European Startup Thoughts
I'm in Paris and Luxembourg for board meetings with eXo and Codenvy. Also, Adobe just bought Neolane for $600M . They are based in Paris and were funded by Auriga and Xange - the same VC's who are backing eXo and also have some ownership in Codenvy. (In fact the eXo board meeting had to end early so Phillippe and Nicolas could go finalize the closing of that deal). Several thoughts on this while I have a bit of time: Cloud is Big and Global. Well, that is obvious these days. But I find it interesting that Neolane will become "Adobe Marketing Cloud" and be headquartered in Paris. The distributed mode of operating a company is becoming more accepted. We've also seen at eXo, Codenvy and CloudBees that Europe is a strong early adopter of Cloud technology. Having a presence in Europe is becoming a strategic advantage and a good place for selling Cloud solutions. US Tax Avoidance. It has been well publicized that US firms have a lot of cash overseas that