I think you’re correct when you say that most “innovation” grants are going to companies that are anything but, but to say that most startups are nothing but grant chasers is absolutely not true.
I don’t know where you’re located, but at least here in The Netherlands we seem to have a fairly healthy startup ecosystem, where grants seem to be more of an afterthought because there’s a fair amount of VC money or bootstrapped startups.
I don't know what the experience is like for people in the Netherlands. But a little bit of googling in English shows quite a bit of stories about Dutch funds getting major govt funding and a bunch of govt programs offering startups money.
So I'd wonder how many funds are truly private. And for those that aren't I'd like to see if any bureaucracy gets pushed onto to the startups they fund.
Say EU-funded VCs, due to the special obligations they're under will often make startups comply with many of the same stuff. So even though a startup might not be a grant recipient themselves they will ultimately have to submit to that regime too.
That’s a fair comment, and I had not considered that. I do know a VC, HollandVentures, that’s one of the VCs that works with EU funding, but I also know many other VCs that, as far as I can tell, work solely with private money.
https://nlfunding.co/ provides a list of all VCs active in The Netherlands, and while a few obvious ones are working with EU grants, I have no reason to believe most of them do.
Regardless, my response was mostly to the “EU startups are grant chasers” comment, which I still believe is an unfair depiction.
I don’t know whether they’re Unicorns, but at least we have companies like Booking.com, Adyen, you could argue Gitlab has Dutch roots, and smaller ones such as MessageBird, WeTransfer, Usabilla, etc. These are more well known names, but there are plenty and plenty of smaller ones, where “small” can still be around a hundred employees.
Again, I’m not claiming that our startup climate is anything like what your see in SV, but it’s definitely a fairly healthy scene, and it would be an insult to characterize these as grant chasers.
Booking is a wholly owned subsidiary of Priceline, a US company and has been for the majority of its existence. It was bought for its considerable IT assets after going bankrupt, IIRC.
Yes, but I was using it as an example of a healthy Dutch startup ecosystem, and I still believe it is a good argument. I wouldn’t consider Booking.com a startup anymore anyway, just like TomTom etc, but that’s missing the point: they had their roots here, and are good examples of a counter argument that they are merely “grant chasers”.
Gitlab is a remote company because of the poor health of the ecosystem.
Mollie & Adyen have had success because of the walled garden iDeal payment system of the Dutch banks. Eindhoven was a very innovative region until Philips decided to move HQ.
Even Sweden produced more unicorns with a population size a 1/3 of the Netherlands.
Maybe you have had more luck with raising money but I experienced a lot of stupidity from private investors.
I don’t know where you’re located, but at least here in The Netherlands we seem to have a fairly healthy startup ecosystem, where grants seem to be more of an afterthought because there’s a fair amount of VC money or bootstrapped startups.