interesting paper on the weakness of the VC community, and general entrepreneurs

http://www.eif.org/news_centre/publications/eif_wp_2011_009_EU_Venture.pdfAn interesting paper on the weakness of the VC community, and general entrepreneurship in Europe vs the USA. Personally, my experience is that too much money is captured in government hands where it does not seek speculative (high) returns. (And therefore does not create jobs.) The authors also note that VC’s in europe are predominantly from finance, not entrepreneurs, engineers or scientists and therefore lack the knowledge to invest in risk ventures. Personally, I think the cultural issues ( Americans are very tolerant of risk and willing to work very, very hard in startups) are not insignificant. Nor is the anti-capitalist sentiment very helpful.