For my blog StartMeUp on La Stampa.it, I interviewed Andreas Tschas and Juergen Furian, founders and organizers of Vienna’s Pioneers Festival.

The full article in Italian is here.

Below you find a partial version in English:

 

 

What do you think of Europe’s startup ecosystem? Is it comparable to the USA, is it different, and in case in which specific aspects according to you does it differ?
Juergen Furian:
When you define any startup ecosystem, the main ingredient is the people! It’s perfectly possible that Silicon Valley is where it is because of a vibrant community and good universities like Stanford.

I think the fear of failure is more present in EU than in the United States; hence, there are more risk takers with a stronger entrepreneurial mindset. But perhaps one reason for that is we don’t have enough success stories. The last European “Google” was essentially SAP.

Europe is also a fragmented place, where the U.S. is one giant market – we need critical mass and more capital! On the other hand, this broken-up Europe can also be seen as an advantage for EU startups because they have to think about internationalization from day one.

But all this isn’t a bad thing! We have advantages, we’re focusing on improvements – we just have to stay in pursuit, to find those advantages and nail them on the head!

 

What are the most interesting startups that emerged from the festival, so far?
Andreas Tschas:

mySugr, the winner of our Startup Challenge in 2011, has become quite successful and is changing the philosophy of diabetes therapy. They’re applying elements from games and making data useful. Now their app is FDA approved and used by tens of thousands of people with type 1 diabetes.
Others doin’ well are: Piano Media, Double Recall, Sketchfab etc. As we are focusing on early stage startups only time will tell who will make it …

 

Do you know the Italian startup world? Is there any Italian startup that caught your attention?
Andreas Tschas: 

In general, the startup scene in Italy throughout the past few years has grown quite quickly. Something we realized while working with startups from various countries is that many Italians focus on hardware.
In fact, this year, the majority of the Italian startups applying for Pioneers Festival were hardware-related; they make up a great part of the hardware startups we have in total.

Juergen Furian: 

There were a few that really caught our attention this year. Smart-I is one; they’re attempting to reduce the energy consumption that comes from public lighting by automatically analyzing the surrounding urban area. Another great one is D-Orbit. They want to clean up space debris by providing propulsive devices for satellites, allowing them to re-enter the atmosphere. And then there’s Empatica. The team there wants to help people make better decisions by providing them with analytics of their own human data.
It’s a shame that two of events as important as Pioneers and the Web Summit are hold on the very same days, forcing attendees to choose between one or the other. How is it possible?
Juergen Furian:
That’s right. It’s a pity that people have to choose rather than giving them the chance to attend both. The events are really important for the European ecosystem as they also act as bridges between the fragmented European startup hubs and are a real value creator for the European ecosystem. We don’t want to focus on this any more as there is nothing that can be changed this year. All we can say is that we didn’t change the date! However, it should still be easy to decide which event one should attend. Pioneers Festival is more than just web! It’s about entrepreneurship and future technologies from web to robotics, from mobile to aerospace.

 

 

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