THE BAY AREA is the 800 lb. gorilla of entrepreneurship. It buzzes with ego and technology and startups. It is where the venture-startup-industrial complex and behemoths like Apple and Google are headquartered (along with previous generation behemoths like Intel and Hewlett Packard). What’s so good about the Bay area, and what is impossible to replicate elsewhere, is the sheer density of people with big dreams and big checkbooks, one attracting the other with a very strong, almost magnetic, force. 

But with that comes a dark side: it is frenetic, chaotic, constantly chasing the latest wave, courting the latest and hottest. For anyone who has lived here, you know what I’m talking about. One week everyone thinks enterprise is crap and consumer is ‘awesome,’ the next week consumer is crap and enterprise is the only thing that is ‘scalable.’ And everyone wants to have coffee all the time and bounce ideas off of you, pitch you on a new company, try to recruit you, or my most-hated expression of all, ‘compare notes.’ Do not forget too, that they judge you by your idea almost as much as they judge you by whether you suggest Philz or Coupa Cafe or Sightglass as a meeting spot, as if the origin of the proverbial napkin you share your idea on is more important than the idea itself. 

Frankly, the Bay area is a little ridiculous and as much as I love it, I’m afraid this whole obsession with startups is reaching fever pitch. There’s a lot of wantrepreneurs in the Bay area. A lot of people show up from <insert random European or Asian capital> and are here to learn the Silicon Valley way. They have a prototype, and they’re here with the best of intentions—but they don’t necessarily approach company building or technology development with the level of quiet, serious determination that is required to build a company. It takes seven years, plus or minus, to become an overnight success, and I find few people really understand that, or care. And paradoxically, the hotter the Bay area gets among the wantrepreneurs, the more appealing the other areas become for people focused on building long term, sustainable businesses, and the more likely the next great company is to come from outside the Bay area. But it is still the place you want to come spend some time at to catch the entrepreneurial bug and see all the frenetic activity firsthand. As the world gets more global, it is getting rarer that the yellow brick road does not at some point pass through Palo Alto’s University Ave or Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road or one of San Francisco’s many coffee shops buzzing with startup chatter.

SEATTLE is in some ways the opposite. In Seattle, there’s none of the chaos and frenetic nature of the Valley. People are calmer, perhaps calmed down by the gray weather outside (‘cloud conference’ means a whole different thing here, and is an almost daily occurrence), and they’re more focused on working for the sake of working and living for the sake of living. How can you not when you have such amazing hiking, camping, sailing, skiing, backpacking, etc. within 45 minutes of downtown? People who have time for family, friends, and the great outdoors are naturally more healthy, happy, and relaxed—and, when they’re working, insanely productive—and it shows when you live in Seattle. 

Whether it is in spite of this or because of this, Seattle has some very serious cred when it comes to building big companies, stalwarts like Microsoft or Amazon, non-tech startups such as Starbucks or REI, older industrial-era successes like Boeing, or more recent successes like Tableau. Of all American cities, Seattle probably punches the highest above its weight. Many entrepreneurs from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos to Tableau’s Christian Chabot have talked about moving to Seattle from Boston/Albuquerque, the East Coast, or the Bay area, respectively, because they wanted some peace and quiet to build a company that takes 10 years to build and lasts far longer than that. You don’t find all that many entrepreneurs here looking for a quick flip, or VC’s peddling acqui-hire prospects to engineers in an attempt to have them quit and take a risk on a startup that no one truly means to grow. There’s no mistaking here that Seattle means business. After all, this is a city that grew up on building Boeing jetliners, and there’s hardly an endeavor that takes more confidence in your own engineering ability than getting into an airplane you built yourself. 

TEL AVIV is often spoken of as the greatest entrepreneurship center outside the US. In some ways this is true—there is a shockingly high amount of venture capital invested and startup M&A activity that goes on here adjusted for its size—but Israel also still has to prove that it has what Seattle and the Bay Area have produced many times over, which is a giant business with a global brand. Even Finland had Nokia—what’s Israel’s Nokia, let alone Google or Amazon or Microsoft? 

The first thing you feel when you get to Tel Aviv is acceleration. The velocity of life in Tel Aviv is just so much higher than it is elsewhere. It’s hard to explain, but the highest highs and lowest lows come with greater frequency, emotions run amok, and as you go through the day it seems like the hours stretch and you fill every minute with far more than 60 seconds’ worth of distance run, to paraphrase Kipling. Tel Aviv is chaos, first and foremost, and chaos is healthy for the creation of startups. 

Tel Aviv is really different from the others in its deep ties to the Israeli army. The startup talk in Tel Aviv is peppered with references to elite units and training programs in the military. If you don’t know what 8200 refers to, you might as well not try to fundraise. People are very technical, having grown up hacking ingenious solutions when they’re 18 that are tested by the battlefield, not by the market. No one cares about usability, or product-market fit, or consumer research, or design. It is all about doing what was not possible before, pushing the technical boundaries, not about polishing anything to a truly finished state. Israeli prototypes are incredible, but Israeli products are terrible. That is why, I would venture a guess, Israeli companies ultimately end up selling, often for hundreds of millions of dollars because their technology is valuable, but not necessarily for their product designs or for their revenues. There’s a ton of fascinating tech, though, from drones and self-driving technologies to security and biotech, and many of these will surely continue to attract investment, rightly so. 

BERLIN, where I studied for a study abroad term in 2005, is now hailed as the up-and-coming European startup city. When the Berlin Wall fell and German reunification combined the long-divided city, there was a ton of investment by the German government into reviving the new capital. An abundance of housing was vacated by emigrating East Germans, and the city became a very cheap and appealing place to live. Combine a bunch of dreamers, designers, and entrepreneurs, with cheap housing, great doner kebabs, and a thriving city with very unique neighborhoods, and not surprisingly you get a flowering of startups—Soundcloud, Rocket Internet, and the many clones that the Samwer Brothers have built and sold. Some of the areas in Berlin are starting to buzz, but it is clearly still early days in its development as a world-class startup hub. 

Given the vibrancy of the German economy you’ve got to wonder how a country that gave rise to Daimler, BMW, Siemens, Bosch, BASF, Volkswagen, and so on failed to produce even one big web/IT company besides SAP? The answer is complicated. I think part of it lies with the German approach to products, which is the opposite of Israeli. Where Israel focuses on speed of execution, Germany focuses on quality of final product. Those two are at odds with each other, notwithstanding what your VC tells you, and startups usually don’t have the funding to push out a first product that is of high quality. There’s an adage in Silicon Valley that if you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’re not doing it right. The problem is, school teaches Germans they should never, ever, EVER, be embarrassed by a product they build and ship. The result? SAP is the only German company in the DAX 30 index that was started in the last 50 years. I think that’s changing to some extent, but I doubt Europe can change fast. It’s just not in their DNA: those whose DNA was to change fast have long moved to America.