I’m on an Acela train between Boston and New York (listening to Boston’s More Than A Feeling – how recursive) on my way to the TechStars Boston 2010 Investor / Demo day.  I wasn’t able to make it to Boston yesterday for the Angel Boot Camp as I was running around NYC with the CEO of a company I invested in last week introducing him to a bunch of potential customers and partners. 

It sounds like Angel Boot Camp rocked.  My long time friend and co-angel investor Will Herman wrote a post titled Angel Investing that summarized some of his advice.  Will is finishing up his 31st angel investment (we’ve done a bunch together – including my very first one – NetGenesis in 1994) and he walks through what he’s learned from 16 years of angel investing.  Don Dodge also has a great post up titled How to be an Angel Investor…and make money.

Jason Fried  gave one of the talks which seemed most relevant to European startups. His business partner is actually from Copenhagen and they worked together for 2 years before meeting in person. Here’s a summary of his presentation and a chat I had with him afterwards.

• Bootstrap your startup because it teaches you how to make money. Funded companies are focused on spending it.
• Charging for something forces you to be good. People care about something they have to pay for so you will get very good and honest feedback.
• Useful is more important than innovative. Cool wears off, useful doesn’t.
• Software has no edges. This makes it more difficult to stop it from expanding beyond where it should. Think of your product as a museum and the features as thee art you select. Only more most important pieces should make it into the museum.
• You can’t make just one thing. Every product has a byproduct. Again this is harder to see than with physical products. In the case of 37 signals, books and conferences have been byproducts of the software products.
• Say sorry in the right way. Don’t say “we apologise for any inconvenience which my have been caused” when you should just say “I’m really sorry” to your customers as you would to any other human being.
• The best are everywhere, not just in the golden California Valley. So live somewhere you love. Don’t feel you have to move just to make your company work.
• Failure is not a pre-requisite for success or a rite of passage. Unfavourable comparisons are often made between the tolerance of business failure in the US and in Europe. Maybe we should worry about that less. Jason advises replicating what succeeded as opposed to learning from your mistakes – the results are much more predictable.
• Europe can be a less risky place than the US to start a company because of the social security system here. You are never going to starve or have to do without medical care even if it all goes pear-shaped.
• In some European countries it may be more frowned upon to succeed spectaularly rather than fail. In countries like Denmark or the Netherlands, standing out is often not considered to be a good thing.