Which is the sexiest city for startups in Europe?

As EIT Digital Alumni, we're partnering with Startup Heatmap Europe to discover which cities entrepreneurs and tech talents find more "sexy" to startup in our continent. Our member Thomas Kösters, Outreach Programme Lead of EIT Digital and founder of this initiative, is telling us why he believes startup and tech talents mobility in Europe is vital.

"For the third consecutive year, we are mapping founders’ favorite startup hubs in Europe. With our fingertips on the pulse of the ecosystem, we enable founders, community-builders, investors, leaders in the corporate world and everyone else involved in shaping the startup scene to better understand where entrepreneurs are moving, and why. Therefore, I want to invite you to please take our 7-min survey: http://survey.startupheatmap.eu

Need a reason why? – Let me give you 10!

Why it is important to study startup mobility in Europe?

  1. Ultimately, we want to make Europe a better place for startups. We are a team of entrepreneurs, academics and community builders, all active in the startup world one way or the other.
  2. Europe’s biggest challenge is fragmentation and the only solution to this is mobility: Mobility of talent, capital and businesses.
  3. Europe is still not connected enough: While in the US 30% of the population lives in another state than they were born, in the EU it is only 3% (CEPS).
  4. There is hope: We have shown that the picture is different for founders: They are 4x more likely to have moved than the average European citizen. But, while 29% of founders from CEE started up abroad, only 9% of West Europeans ventured beyond the borders of their country.
  5. More hope: Paris, London and Berlin together have more professional developers than the Silicon Valley (Atomico SOET 2018), and 3% of IT developers in Europe move to another country each year (CEPS).
  6. With the startupheatmap.eu platform we want to help everyone to learn from experiences of others and ideally, find the right place to startup for them personally.
  7. Europe fails in bringing capital to where talent is moving. On average only 17% of European funds go abroad. At the moment, increasing fund sizes lead to funding for the wrong startups as they are trapped in closed markets.
  8. While VCs hope one or two hubs will champion the war on talent, founders prove them wrong. Location choices are a mixed calculation of personal reasons and availability of resources like talent and capital. We repeatedly showed capital is not the decisive factor for moving.
  9. We help governments to play a constructive role in the ecosystem and help founders build international connections. We are presently working with the cities of Munich, Cologne, Vienna and Tallinn and hope to be able to help many more in the future.
  10. Perception creates reality: If you want to know which startup hub will produce the most unicorns in 10 years from now, you cannot look at the past but must look in the future. By asking founders directly, where they see opportunities on the rise, we are keeping pace with an otherwise incomprehensible development.

With these 10 personal reasons, I hope you have been convinced to lend us your opinion. Thank you for allowing us to bring value and more understanding to the dynamic startup ecosystem of Europe. Follow this link to take the survey: http://survey.startupheatmap.eu".

Thomas Kösters