Last day to apply for Startup School Europe | Hacker News Reader

Last day to apply for Startup School Europe

blog.ycombinator.com

54 pointskatm44 comments

I recently attended the Startup School in New York (18th of June). It exceeded my expectations in every way. I highly recommend this to everyone.

I thought the quality and breadth of the NY lineup was excellent. Each speaker gave honest, entertaining, and insightful talks about their experiences working with/founding startups.

I totally agree. As a college student, Startup School definitely opened up my eyes, and it was amazing to hear from people who were in a similar position as me.

I wrote up a blog post about "What I Learned at Startup School," if anyone wants to check it out: https://medium.com/@virjog/what-i-learned-at-startup-school-...

I went to Startup School NYC a couple days ago. Well worth the trip all the way from Ohio. What a great group of people to surround yourself with. If I was in Europe I'd go again!

This looks cool, however, I can't find anything about the costs... Is this free to attend (if you're invited)?

Yes, it is free.

Some really interesting speakers, will any of the talks be put online afterwards?

Talks will be livestreamed and put online after the event.

I applied earlier, and I was trying to get my school to cover my costs there, but it turned out to be a dead end. Looks like I will have to turn my invitation down (if I ever do receive one, that is). Bummer.

If you can travel by train and couchsurf, I think you can keep the costs down.

Why London? Wouldn't it make more sense to have it organized in a mainland city such as Berlin or Paris where many more Europeans can easily get to?

London has 5 airports; there is also the Eurostar. If people really want to go, I'm sure they can find a way. Surely if thats too high a barrier it says something about how serious they are about founding a startup?

Yes, but UK is not schengen, so for any non-EU living in the schengen area this presents a barrier.

I'm not complaining about the location but your statement about "how serious" I am is over the top.

I am willing to create a startup on which I'm working in my free time (I need a day job to pay the bills) and personal elements made my life a bit more complicated than necessary financially-wise and I couldn't afford a trip abroad right now.

By the same logic they should be hosted it in Reykjavik.

Check the map. Reykjavik is much, much further from Europe and flights there cost fortune usually. Flights to UK are really cheap and frequent. Better comparison would be "By the same logic they should be hosted in Dublin".

> London has 5 airports; there is also the Eurostar.

This. Personally, I think the parts of the world that will perform best in the future century and beyond are those that are the most connected. It's notable that London plus NYC, Dubai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Sydney etc are economically speaking doing extremely well - it's no co-incidence they are also very well connected.

I imagine the factors that came into play:

1) It's an major English speaking city with a culture many of the YC partners are comfortable with. Running an event in a country with a foreign language and culture is hard.

2) It's well connected with flights from pretty much every major city in Europe and has direct flights from SF & NY. Not only for attendees but also for convincing speakers to attend.

3) It's by far the biggest startup/tech hub in Europe (excluding Israel) and YC is very pro-hub (one of the reasons YC moved from Boston to SF).

Obviously there's downsides to London, mainly being that it's an expensive city but given that it's a one-day event that gets mitigated to some extent.

> It's an major English speaking city with a culture many of the YC partners are comfortable with. Running an event in a country with a foreign language and culture is hard.

There is no major European city where you could not get by with just English.

> It's well connected with flights from pretty much every major city in Europe and has direct flights from SF & NY. Not only for attendees but also for convincing speakers to attend.

But there are better cities for that purpose: Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris.

> 3) It's by far the biggest startup/tech hub in Europe (excluding Israel) and YC is very pro-hub (one of the reasons YC moved from Boston to SF).

That is actually an excellent reason to do it somewhere else.

Really, missed opportunity.

There's a significant difference with being a visitor to a foreign country (where you can just wing it) and running a several hundred person event. Something getting lost in miscommunication can easily become a big deal.

(in practice you'd hire a local events company to manage it, but still it's messier)

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning for doing it in a non-startup hub though ? - certainly you could make an argument for doing it in one of the other hubs like Berlin but doing it somewhere like Frankfurt doesn't seem to make any sense to me.

Frankfurt and even Hamburg are quite alive, Frankfurt is extremely central. It's an event for Europe, by doing it in London you are far away from most of Europe.

Frankfurt is a huge hub when it comes to transportation, and there are facilities right at the airport.

As for your 'miscommunication' suggestion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxUm-2x-2dM

Frankfurt is certainly a commercial/financial hub, but it's much more expensive to get to from say Paris or Barcelona because those routes aren't served by the budget airlines as it's not a tourist destination. But the Barcelona to London route is served by at least four budget airlines.

Even from eastern Europe, flying to Frankfurt from Warsaw is almost twice as much as to London (although the trip to London is an extra 40 minutes).

So Barcelona it is then ;)

Ryanair flies to Frankfurt-Hahn which is 1.5 hour with bus outside of Frankfurt. Lots of budget airlines also fly to Cologne/Bonn which is 1 hour away with train.

Ryanair don't fly to Frankfurt from Paris or Barcelona, they only serve a handful of major city routes (primarily London and Rome). And at the point where you flying into a different city it's no longer an "easy-to-get-to" location.

> Ryanair don't fly to Frankfurt from Paris or Barcelona,

http://www.bravofly.com/offers/flights/frankfurt-barcelona/r...

As for 'flying into a different city', almost all of Londons airports except for Heathrow are more than an hour away and most of the cut-rate lines fly into the aiports furthest away.

I know you're trying to find all kinds of reasons to justify the choice made but all this nonsense is a bit strange. First you contend that you could not get along in Europe with only English, this contradicts my experience from travelling through Europe for many years (yes, I do speak multiple languages but in every country I've been to as soon as it's business English is the norm, even in France when dealing with foreigners). Now you make it seem as if a major hub for air traffic in continental Europe is somehow at a disadvantage to London.

I don't get it. Can't we just agree that there are viable alternatives that would have been a lot easier to reach for a lot of possible attendants?

Did you look at the pricing ? - it's 306 euros with stopover versus 190 euros direct Barcelona to London (for one day return on day of startup school). There are certainly other viable candidates to host such an event such as Paris and Berlin, but Frankfurt isn't one of them.

As I said running an event is different from visiting, you're dealing with venue staff, caterers, security, insurers, etc. it's certainly all doable especially at the high-end of the market where everyone speaks english but it adds non-trivial overhead and you will be paying a premium.

As soon as you require all your vendors speaking English you're price segmenting yourself into a more premium market. There are some cities where everyone speaks English, but in many major European cities many caterers, etc. will only speak their native language. I've even found smaller hotels in Paris, Madrid, etc. often not to have english speaking staff.

> Did you look at the pricing ? - it's 306 euros with stopover versus 190 euros direct Barcelona to London

For one, you said they did not fly there, second it lists 81 euros here.

Yes, my mistake I was checking via Skyscanner who gave the cheapest route as Lufthansa. Hmm not sure why I'm seeing different pricing, but if the budget airlines do fly that route than obviously I withdraw my point.

[edit: it looks like bravofly is also returning the lufthansa flight for me even when using the same link as you]

Israel is not in Europe.

hahaha

Their Europe expert is even worse than their Afghanistan expert!

We sure put dumb people on those boats.

edit

I do wish everyone the best of luck :)

Running an event in a country with a foreign language and culture is hard.

Getting a bit off-topic, but this is no longer really true in a lot of Europe. I haven't tried organizing an event in France without speaking French, but it is perfectly easy to organize an event in Denmark without speaking Danish. So many events are organized by multinational organizers that doing all the organization in English is not only possible, but becoming the default.

is it really true that Israel is the biggest tech hub in Europe? (if we consider that its part of europe ) ,I always though its Berlin

Israel is certainly bigger than Berlin. It's not clear which is bigger between the UK and Israel as it depends which metric you use.

I wouldn't call it a hub though.

The Israeli tech scene is actually very heavily networked probably more so then any startup environment outside of SF.

I live in Germany, near Frankfurt, and I'm comfortable with tech events being in London. The preferred way to get to major European cities is by airplane anyway, so it really doesn't make any difference travel-wise if something happens in Paris, Berlin, or London.

I do think London is the best choice though since it's guaranteed to be an English-speaking setting and as far as I can tell it's the most influential startup hub in Europe.

As a non EU who lives in France, I find it very difficult to go to England due to Visa issues and the high cost of living there when you do the conversion of euro to pounds. so its not a very good choice I think.

For what it's worth Joel Splosky looked at the numbers when he toured FogBugz and London was No1 ahead of SF and NY even. There's also 5991 members on the HNLondon meetup group. There seem a lot of tech interested types here.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/11/16.html

FogBugz Biggest turnouts

FogBugz World Tour

London Toronto Seattle Austin Boston Arlington, VA Amsterdam Vancouver Dublin Denver (Boulder) Cambridge, England San Francisco Mountain View, CA Dallas New York Atlanta Copenhagen San Diego Waterloo Emeryville, CA

Bruxelles - London by train is 3 hours :)

After applying it told me to record my password. I had been given no password so I do not really understand whether it worked or not.

I think that text is for the benefit of people who just registered a YC account to go through registration - which is obviously not us.

Would love to attend this, but not sure if I will make it to London.

The form appears to submit to a blank page?

Applied!

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