Go for it

Successful starters offer an optimistic message to aspirant entrepreneurs

Your correspondent can testify: spending time with entrepreneurs is an invigorating experience. Because let’s be honest, our charming country can be dreary at times. The rain, the traffic, the politics, the many industries in decline—it does not exactly have the buzz of Silicon Valley about it. But impressions can deceive, fortunately. The fact is that there is a tremendous crowd of young entrepreneurs out there. They are enthusiastic, energetic and see the world as their oyster. And remarkably, they all have a reasonably consistent message for aspirant entrepreneurs.

Challenges

Starting a business in Belgium has its challenges. Our mediocre performance on the international entrepreneurship rankings testify to that fact. For example, in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) we score abysmally; less than 3% of the working age population is involved in setting up a business—that compares to nearly 6% for Europe as a whole. Indeed, we may not have enough starting entrepreneurs, but they do exist. And they are an impressive bunch—even the GEM can testify to that given their focus on innovation, job creation and internationalisation.

The challenges are clear. They are a mix of politics, geography, culture and economics. Take politics and government policy. While the inflexibility of our labour market and high taxes are the usual refrain, these are not the key pain points for starting entrepreneurs since they do not employ large numbers of people or generate large profits (yet). But they are looking for talent, to recruit or to partner with. And that is difficult, when your main competition is your own tax money, i.e., the public administrations with their generous (and some would argue, blatantly unfair) employment conditions.

Geography we cannot do much about. Belgium is a small and complex market. But that can have its advantages too, for example, in a less intense competitive environment. But for many entrepreneurs, that is exactly the problem. It has led to the establishment of semi-monopolised industries that are intolerant of innovation and new players in the market.

A common complaint among starting entrepreneurs is the lack of entrepreneurial capital. There are few venture capital players, and anyway, the argument goes, they are more in the business of growth financing than venture financing. Entrepreneurs complain that there is an absolute dearth of seed and pre-seed capital. There are angel investor networks, but they too are criticised for a lack of transparency. Reference is often made to the US and UK where the angel networks compete against other and where there is more openness in their screening procedures.

Finally, there is something amiss culturally. Where is the initiative, the courage, the creativity, the passion? While the many government support schemes certainly are welcome, some entrepreneurs remark cynically that many of these schemes are simply part and parcel of our nanny state. A subsidy may come in useful certainly, especially since there is no seed capital available, but many of the government’s advisory ‘services’ seem designed for people who will never be entrepreneurs anyway. And that is the core problem; that so many people seem to grow up with a sense of entitlement; that everything will be provided for, no matter what they do. The titanic is sinking; and we’re dancing in the ballroom.

Another cultural issue is the intolerance of failure. This is often mentioned as the main factor that distinguishes the United States from Europe, more important than taxes and bureaucracy.

Indeed, the challenges are significant and probably have their impact, not only in the lack of entrepreneurships. For example, Sasha Vekeman took Mobiya to the UK when he could not find his feet in Belgium; Maarten Van Laere’s ServerCheck can hardly be called a Belgian company; and Sebastien de Halleux (Playfish) set up offices in the US, UK, China and Norway, but not Belgium.