I’m French and an entrepreneur. I really feel offended by such a poll. That’s very much against European cultural values. Very shameful imho.

I also thought you were extremely rude and whether intended or not, you came across as arrogant, patronizing and superior, ergo disrespectful to your hosts. Whether your superiority is deserved or not, I’m sure you’d argue it is, you can’t deny there are many ways of saying things, you could just have easily made your point with the illusion of mutual respect and the illusion that you open your mouth as part of a dialogue rather than dictating how things are.

Also, I think the more enlightened Europeans, despite being overjoyed at the Obama/Bush house move, judge America based on the Americans they meet, or hear talk in person, and I think some on the Gilmore couch at the end did very badly, I for one can glace over most of the oration but I can’t be anything but angry for some in the group embarrassing Loic.

Finally, I have to say the vote is petty and childish!

From the comments here its easy to get the funny picture of euro-ppl pushing the things toward the eden garden idea without work at all, and everyone being happy and free with big puch of dough. Wonder why most of the venues in eu are less successful than the american counterparts and eu govt tries to force poor policies toward the solution of “those big st00pid americans are winning with us on all grounds, lets build quiero to compete with google” problem.

Oh said enough on this one. As was said in some picture book, never argue with ignorant as they have been playing their game for last 30 or so years and they cant beat You with just any non-rational argument that will come to their mind. For You Mike, I would use the knowledge You learnt so far from this story to Your and valley’s startups good as much as possible and leave the volatile ones with their ways (sub-optimal ways but their personal ones).

Anyway, good luck from me too to the european enterpreneurs who do and try their best, no matter whether they fail or not.

And as for trying to change the old ways in euro-area, when they get really pressed against the wall they either ban Your right to have different view (which some of the european societies have mastered and are using with great pride) or when arguing with us ways – they will hide behind a 2000 years of history non-argument. Here come the Chinese and Israeli with 4k years of history.

Did you read the whole post from Loic?

It looks like you just read the first paragraph then write this post.

May be you miss time reading (or writing), in the end this post is not very constructive.

David

GIven the fact that you are an investor in Seesmic I don’t think Loic ever thought of barring you from attending.

More than that, when you have postings of this sort (touching on personal sensitivities) you remind readers that this indeed a blog and not a true news site. Perhaps that’s the idea, but one might ask why you’d alienate part of your readership and refuse a certain level of legitimacy if you’re not gaining a corresponding new readership. As a new-ish reader, I had viewed this site as more a tech news site than a Michael Arrington blog. Sorry if I was mistaken.