Pessimism about Europe at DLD Conference

Posted by: Jennifer L. Schenker on January 20

I’m participating in the Digital Living Design Conference in Munich. Speakers on the first day are bullish on the tech sector but pessimistic about the future of Western Europe. The first panel discussion included WPP chief executive Martin Sorrell, Israeli tech guru Yossi Vardi, Accel Partners’ Joe Schoendorf, a venture capitalist who has been a figure in Silicon Valley since the 1960s, Richard Wurman, the creator of the TED conference and Hubert Burda, chairman of Hubert Burda Media, the conference’s host.

Both Vardi and Schoendorf said there has never been a more exciting time to be in tech.“I’ve spent 42 years in Silicon Valley and I have never seen so many new things going on,” says Schoendorf.He still sees Silicon Valley as a great place to create companies.
Sorrell no longer sees his home base of Europe that way. He says that if he was 25 he would move to Shanghai or Beijing. “I don’t hold out a whole lot of hope for Western Europe,” he says. The focus at WPP is no longer on UK, Germany or France. Increasingly business is coming from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe. “Things are moving at a slow speed in the West and at a fast speed in the East,” says Sorrell. The risk is that Europe finds itself sidelined. Schoendorf predicts that at the 2016 G7 meeting only one European country will be invited to participate and that will be the U.K.
Not everybody at DLD is pessimistic about Europe. Serial tech entrepreneurs attending DLD such as Germany’s Samwer Brothers and Madrid-based Martin Varsavsky remain enthusiastic as ever. They spent the evening networking at a gala dinner sponsored by Goldman Sachs Spotted in the crowd were Flickr’s Caterina Fake, lifestyle diva Martha Stewart, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ann Winblad from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, former MTV Networks President Michael Wolf and French blogger Loic Le Meur.