Forbes is one of the top magazines on business related topics. It published an interesting article called “Scaling Alpine Heights: Austria’s Startup Scene“on the Austrian Startup Scene. The following statement attracted my attention:
“The country is enjoying something of an entrepreneurial renaissance, driven largely by the return of some highly successful founders whose presence has awoken its capital Vienna from a start-up winter sleep.” [by Forbes]
The Austrian startups that made it to the article are the following ones (details on the startups can be found in the article and on their corresponding website):
- Usersnap
- Speedinvest
- Pioneers
- Dynatrace
- Runtastic
- Wikidocs
- Crate
- Sclable
- Blossom
- Codeship
- Crate
- The Impossible Project
Although Austria offers quite some support for starting a business (e.g. by granting loans, issuing bank guarantees and R&D grants, availability of cloud services such as AWS and Google App Engine) it is still not as startup friendly as it should be. High labour costs, high payroll-taxes and high health insurance costs not to forget the lack of real tax incentives for startups and startup investors to give some examples.
Florian Dorfbauer, CEO and co-founder of Austrian website feedback startup Usersnap states:
“I expect that Vienna will be the number one start-up hub of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – other CEE capitals like Budapest or Bratislava are within a few hours’ travel time – and I expect the dogma ‘Move to Silicon Valley or Die’ to shift towards ‘move some people to Silicon Valley and keep the core-team in Austria’, as there is little reason to expose an early- to mid stage start-up to Silicon Valley cost structures.
“And of course I expect a string of successes from my fellow start-up colleagues, so yes, I am feeling very optimistic about Vienna.”
If this is the future of Austrian Startup Scene then I’m looking forward to it. What do you think about the Austrian Startup Scene? Leave me a comment or drop me a note on @hmuehlburger.
(via forbes.com)