Almost a decade ago, a wave of European-born entrepreneurs and technologists packed their bags and headed for Silicon Valley. I was one of them.
There were many factors drawing us there, including the explosion of start-up activity that made it so attractive to be an entrepreneur and the arrival of Apple’s iPhone — the single most transformative moment in the history of mobile phones. But perhaps most important of all was a realisation that if technology was your passion and you aspired to build a major company, then you could not afford to be anywhere else.
Today, we are living through a comparable growth spurt on the other side of the Atlantic. Technology stars such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerbergand Dropbox’s Drew Houstonhave inspired a generation of talent from Helsinki to Lisbon, and Tallinn to Tel Aviv. Successful founders across Europe have become local heroes, building companies such as Spotify in Stockholm, Unity Technologies in Copenhagen, and DeepMind and Deliveroo in London.