This guest post was written by Roman Stanek,
the founder and CEO of Good Data,
a cloud-based business intelligence startup headquartered in San Francisco. Roman has been a tech entrepreneur for almost 20 years. He was founder and CEO of NetBeans
(acquired by Sun Microsystems) and Systinet (acquired
by Mercury Interactive and later Hewlett Packard). Read Roman’s blog here.
When I met Michael Arrington back in April, I told him he was crazy to dismiss the possibility of a first-class technology startup coming out of Europe. I was born and raised in the Czech Republic, I’ve spent the last 15 years working towards building a global hi-tech company. So naturally I took it a bit personally. But I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit since then.
The story usually goes that Europeans just don’t have the drive and commitment to spend enough hours necessary to get a fledgling company to an escape velocity and grow it from there. Our love of the two-hour lunch and Augusts in Provence is the evidence most often cited to prove this theory. But I believe that there are some very driven people in Europe who are willing to put enough time into it.
My problem with the European startup ecosystem is somewhere else. I actually believe that it bears some signs of a Cargo Cult.
Here is the definition from Wikipedia:
A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-native cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.
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Engine Yard
Europe has no real equivalent to the big hothouse that is Silicon Valley, but it does have lots of tech clusters and networks. As recent research from the startup Seedcamp startup programme 
Earlier this year,