LeWeb: A Traveler's Guide to Europe's Tech Scene

PARIS – One night last month, I found myself in a line of Very Cool People, waiting in the cold for 45 minutes to get into a... startup incubator. Things have definitely changed in Paris.

It was the opening night of NUMA – a new hotspot for coworking and networking – and 8,000 people had RSVP'd, from wide-eyed college students with a startup on the brains to corporate and government bigwigs and the it-founders of the day. Burly security guys even blocked several streets.

Go back 10 years, when Zuckerberg was still a mountain in Germany and Loïc Le Meur hosted 250 people at the French Senate for the modest first edition of LeWeb. In my class of business majors, students were divided into two groups: those who planned to go into finance and those who would have killed to do marketing for the luxury industry. Entrepreneurship was an afterthought.

Today, every French business school worth its salt has its own incubator and every kid I meet has a startup in mind. The successes of ad retargeting pioneer Criteo, which went public on the Nasdaq this fall, and every utterance by Xavier Niel, a telecom billionaire and the father figure of all French entrepreneurs, systematically make the front page. What happened? What did all over Europe: social networking and technological advances that lowered entry costs to entrepreneurship to near-zero, a generation that never knew a world without double-digit unemployment and decided to find another path... and maybe a certain David Lynch movie.

Liberté, égalité, code

Of course, no one's saying this is quite Silicon Valley yet. The funding ecosystem isn't up to snuff and slowed by a suffocating tax system. Strangling regulations meant to maintain established companies hamper innovation in a number of industries. The government has caught on to the trend and has good intentions, but the world of private business is so foreign to them, they seem .

Yet, the growth of French tech is undeniable. The most heartening trend is the opening of coding schools and startup accelerators all over Paris. Xavier Niel launched 42 (yes, that's a Hitchhiker's Guide reference), where 1,000 people go through a 3-year, tuition-free course in computer science. The only criteria for admission are brains and motivation – not grades, not even a high-school diploma. At Simplon (full disclosure: friends of mine), underprivileged youths with a good head on their shoulders are empowered, paid to study code intensively for 6 months and develop their personal projects in social innovation. Niel again is spearheading a public-private partnership for the construction of a 320,000-square-foot coworking and incubating space that will host 1,000 startups. Microsoft, Google and many others have opened their incubators. (The map below shows all incubators in Paris... 6 months ago. More have sprouted up since.) These are just a handful of examples... Come back to France in a few short years, and I fully expect you shall see some of these kids on stage at LeWeb.

Not Your Parents' Old Continent

But though Paris is home to LeWeb, it's certainly not the conference's only focus. The entrepreneurial wave has washed over not just France, but all of Europe. Here are a few places where you should be taking founders out for coffee if you're visiting.

London. Let's start with the obvious: with its English language, strong ties to the US and a political culture that is probably the most business-friendly in Europe (Ms. Thatcher was here), the UK was the logical place for Europe's tech entrepreneurial culture to take hold. Silicon Roundabout, an East London neighborhood where startups had historically clustered, was built out with government encouragement and became "Tech City", now 3 years old and home to 1300+ startups. The government is now aggressively reaching out to founders across Europe and inciting them to move to the UK with friendly immigration policies. And it's no coincidence that LeWeb is holding its summer edition here since 2012.

Berlin. The German capital was long known for a killer clubbing and art scene, and not much else: any actual money-making endeavor in Germany happened further south, especially around Munich. Not so anymore: it's only normal that Berlin's creativity and energy would spill out into other arenas and its Silicon Allee is now rivaling Tech City. Bonus point: super cheap rents.
But Berlin's most famous child, Rocket Internet, is hardly an icon of creativity: this incubator's business model is to spot a good startup in another market (usually the US) and copy it somewhere it is not yet implanted (usually an emerging market). Not much innovation, but flawless execution. This is how Zalando, a shoe-shopping site my postman is well acquainted with, was born on the heels of Zappos. Even the name rings a bell... Rocket's founders, the Samwer brothers, have gotten a lot of heat for this, and it's a reproach generally made to European investors: they'd rather copy a business model than take a risk. I'll just call it a phase, an unsurprising one in a nascent ecosystem. And it's not like every photo app out of Silicon Valley is reinventing the wheel...

Dublin. An educated, English-speaking workforce, low cost of living (and thus lower wages) and, let's be honest, Europe's friendliest tax system. It's Dublin's trifecta that has attracted here the European headquarters of every major tech company. This has turned the capital of Ireland, traditionally a country of emigration, into a hub for a young and diverse population of immigrants from all over Europe and beyond, who typically spend a few years here to launch a career in tech.

Nordics. Chances are, you had your first taste of mobile thanks to Finland's pride: Nokia. And even if you've probably switched hardware brands by now, you're still hooked on Finland's pride: Rovio and its Angry Birds. Nokia is said to have once been responsible for close to 20% of Finland's GDP. Imagine such a company imploding – and releasing onto the market its troves of engineers, thinking about their next project... Meanwhile, Sweden burst onto the European tech scene as the flag bearer for a new generation of media consumers and the thorn in the side of the entertainment industry, with peer-to-peer network Kazaa and the infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay. Now it is disrupting the music industry in more consensual ways (or are they?) with Spotify. And with such a culture of social and environmental responsibility, look to them too for some world-changing apps.

These are just some examples. What about your city? What's the entrepreneurial ecosystem like and where should a visitor be heading?

Please join the conversation. And look me up if you're at LeWeb!

Author's note: edited to incorporate corrections from readers

Graphic: Elusive Photography / Getty Images and windesign /shutterstock

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Missed LeWeb? Read more coverage and posts from LinkedIn Influencers at the conference.

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• Mindfulness, Frictionless, Makers… The Trends that Are Shaping Silicon Valley by Loïc Le Meur
• Fred Wilson : The Three Trends That Will Transform our World
• Why Q&A Should Be the Future of All Conferences by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Nick d'Aloisio, All Grown Up: On Snapchat and his Next Startup
• Gary Vaynerchuk: "Snapchat Is My Most Valuable Marketing Tool Right Now"
• Tony Fadell: Work for your Heroes, Save Entrepreneurship for Later
• The Dilemma’s Innovator: The Next Ten Years Will Either Happen To Us or Because of Us by Brian Solis