TEDxWarsaw - Martin Varsavsky - Fostering Europe's Start-up Ecosystem

Good morning, Martin. Can you hear us okay?

Can you hear me?

I can hear you just fine. Good morning, Martin. I was just saying that with a name like Varsovsky, we couldn't really not introduce you to this crowd and we tried to get you in person. Unfortunately, that wasn't quite possible this time. But, you know, the invitation is always here. Martin is one of Europe's leading technology entrepreneurs. He's founded a whole bunch of companies, some of them big, some of them bigger. He is currently running the world's largest WI FI network. It's a community based network and it's a very, very cool thing. And Martin is going to give us a little pep talk about how Europe is actually well positioned to take on Silicon Valley in the high stakes game of technology entrepreneurship. Martin, all yours, mate.

Well, thank you very much. My apologies for not being there in person. I do hope to be there next time. As you said, I'm Barzowski. I should be able to show up in Warsaw in person. Now let me speak a little about the atmosphere for creating businesses in Europe as opposed to creating them in the United States. I have experience doing both. I created a company known as Via Dell. I started it with $200,000. By the time I saw this company was worth around 1.2 billion. And that company was started in the States and it was. But it really developed in Europe. I worked in all over the States and in many European countries because this was a pan European, the first pan European fiber optic network in the late 90s. Then I developed Jastel in Spain, which is the second largest publicly traded telecom operator. So I had a chance to operate exclusively in Spain. I also developed Ya.com, a company that we built here for 38 million euros. And we sold it to Deutsche Telekom for 550 million euros. We started an alternative energy company which is now pretty. It's in Mexico, Spain, Germany, other countries. It's worth around a billion now. It's called Eolia. And it will offer an alternative. And it offers an alternative to the whole debate that's going on now after Fukushima of how safe nuclear energy is. In my opinion, nuclear energy is necessary until we find other sources. I don't think it's as dangerous as people think it is. I think burning coal is actually more dangerous. I think burning coal certainly damages the environment and nuclear may damage the environment. But we don't do coal, we don't do nuclear. We do wind and we do solar. I've also had my shares of Failure. I had One big failure. I had one cloud computing company that I started in Germany, and I personally lost 35 million euros betting in cloud computing. Too early? Too early. Now a little bit about my background. I grew up in Argentina, so I'm not European, I'm not American, I'm South American. I grew up during a civil war that there was in Argentina that was known as the Dirty War. And that was a very sad moment in Argentine history. It was the military dictatorship. It was attacks on intellectuals. I was only 16 years old of age when my cousin, who was 17, was killed by the military. So I'd like to say this because I think growing up in a civil war environment made me think of risk in a very different way. In that audience, you probably have maybe a few hundred entrepreneurs, a few hundred people who would like to build companies. And the key thing about entrepreneurship is to assess risk, is how to judge risk. And my take on risk after almost having died at a bomb that exploded 100 meters away from my home, or having my cousin getting killed, or after my youth, nothing in business ever seemed risky, really as risky as what it was to live in Argentina when I was growing up. But still doesn't mean that one should be suicidal when starting business. So the concept is, how much risk are you going to take without being suicidal or without actually having a failure from which you cannot recover? So for that, you have to think about the culture of Silicon Valley and the culture of Europe. I think that probably because Europe went through so much negativity, let's call it, for not using the S word, that World War II, communism, and there was so much uncertainty that people, instead of reacting like I did, which is like, ok, I used to live with so much risk. Being in business should be easy. What happens to a lot of people in Europe is that they just want a comfortable job. They're not particularly ambitious. They want a steady, stable job, and they want to go on with their lives. While people in America, their experience of risk taking has generally been very rewarding. America is a country that's been built on risk and successful risk. If you can think of European enterprises that were incredibly ambitious, for example, Nazism was a suicidal, extremely damaging global enterprise. And so it is not that Europe never embarked on global enterprises or extremely ambitious enterprises, that it embarked on the wrong kind of enterprises. And after World War I, World War II and communism, a lot of people said, well, let's just try to live a life, okay? Now I think risk taking is worthwhile and risk taking can be extremely rewarding without being Suicidal. The question is to have an original idea, to have tremendous ability to execute it, to have an amazing management team and partners to work with you and to live on the Internet knowing that, as this presentation shows, it doesn't matter where you are, it doesn't matter that I'm here in Madrid, you're there in Warsaw. We are communicating. And the same is true of what happens on the Internet. So now I am investing. Other than my own enterprise, which is fon, which has become the largest WI FI network in the world and hopefully will be in Poland in the next two years, I also do investing now. My investing is based on products. I use people I like to hang out with at valuations that I can stomach. Those are my three rules of investing. Investing. Anybody who has an interesting project to send to me can send it to martinand.com, my idea of investing is very close to mentoring. I've had my fair share of successes. I have some failures too, but mostly I've done well as an entrepreneur. I like to share and mentor other people who are trying to do the same thing concretely. In the area of technology, I invest in Internet, telecoms, alternative energy and biotech. Now, in Europe, there is amazing talent. There is amazing talent. What there isn't is enough ambition, because ambition as such is actually poorly regarded in Europe. It is poorly regarded to want to raise your head above the crowd, to want to be different, to want to be extremely successful. It is embarrassing in Europe actually, to say you want to be absurdly successful. If you walked around saying you want to be a billionaire, people would look as if you're an outcast. Okay? Because in Europe, entrepreneurs, we are. We're misfits. We're misfits because most people don't want to do our job. Now, I hope that after this talk and after hearing what I have done in the area of the Internet, you find it motivating to say no, you can be very much part of society, you can create jobs, you can help others, you can make your country a better place and you can be entrepreneur. Thank you very much.

Much. Thank you very much for your time. You actually finished two minutes. Can you see me? You can just see me? You finished two minutes ahead of time. So thank you for that because this session is quite packed and following on your heels, we're going to have a leading economist. So that's actually quite a. Quite a cool thing. Thanks again. Now off you go to the airport and don't be late.

Thank you.

Have a good day.

Thank you for having me.