I am doing a bit of research on Joi Ito these days, and Nicolas sent me a link to a profile made by the strategy+business magazine under the title of The Ambassador from the Next Economy.

The author captured pretty well the reality of a new breed of entrepreneurs I would call the “worldwide entrepreneurs”. These are the first one who embraced the web as their primary tool, using technology to conquer a flat world and, in the process, break both the established business models and the good old ways of doing things. Beyond the future of entrepreneurship, this is the future of knowledge work (= the future of a lot of people) that is emerging:

In some ways, Mr. Ito’s style foreshadows the changing nature of knowledge work; he moves among many organizations at once, balancing his entrepreneurial individualism against an avid, even obsessive participation in the organizations and communities that interest him, whether online or offline. […]

Typically, when Mr. Ito discerns an idea with promise, he founds a company or funds an existing business to capitalize on that promise. Once the business is humming, he walks away to the next cool idea, expressing little interest in the money made on the venture, but continuing to evangelize its potential as a builder of communities and an enabler of public participation.

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I met some of these entrepreneurs this year – the likes of Pierre Chappaz, Jaewoong Lee, Thomas Mygdal, Loic Le Meur or Kiyoshi Nishikawa. They are all different and intriguing characters, always looking for the next challenge, juggling with tenths of projects, changing roles five times a day, constantly switching back and forth between the reality of the field (i.e. starting concrete businesses) and the more abstract world of ideas, of writing articles in Wired and speaking at conferences around the world.

The web has reshaped entrepreneurship the way it has reshaped almost everything else. Today’s entrepreneurs have different tools, values, motivations, expectations, and possibilities. And they are building a new ecosystem in which we will all be working in a few years.

Mike Arrington has his hands full with the TechCrunch redesign-gate so I won’t try to take over him today. But at Innovate Europe I got the chance to meet some pretty impressive companies. Here is a quick roundup:

These guys (partly based in Geneva) are rolling out a service allowing you to connect to your friends based on your localization. Pretty straightforward stuff, you send a sms to tell the system you’re “on” (which means you are ok to be localized), then your buddies get a message if they are near you. Easy, useful and simple.

Digislide is working on a tiny beamer that will be embedded in mobile phones. Really cool product and impressive demo, even if it prototype they were showing was far from functionnal (the guy had wires hidden all over his suit ;-) ). If this succeeds (they are looking for 4-5 million euros) it will be a must have on any phone and we will have a new nuisance in cinemas: abusive beaming!

Netvibes is the hot company of Innovate Europe so far. I had a chance to meet their CEO – Tariq Krim – and got a quick demo of the upcoming version. These guys seem to keep their cool despite the increasing pressure, and have a good roadmap for the coming months. I actually changed my opinion on them – I first couldn’t see a business model – really cool company and service.

Feeds 2.0 is a service that, once you see it, makes you wonder how you lived without. The idea is to fight information overload by providing a more intelligent RSS reader, changing the order of news items depending on your reading habits and interests. I signed up for the beta and can’t wait for these guys to release! Cool product from Greece!

All the companies presented at Innovate Europe are listed here.

Update: Pascal Rossini points to a great Paul Graham speech: The hardest lessons for Startups to learn. It’s worth a read, even if it’s not written by Pascal ;-)

Seems there is an informal series of blog posts about entrepreneurship in Europe emerging. After my rant and Valerie Thomson’s state of the European investment, the latest episode features a pep-talk by Pascal Rossini, CEO of Ads-Click and Sky-Click, one of the longest-standing Web entrepreneurs of Switzerland, and the best animator of our local blogosphere (mostly in French thou). He wrote an amazing post about the hardest lessons for a startup to learn, and says that “the most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence. Determination.”

It is a must-read for all the web/software/product entrepreneurs, because as he says, things that make a startup successful “are kind of counterintuitive”. There are so many quotes I wish to reprint but instead click here and read that post!

The hardest lessons for Startups to learn

Lesson 4: Fear the Right Things […]

Most visible disasters are not so alarming as they seem. Disasters are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you’re doing, your servers keep crashing, you run into an insoluble technical problem, you have to change your name, a deal falls through – these are all par for the course. They won’t kill you unless you let them.

Nor will most competitors. A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?” Actually big companies are not the ones you have to worry about – not even Google. The people at Google are smart, but not smarter than you; they’re not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails; and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.

What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.

Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing.

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