Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Europe
September 17, 2009 at 19:55 PM EDT
This week's TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco brought together a number of threads and stories which have been kicking around the back of my mind for while. A little like Borat , I've been asking the Americans a lot of questions (though hopefully without the accompanying chaos). The first one seems obvious but is worth spelling out one more time: to launch a consumer web service or, increasingly, mobile application, America remains the golden prize worth shooting for. It is a large, homogeneous market which speaks one language. It is quite simply a no-brainer to really go for it there. That has always had implications for European startups. How do you launch in a market when you are not actually in the USA, or headquartered there? How do you get traction? It is of course perfectly possible. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco