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InfluAds was lucky enough to participate on Techcrunch Nordic and Mini Seedcamp Copenhagen. The grass-root (and scarce) entrepreneur community in the region was part of the discussion there and I kept thinking about it ever since, specially every time I hear about Entrepreneurs in Residence.

Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR) are experienced entrepreneurs invited by VC’s to support their portfolio. This is great since they provide amazing value, specially in the current context where founders are younger and younger, reflex of the lack of barriers when building a startup. [Tech and Web startups is my focus here ]

But on the Nordics  and many other places like Portugal (my home country) and some of the emerging Baltic countries this phenomenon may suffer a double-sided impact.

An Entrepreneur in Residence is likely to be a choice between:

Joining a VC firm as EIR to help young startups is likely to produce awesome help to make more startups succeed better, probably reducing some of the risk associated with the investment. Younger entrepreneurs benefit immensely from it and dumb mistakes are likely to be avoided when experience is on the table.

But experienced entrepreneurs are a big asset since they can create more and better startups (historically and statistically better able to succeed). By not trying again, some entrepreneurs may even kill a great chance for the “Billion Exit”, which may produce stronger role-models and even a new stream of early-stage capital into the community, which for instance happened with the Skype duo (trough Atomico) and other minor funds created by early Skype employees in the Baltics.

I believe this issue even gets extended in some ways to Designers in Residence and young entrepreneurs turned VC. An example isNikolaj Nyholm (@nikolaj on twitter), a danish/swedish reference entrepreneur who recently joined Sunstone Capital being target of a loud “comment” from Morten Lund (@ML) because of it. I also got in touch with Jason Putorti recently, a Designer in Residence for Bessemer, who is also focusing on Elegant.ly [Jason's blog and Elegant.ly recently joined our Design community at InfluAds].

This may end up being  a zero-sum issue since these guys provide awesome value nonetheless.

My personal view is that a context like the small Danish community would certainly benefit from a few engaged entrepreneurs going for the home-run, which could spill back to the community. Grass-root events like StartupBootCamp, StartupWeekend, the many other events that do not exist yet but are very needed (!!) and the entrepreneur’s drive to get good mentorship achives some of the value that EIR’s provide anyway.

There is also an  issue here: the danish tax system (and culture) does not reward risk.  Michael Jackson (@overdrev on twitter, VC on Mangrove Capital) referred exactly that when talking to the Mini-Seedcamp crowd: high taxes giving low incentives to risk/invest and work-life balance, aligned with the carrot of a being a (better paid?) executive in a VC firm may make reference entrepreneurs want to reach the first-base only.

Assuming that early stage entrepreneurship in Denmark and the Baltics is roughly at the same level (“blossoming”), I can only see that the Baltic countries will kick Denmark’s little ass on this matter since costs are lower and rewards higher there. Is it? Any feedback or comments would be strongly appreciated.