Why start your internet company in California? “Black swan” start-ups have cut paths beyond the hi-tech heartlands.
When Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 less than half the population had a telephone line. A decade later Denmark’s Janus Friis and Sweden’s Niklas Zennstrom chose its capital, Tallinn, as the launch pad for what would become one of the world’s most valuable start-ups – Skype. Similarly, in the mid-2000s two Swedish music enthusiasts Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung looking for a location to create a website that would be for sounds what Flickr was to photos, visited Silicon Valley and initially set up a small office in Stockholm before relocating to Berlin, a city then in a state of economic decline. Their business SoundCloud went on to become one of the biggest audio-sharing websites in the world attracting over 250 million listeners each month.
To read the original article: The Five Cs of Locating a Start-Up | INSEAD Knowledge
