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June 25, 2006
Meyer On Butt-Kicking Euro Techpreneurs And The Next Skype
The European entrepreneur: you've got to be willing to do deals that handle his lower tolerance for risk and sometimes you have to kick him in the butt, at least you do according to Neil Rimer of Index Ventures, for the former, and Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital, a technology company advisory firm, for the latter.
Meyer, who gets more press than any other European venture industry professional on our radar (relative to the size of her company), was profiled in European Business this month where there's some insight into her butt-kicking ways. She also predicts Zopa as the next eye-popping European exit a la Skype.
So who’s the next Skype on her books? “Zopa,” says Meyer without hesitation. Zopa, she explains, is a peer-to-peer lending network, web-based of course, “that matches lenders to borrowers”. Behind it is Richard Duvall, the man who created Egg in 1998, today the world’s largest purely internet bank.
And about the need to provide a kick to the entrepreneur:
... Zopa’s only a couple of years old, but Duvall came to Meyer for all sorts of advice including whether to start up in the US when the British side of the business was hardly begun. “I kicked him up the butt and told him that if he didn’t get going someone else would eat his lunch and he’d be the QXL to eBay instead of the eBay to QXL.”
Later on, Meyer was asked about the "relative paucity" of entrepreneurs in Europe, compared to America and what advice she has for wannabe tech entrepreneurs inside old European institutions, like Telecom Italia, looking to break out and startup a business. Here again the butt-kicking advice:
“Stop moaning about Telecom Italia,” she tells an imagined trudging employee. “If you have something to contribute to the world, get off your butt, tell the spouse it’s going to be a tough eight years ahead, and get on with it.”
Read -Read - Skype’s the limit: Cover Story June 2006 (European Business)
Read - Five Tips For Working With European Entrepreneurs (dailyii.com)
Posted on June 25, 2006 07:04 AM | Posted to entrepreneurship | Permalink
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