I can only be glad there are such sites around already doing this job.
In the past few years I have seen some great companies launch in Europe but no one ever had the kind of media exposure that valley’s startups get, and I think we have to (and we can) change that.
Here is a list of the best blogs and sites that currently cover european startups, I read them every day and I think everyone should.

• Techcrunch Europe

You all know Techcrunch, the most important startup blog in the world, founded and edited by Michael Arrington. This is the continent-specific blog dedicated to europe, it is edited by Mike Butcher. They cover startups and organize  major entrepreneurship events around Europe.

• Techcrunch France (French)

Techcrunch France was founded in 2006 for the fracophone community according to technorati it soon grew to be one of the most influential blogs in France.

• Arctic Startup

ArcticStartup is one of my favorite blogs, it covers all the startups in the scandinavian countries. It was founded by Ville Vesterinen, Antti Vilpponen, Miikka Kukkosuo and Karri Saarinen. If you live in any of the nordic countries this blog should be a daily read.

• The Next Web

TheNextWeb was started in 2006 by the founders of The Next Web conference (which will be held again this year in Amsterdam starting April 15). They cover “everything that influences the future of the Web, in any way“.

• Dutch Cowboys (Dutch)

Too bad I can’t read dutch, because this blog looks interesting and the dutch startup scene is one of the most active around Europe. There are also German Cowboys and Belgian Cowboys.

• Loogic (Spanish, Italian, English)

Loogic is the most influential web2.0 blog in Spain, it is available in spanish, italian and english.

• theStartup

This one, of course. We are aiming high, and we’d like to make it to the top, providing great and useful content every day!

Please feel free to add some others I forgot in the comments, and I’ll update the post.

There we go.. first post! I just want to share with you why I’m starting this blog (and why I think you should read it).

Being very passionate about entrepreneurship and startups, and noticing the lack of information about the european startup scene I would like to fill a hole, while trying to have as much fun as possible and learn a lot from the great people this community is made of. I know there are a lot of other blogs and websites that write about this subject but I feel that currently every blog focuses on a specific country or area, or covers more than european startups. I just think there is a need for a pan-european blog, covering and giving the needed media exposure to european startups, entrepreneurs and events.

I’ll cover pretty much all the topics that relate to startups: entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, M&A, venture capital, but you are likely to see tech news too. My hope is to cover all the major european conferences and events, where entrepreneurs can share their wisdom and most importantly announce great new companies and products.

As you may have guessed I’m not a native english speaker so please forgive my errors, I’ll try to check them but I can’t guarantee error-free posts. If you would like to contribute or have any other suggestion, I’ll be glad to hear from you at the following address: contact @t thestartup d0t eu. I hope you’ll join me in this adventure.