Just saw this video, from the LeWeb this week:

that I found here where Michael Arrington writes:

But Europe’s persistent background pessimism was out in full force, even at an event full of entrepreneurs. Americans dominated the stage and spoke mostly about the tremendous opportunities that arise in down markets. Engineers are much easier to hire. The press have fewer startups and stories to divide their attention. The pond certainly gets smaller, but there are far fewer people fishing, too. For most startups, this is a time to blossom.

He got a point, for the past almost 10 years that I have been going to the US for business trips once, twice or three times a year and visited Silicon Valley frequently, I always felt that Silicon Valley is very meritocratic, and that if I would surround myself with the like minded people that I meet there, I will be able to achieve more.

Now not to say that I don’t enjoy long lunches and good wine, I do, but I rather see it as work-hard and play-hard, I don’t do when my schedule is tight, on the contrary, when I know there is a lot of things I can do to move things forward I focus on getting a lot of things done. But you do need to wind-down and enjoy life once in a while. But my work is my passion, which helps a lot to keep discipline and motivation going.

But people in the Silicon Valley enjoy life and I think the quality of life is better than northern Europe (European are not Europeans, and definitively not French, France is 13% of the European population, and cultures are very different across Europe), if not for other things the weather definitively helps (do you know that today in Stockholm there were 5 hours of daylight, and during that time it’s not much of it either, and it’s cold).

Move is happening February-March 2009, so excited to spend more time in the Bay area, and to get some traction for my new Internet bootstrapping business lab, bootstrapLabs that I just setup in Silicon Valley.

So Loic, and Michael I hope we run into each other next year in the Valley!