ICT Spring conference in Luxembourg was quite a trip.
www.ictspring.com for those who missed it.

Now - I'll first say that I dont know alot about the startup events in Europe. I mean c'mon. Europe isnt very well known for startups - with a few exceptions (UK, budding Belgian scene, Holland, etc).
Regardless - as most of my background and my startup upbringing is in the southwest US / silicon valley area, my European startup knowledge isnt that of a local. (Despite the fact I've built one in Spain and one in Sweden: both of those places arent well known for startups either)
So - initially, I had been under the impression that this ICT Spring conference was indeed one of the pinnacle European startup events. They certainly branded it as such.

This was not so.


While the ICT Spring is indeed a fun event, with lots of great panelists & guest speakers, and located in a beautiful city.... Luxembourg itself, its culture, its business life, and the mentality is about as far from startup as one can get.
People in Luxembourg dont even understand what a startup is!
Its true. 100%

Even their governmental incubator program lists on its requirements for the seed stage startups it incubates:

Startups we incubate must be funded, have initial revenue, and user growth with an established product in their target market.

Yup. Seriously.
They really do think a startup is simply a small version of a big company.
Suffice to say - their incubator stands empty.



Luxembourg is putting all this weight behind trying to brand themselves as a good place to start-up - and they dont even know what the term means.
Its pretty sad because they apparently really want to see innovation coming in. The result however is that their rigid, typically traditionalist european way of doing business, is simply going to run them into a very big hole.
Especially with the euro crisis and their entire industry being reliant on private banking on the euro.


Luxembourg will need to adapt fast or see themselves in worse state than Greece.
They definitely have the information infrastructure, tax structure, legal structure, and support of the community to create an entrepreneurial scene there - but the mentality and willingness, as well as attraction for business angels and actual seed stage investors/incubators/accelerators is absolutely non-existent as of right now.

Conclusion: There are no startups in Luxembourg.

I plan to help them fix this with an initial 3 Day Startup program, as there are in fact a whole lot of locals interested in building startups, but unable to do so because of the severe lack of understanding how to do it, how to support it, and how to build such a community.

The positive side is:

1. that Luxembourg is rich as all hell
2. doing business is relatively easy
3. they seem to actually be interested in creating a startup community there - they just dont know how