The Dutch may be more famous for clogs than bootstrapping, but analysis of Red Herring's latest list of promising companies suggests that they may be the best in Europe at creating top companies with limited external funding.

Red Herring has just unveiled its shortlist of the 200 most promising private European companies (thanks to Vecosys for the tip-off). Excluding the nine companies that don't have easily identifiable headquarters locations, a quick analysis shows that the UK contributes the highest number of companies (46), with France (26), Germany (22), Israel (16) and The Netherlands (14) some way behind.


On the face of it, the ordering is quite similar to the geographic distribution of venture capital investment across Europe, although not exactly, but I wanted to find out if this was the whole story.

I looked at the countries in the list that are represented by more than ten companies, and compared the number in each with the total venture capital invested in that country in 2006 (using the 2006 figures shown here). The aim was to show which countries are outperforming in relation to the size of their venture capital market. The higher the value, the larger the outperformance.


By this measure, The Netherlands is the clear winner. I also looked at the average disclosed venture capital investments made in the individual companies to see if this told the same story.

Once again, a similar outcome. The average amount invested in the Dutch companies was only €2.7m, less than half as much as the closest competitor (Germany) and less than 20 per cent of the amount invested in Israeli companies.

There’s no doubting that by these measures the Dutch are definitely the 'Bootstrapping Kings of Europe'.