Great post by Fred Wilson @fredwilson
and this is the big point - European entrepreneurs have made money for VCs. There have been 24 billion dollar plus exits in Europe in the last five years - after all VC's are in the game of making money for their limited partners
At USV, we’ve been investing in European startups since 2008. Currently 22% of our active portfolio is in Europe. Since 2010, we’ve invested in 47 companies (roughly 8 per year) and 11 of them have been in Europe (roughly 2 per year). So over the past six years, roughly 25% of our investments have been in Europe. In 2015, we have made nine investments to date (a few have not yet been announced) and four of them have been in Europe (45%). European entrepreneurs have, for the most part, abandoned the approach of building domestic businesses in their home markets and are now targeting global customer bases from day one. That means the potential scale of European startups is as large as US startups.
