马丁•瓦萨夫斯基是欧洲顶尖的科技创业家之一。最近，他接受《财富》杂志（Fortune）专访，畅谈了英国和欧洲的科技创业趋势以及他对Facebook、戴维•卡梅伦的初创企业计划、美国风险资本和其他科技业务的解读。瓦萨夫斯基创立了西班牙第二大电信公司Jazztel和已经被法国电信（France Telecom）收购的Ya.com。目前，他担任自己创立的公司 FON的首席执行官。FON的投资者包括谷歌（Google）、英国电信（BT）、Index Ventures、Atomico和红杉资本（Sequioa）.

马丁，科技创业在欧洲有多活跃？有哪些亮点和挑战？很多欧洲科技初创企业都在沿着Skype的足迹向全球扩张，包括Spotify、Rovio、Hailo、Fon、Oanda等等。

    传统上，欧洲年轻人会选择在政府或企业找一份可以干一辈子的工作。欧洲危机改变了这一切。因为各国政府债台高筑，企业薪酬缩水。目前欧洲科技创业最火的三个城市是伦敦、柏林和斯德哥尔摩，但在整个欧洲都能看到这样的创业活动。

    挑战是欧洲不像美国那样有沙山路（Sand Hill Road，美国风投行业的代名词——译注）。我们需要有相当数量的风投公司，构建一个更加强劲的创业生态系统。有些美国风投公司正在向伦敦进发，比如Accel等公司。但我们需要更多像Index、Atomico这样的本土基金为初创企业提供融资。

事实上，美国一流风投公司似乎更多地进入了以色列，而不是英国和欧洲。

    没错，我们需要吸引更多的这这样的公司来关注这里的机会。以色列的科技创业活动非常活跃，但欧洲的创业活动也在升温，同样需要资本和初创经验。

    欧洲科技创业发展面临的第二大挑战是文化。欧洲人必须接受这一点，科技创业界的成功来自于不断地尝试和犯错。欧洲人热衷于不会失败的完美计划。谷歌、Facebook、亚马逊（Amazon）和苹果（Apple）可不是这样诞生的。

你在欧洲看到了什么样的初创企业？

    科技企业远远超出社交媒体应用软件企业，特别是在欧洲。欧洲盛产工程师，而不是市场营销师。看看现在的德国，经济形势相当不错，失业率相对较低，大多数人都依赖优质工程技术（涉及领域广泛，远不止汽车）保住了饭碗。德国人均工程师数量远远超过美国，而且看得出来。

    很多欧洲初创企业的技术非常深奥，要求投资者学识渊博。看看聚集在牛津大学（Oxford）和剑桥大学（Cambridge）周边的科技初创公司，有些公司正在解决的一些问题即便是受过良好教育的人也需要花上几个小时的时间才能弄懂他们的科技计划。比如创新的给药系统、新型显示技术和芯片设计，都是些消费者看不到的公司，但他们推动的很多产品对于当代生活非常重要。

是不是有很多超级天使在帮助这些公司？在硅谷，我们有几十个超级天使给超过50家初创企业提供融资。

    本周我参加了戴维•卡梅伦倡议的、由唐宁街10号组织的超级天使峰会。看到那么多欧洲超级天使给人留下了深刻印象。我很高兴能成为其中的一员。欧洲也有一些成功的案例，比如Skype或者我在西班牙创立的Jazztel和Ya.com，这些公司把财富分配给了员工，一旦他们卖出股票期权，这些员工就成了天使投资人。

    不好的一面是在英国和欧洲设立初创企业面临着几项挑战：

    1. 第一个问题是如何征税。在欧洲，很多税是通过雇佣环节征收的。这对大企业没什么，但依赖大企业和天使支持的初创企业也要承担同样的社会费用。结果就不如为美国初创企业提供融资，确保在企业风险最高的时期大部分资金都能流入企业本身。欧洲的天使投资人可能要损失1/3的融资，用于为早期试错阶段的雇佣缴纳社会费用。相比之下，美国由天使投资人支持的企业将留有更多资金用于企业自身的发展。

    Martin Varsavsky is one of Europe's leading technology entrepreneurs. He recently spoke to Fortune about startup trends in the UK and Europe, his take on Facebook (FB), David Cameron's startup initiative, US venture capital and other tech business. Varsavsky started Jazztel, Spain's second-largest telecom firm and Ya.com, now a division of France Telecom. He is currently the CEO of FON, a company which he founded. Investors include Google (GOOG), BT, Index Ventures, Atomico, and Sequioa.

Martin, how vibrant is the startup tech scene in Europe? Where are the bright spots and what are the challenges? Quite a number of European tech startups are expanding globally including Spotify, Rovio, Hailo, Fon, Oanda and others, following in the footsteps of Skype.

    Young people in Europe have traditionally opted for lifetime government or corporate jobs. The European crisis, however, is changing all that. Governments are maxed out in debt and corporate payrolls are shrinking. The three hottest startup cities in Europe right now are London, Berlin and Stockholm but there is startup activity all over the map.

    The challenge is that there is no Sand Hill Road in Europe. We need to have a critical mass of venture firms to build a more robust startup ecosystem. Some American venture firms are coming to London, firms such as Accel but we need more homegrown funds such as Index and Atomico in Europe to finance startups.

In fact, it seems that more top US venture firms have a presence in Israel than in the UK and Europe.

    Yes, we need to attract more of them to the opportunities here. Israel has a very vibrant startup scene, but things are also heating up in Europe and can use capital and startup expertise.

    The second challenge in growing the startup ecosystem in Europe is cultural. Europeans must accept that success in the tech startup world comes through trial and error. Europeans prefer great plans that don't fail. But that is not how Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple were born.

What kinds of startups do you see in Europe?

    There is a lot more to tech than social media apps and especially in Europe. Europe is a continent of engineers more than marketeers. Look at Germany now, a pretty successful economy with relatively low unemployment, mostly sustained on high quality engineering in fields that go way beyond cars. Germany has many more engineers per capita than USA, and it shows.

    Many of startups in Europe are deep-technology based and require an extremely knowledgeable investor base. If you look at the technology clusters around Oxford and Cambridge universities you will see startups that are working on issues that take hours before a well-educated person can understand the technology plan. Examples include: innovative delivery systems for medications, new display technologies, chip design, companies that consumers do not see but that enable many products that are essential for modern life.

Are there many superangels who help get these companies going? In silicon valley we have dozens of people who fund 50+ startups.

    This week I was at the Superangel summit organized by 10 Downing Street at the initiative of David Cameron. It was impressive to see that there are quite a few European superangels and I was happy to be part of the group. There are European success stories, such as Skype or the companies that I built, Jazztel and Ya.com in Spain in which wealth is distributed among employees and once they sell their stock options employees become angel investors.

    On the negative side there are several challenges to starting a company in the UK and Europe:

    1. The first issue how taxes are collected. In Europe a lot of taxes are collected via employment. This is fine for large corporate but social charges for large corporates and angel backed ventures are the same. As a result it is better to fund a startup in USA because most of the money goes into the venture at its most risky time. Instead an angel investment in Europe may lose about a third of its funds in social charges for jobs that are part of this trial and error effort. USA angel backed ventures have more runway.

    2. 另外，欧洲实行强制的遣散费制度，这一制度根本没有意识到初创企业的高风险性质。初创企业很难拨出资金，为将来可能支付强制遣散费预留一部分钱，但如果不提前准备，很可能终生都要追究你的责任。欧洲需要为天使支持的企业建立一个特殊的体制。我提议，所有成立不足3年、雇员不满10人且尚未盈利的公司无需支付就业税或强制遣散费。

    3. 最后，创业者不应因创办这些公司而承担个人债务，应赋予个人宣布破产的权利，就像美国一样。

Facebook刚刚开设了第一家海外技术开发中心，他们把它设在了伦敦。谷歌也在东伦敦开了一家初创企业孵化中心，包括TechHub等4个不同的孵化器，TechHub将入驻几十家初创公司。伦敦是不是正在超越其他城市成为初创企业地区制高点？

    卡梅伦政府至今尚未在宏观层面打开经济增长和就业局面，英国经济正在承受痛苦。但唐宁街10号在吸引顶尖科技公司前往英国设立分支机构方面做得非常出色。我自己就被邀请参加了好几次活动，英国财政大臣乔治•奥斯本、英国首相戴维•卡梅伦，甚至安德鲁王子都亲自到场，向来自全球的创业家发表讲话，鼓动他们到英国投资。

    就这一点而言，我认为，伦敦是在欧洲创立新公司的最佳城市。不好的一面是，伦敦是一个非常昂贵的城市，经营成本很高。

    虽然英国提供一种创业签证，非欧盟创业者可以迅速移居英国开办企业，但其余的雇员却并不享有简便的签证政策。因此，美国的创业家可以很容易地移居伦敦，但要将他们的高级经理们带到英国来就没那么方便了。

你与硅谷公司和华尔街银行都保持着联系——你怎么看目前的市场变化？特别是在最近很多IPO股票上市后走低的情况下？

    最近，在Allen and Company于美国太阳谷召开的会议上，我得以亲眼见证了硅谷与华尔街之间的脱节，最近的科技股估值就是这种脱节的反映。出席太阳谷会议的顶尖硅谷创业者，像马克•安德森、雷德•霍夫曼、马克•扎克伯格、谢尔盖•布林、蒂姆•库克等等，都有这样一种感觉，华尔街根本“不懂科技”。

    硅谷领导人们感到不满的是，像苹果、谷歌这些公司的市盈率目前都处于历史低位，特别是，如果剔除这些公司以惊人速度累积的现金之后，它们的市盈率会更低。比如，拥有1,000亿美元现金的苹果。在利率接近于零的情况下，为什么这些每年盈利增长20%的公司获得的市盈率只有11倍？这在硅谷创业者看来完全没有道理。他们说的有道理。

    与此同时，出席太阳谷会议的一些全球最大的投资公司（其中大部分总部都在纽约）的高管似乎来自另一个星球。就好像硅谷创业者来自火星，而华尔街投资者来自金星。华尔街投资者的反应是：“科技就是流行一时的风潮”，谁知道苹果、谷歌的利润增长能维持多久。他们现在看着Facebook，心里想的却是接下来谁将是明日之星，就像当初Facebook超越Myspace一样。硅谷创业者相信自己永远地改变了世界，但华尔街看着他们说：“今天是你，明天就会冒出下一颗新星：苹果，我们不会给你高市盈率。因为明天就会有人把你变成下一个诺基亚（Nokia），你的利润率很快就会下降，你的创新精神也将消失殆尽。”华尔街说的也许没错。

很多创业者关注社交媒体初创公司——有很多重大的挑战，没有受到那么多关注——这种趋势会继续下去吗？

    社交媒体的吸引力在于这是一个不断增长的巨大业务，而且进入门槛相当低。想想雅虎（Yahoo）、谷歌、甚至Youtube起步时的投资规模吧，再把它们跟Instagram极低的启动资金比比看。因此，创业者都梦想组建下一支12人团队，打造一款应用软件，然后在几年内建立一家公司，再以10亿美元的价格卖出去。但问题是，成百万的人都拥有同样的梦想，但却只有12个人能美梦成真。

    为iPhone和安卓手机开发应用软件，还能培育出很多的10亿美元级企业吗？可能不会了，我同意，社会在这方面浪费了很多的聪明才智。社交媒体应用软件领域已经拥挤不堪，很多企业都会倒闭。

    2. Furthermore, Europe has a forced severance pay system that fails to recognize the high risk environment in which startups operate. It is hard to provision for forced severance payments but if you don't you can end up indebted to the government for the rest of your life. What Europe needs is a special regime for angel backed companies. I propose that all companies with less than 10 employees, that are not profitable and that are younger than 3 years, do not pay employment taxes nor forced severance pay.

    3. Finally, there should truly be no personal liability for the entrepreneurs of these companies and an ability to declare personal bankruptcy as there is in USA.

Facebook just opened its first non-US engineering office and they did so in London. Google just opened a startup incubator in East London hosting four different incubators including TechHub who in turn will host dozens of startups. Is London rising to the startup challenge more than other cities?

    The Cameron administration so far has not cracked the growth and employment situation at the macro level and UK is hurting as an economy. But 10 Downing is doing an amazing job at attracting top tech companies to set up shop in the UK. I have been invited to quite a few events in which George Osborne the Chancellor, David Cameron the PM and even Prince Andrew personally entertained and addressed global entrepreneurs to convince them to invest in the UK.

    At this point I would say that London is the best city in Europe to start a new company. On the negative there are the high costs with London being a very expensive city.

    While the UK offers an entrepreneur visa in which non EU entrepreneurs can quickly move to the UK to start a business there is no easy visa system for the remainder of the employees. So a US-based entrepreneur can move to London easily but can't easily bring her top managers to the UK.

You interact with both Silicon Valley firms and Wall Street banks -- how do you see this dynamic unfolding right now? In particular, given the recent downturn in many of the recent IPOs?

    Recently, at the Allen and Company conference in Sun Valley I had a chance to observe on a first hand basis the disconnect that exists between Silicon Valley and Wall Street and recent tech valuations demonstrate this. For people like Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Tim Cook and other top SV entrepreneurs present in Sun Valley there is a sense that people in Wall Street just "don't get tech."

    Silicon valley leaders are frustrated that companies such as Apple and Google are trading at historical low P/E especially when you strip these companies of cash which they accumulate at astonishing rates. A case in point Apple with its $100 billion in cash. Why should companies that grow earnings at 20% a year be given P/E ratios of 11 when interest rates are close to 0? This makes no sense to the SV entrepreneurs. And they have a point.

    At the same time, the heads of the largest investment firms in the world, mostly based in NYC, also present in Sun Valley seem to be from another planet. It's as if Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are from Mars and Wall Street investors are from Venus. Wall Street investors reaction is that "tech is a fad" and who knows for how long Apple and Google will sustain their earnings growth. They look at Facebook and they wonder who will MySpace them next. While SV entrepreneurs believe they are there to change the world for good, Wall Street looks at them and say, "today is you, tomorrow is the next star: we are not giving you a high P/E Apple, tomorrow somebody will turn you into the next Nokia, your margins will shrink, your innovation spirit will disappear." Wall Street may be right.

Many entrepreneurs focus on social media startups -- yet there are grand challenges that get less attention -- will this continue in this way?

    The attraction of social media is that it is a huge growing business with very low barriers to entry. Think of the investment that took Yahoo (YHOO) to get started, that took Google to get started, that even took Youtube to get started and compare that to the tiny amount of money that took Instagram to get started. So the dream is that the next 12 guys with an app can build a company in a few years and sell for a billion. But the problem is, there are a million guys with the same dream and only 12 can win the prize.

    Can many new billion dollar businesses build as apps for iPhone and Android? Probably not. I agree that a lot of talent is being wasted this way. The field of social media apps is overcrowded and there will be a lot of write-offs.

你预计在大数据领域的创业活动会更活跃吗？

    从上世纪80年代开始，全世界人均科技存储信息能力几乎每40个月就会翻番；截至2012年，每天有2.5百亿亿字节(2.5×1018) 的数据生成。它带来了一个全新的领域，包括如何存储、处理、挖掘、分析和利用这么多数据。我个人认为，大数据领域需要的创新太多了。

    有意思的是，Facebook除了能让用户及时了解到朋友的宠物刚刚过世和其他爆炸性社交新闻外，它为这个世界做出的一项最重要贡献是Facebook作为一家公司处理大数据的能力，以及Facebook开放了手头所有大数据技术的源代码，给这个世界做出的贡献。很多公司，像如今已是世界最大WiFi网络的Fon都可以获益于这些投资，也全部开放源代码。

    开放源代码是一种合作理念，基本上发端于欧洲，后来得到了全球的追随，如今全球一些最大的社交媒体公司大多数后台都在运行开放源代码软件。这一点可以理解，如果你的数据库是私有的，如果你是唯一一家对用户和客户设有密匙的公司。为什么不开放所有技术的源代码，让所有这些都能发挥作用？开放源代码是一种合作理念，但实施开放源代码本质上是非常资本主义的。像我在Index Ventures的投资伙伴以及其他很多投资者已大举退出MySQL这样的大数据公司。

    大数据结合开放源代码方式将产生重大的创新，创造可观的价值。

最后一个问题，Facebook在欧洲的普及率很高，在亚洲也在取得进展。你对它的商业模式和扩张能力有什么看法？企业增速看来已经放缓，有些广告客户说，Facebook广告不如搜索引擎广告有效。

    Facebook现在的状况就像2004年的谷歌，能盈利但还不能大量盈利。Facebook需要微调广告模式，它当前的广告模式相当粗糙，不是不好，但还处在早期阶段。我不认为现在是买进Facebook股票的好时机，因为大量内部人士的卖盘还在持续。但买进时机很快就会到来。我不认为Facebook是明日黄花。马克•扎克伯格是当今的天才CEO之一，Facebook将继续走下去。扎克伯格有能力破解下一个难题，也就是移动平台的货币化。

    译者：早稻米

Do you see more startup activity in big data?

    The world's technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s; as of 2012, every day 2.5 quintillion (2.5×1018) bytes of data were created. This has led to a whole new field which deals with how do we store, process, mine, analyze, and make use of so much data. Personally I see big data as an area in which a lot of innovation is needed.

    Interestingly one of the most significant contributions of Facebook to the world, other than learning that your friend's pet just died and other shocking social news, is the ability of Facebook as a company to process big data and the contributions that Facebook has made for the world by open sourcing all the big data technologies it uses. Companies like Fon, now the largest WiFi network in the world, can piggyback on these investments and be all open source.

    Open source is a cooperative idea and mostly European invention that the whole world has tagged along and now most of the back offices of the largest social media companies in the world are run with open source software. And it makes sense, if your database is proprietary, if you are the only one with the key to your users and customers. Why not open source all the technology that makes it all work? But while open source is cooperative idea, the implementations of open source are very capitalist in nature. Investors like my partners at Index Ventures and many others have had significant exits on big data companies like MySQL.

    Big data combined with an open source approach will lead to significant innovations and massive value creation.

Finally, Facebook now has deep coverage in Europe and is growing in Asia as well. What are your thoughts on it business model and its ability to scale? Growth seems to be slowing and some advertisers say that FB ads are not as effective as search ads.

    FB is now where Google was in 2004, profitable but not yet hugely profitable. FB needs to tweak its advertising model which so far is pretty rudimentary, not bad, but an early stage. I don't think it's time yet to buy FB shares because of the tremendous amount of insider selling that has been taking place. But soon the time will come. I don't think Facebook is a passing fad. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the genius CEOs of this era and FB is here to stay. Zuckerberg will crack the next piece of the puzzle which is how to monetize mobile platforms.