This is a guest post I wrote for Techcrunch:

It’s difficult to know where to invest your money right now. Most asset classes are moving in the wrong direction as the world teeters on the edge of a double dip recession.

There is growing distrust of most of the established financial markets – complaints include that they are deliberately complicated and full of jargon, they are over regulated, there are huge rewards for a very few that are not necessarily linked to sustained performance and, perhaps most importantly, when things go wrong it seems to be the ordinary people who are the ones that really suffer.

Let’s look at two of the most common asset classes for personal investment – stocks and bonds. The FTSE is the most widely used index of stocks in the UK. In October 2001 the FTSE stood at 5036 and today it is 4944 – actually down over the ten year period. Once you factor in inflation it is clear that the FTSE today is worth materially less than the FTSE of 2001.

UK government bonds have traditionally been a solid way of ensuring a reasonable return with good downside protection. Currently a 10 Year UK Government bond is yielding a miserly 2.4% – and again this doesn’t even keep up with inflation.

With all of this in mind it occurred to me that our entrepreneurs, with their hopes and dreams of offering customers something different and something better, represent a much safer place to put our hard earned money.

Of course, investing in start-ups is a high-risk exercise and also locks up your money for a good few years. But at the same time you are investing in the companies of the future rather than the ones of the past. In addition, these companies will be reaching maturity and perhaps looking towards an exit a few years down the road when there is a very good chance that the economy will be in better health.

All of this of course depends on the basic fundamentals of choosing companies and markets that are growing fast and will be able to prosper through the economic downturn. I invest in the technology market and I think there are three megatrends right now that would all qualify in this way – namely social, cloud computing and mobile.

I attended the F.ounders event last week and felt inspired to write about it.

F.ounders is an invitation-only event for around 150 people – mainly founders of technology companies with a few investors, media and others thrown into the mix. It is based in Dublin and is naturally focused more on the European scene although there is fairly strong representation from the US.

I had a great time and think that is has clearly consolidated it’s place amongst the few events that manage to attract a high quality crowd and provide real peer to peer networking that we are so often promised but is so rarely is delivered.

My view is that meaningful relationships are forged when people spend a good amount of time together, when they respect and like one another and also when they are relaxed enough to let the ‘corporate guard’ down and really talk about interesting stuff, openly and honestly.

I think F.ounders manages to achieve this and that it is principally down to three things – the quality of the people, the cultural experience it provides and the effortless vision of its founder Paddy Cosgrave.

The founders are roughly divided between those that have done it, those that are well on the way and those that are up and coming. This approach works well and makes for a more stimulating event seeing founders at different stages, tackling different issues and with the next generation given something to aspire to and with the older guys being kept on their toes by those trying to eclipse them. You then throw into the mix a small selection of investors and media and you have a great cocktail.

This is a guest post by Jos White, a partner at Notion Capital for TechCrunch. This is in part a response to recent criticism of European VC by Datasift which raised money from US VCs.

All you ever hear about these days with European venture capital is either that it is miles behind the US or that it can contribute greatly to economic growth and should be subsidised by governments. While I mostly agree with both these statements I think they are missing the central point. By investing in early stage European technology companies you can make a lot of money if you get it right.

I don’t understand why people shy away from this. Perhaps people feel unable to make this case and quietly step around it. Or, in these austere times, maybe us Europeans feel uncomfortable being outspoken capitalists. Yet I feel strongly that the evolution of virtually any successful market anywhere in the world was fuelled by the opportunity to make money, and I don’t believe European VC is any different.

The European early stage investment market as a whole has under-performed over the last decade. I’d put this down to an over-supply of cash, spurred on by the success seen across the pond, combined with an immature start-up ecosystem, all leading to too much indiscriminate investing.

At the same time, I don’t believe that the European market is performing as badly as reports suggest. It’s too early to measure the performance of funds from around 2005 onwards and the data available for the industry in Europe is poor and unrepresentative due to less regulation and disclosure – estimates put the number of funds that are included in industry reports at less than 5% of the total market.

As a result of this real and perceived underperformance, combined with the worst recession for decades, there has been a Darwinian like culling of the European VC industry. According to the EVCA, the number of funds dropped from 1,600 in 1999 to 596 in 2009 and, out of those remaining funds, only 30% are considered active.

Dear George,

You’ve said that you want to root out the ‘enemies of enterprise’ and make entrepreneurs a central part of your government’s economic policy. This is encouraging news and I wholeheartedly agree with you that entrepreneurs and the businesses that they create and develop can help to propel the economy forwards.

With this in mind, and with your new budget about to be announced, I thought I’d draft a top ten ‘wish list’ of initiatives that could help make this happen:

Guest columnist Jos White identifies one of European technology’s sweet spots

This is a guest column in the Telegraph’s Tech Start-Up 100 debate series. The Start-Up 100 is supported by Orrick, Silicon Valley Bank and Microsoft BizSpark.

One of the biggest shifts in the last year or so – and something we’ll undoubtedly see more of in 2011 and beyond – is the rise of mobile internet. If CES is anything to go by, smartphones and tablet devices are going to continue sweeping across the market at a terrific pace: starting with consumers, but soon reaching into business, education and government. This huge growth in the market will be further accelerated in 2011 by smartphone prices coming down significantly, by ever-improving mobile networks and by increasingly ubiquitous and free WiFi networks. Research suggest smartphones sales will exceed half a billion during that year, overtaking PC sales for the first time.

European companies have some big advantages over their American counterparts because of the natural head start they have had. Mobile adoption came much faster and much more rapidly in Europe, spurred on in part by the innovations enabled by GSM networks that weren’t available in the US. As a result, our mobile market has matured faster than America’s has. There’s a whole generation of consumers coming through who expect their first point of contact to be through a mobile device.

Europe is producing some very strong online services – think Groupspaces, Huddle, Spotify, Skype, Tradeshift and LOVEFILM – that have a large and growing user base. The next step for them is to truly unlock the power of their service across mobile platforms. The question these companies need to be asking themselves now is not ‘when can we do this?’, but ‘how quickly can we do this and how can we make it an even better experience than it is on a PC?’ That will be of the key challenges that defines 2011 for almost every web-based business.

The businesses that get ahead will be those that take full advantage of mobile, delivering a quality service that exploits the unique characteristics of the platform, in a way that consumers really love – rather than providing something people can put up with until they get back to a PC.

I look at raising money as a necessity for most fast-growing tech businesses. The truth is that generally you need to move faster in the world of technology than you do in most other industries and it is normally not possible to do this organically.

Raising money can help a business to accelerate its progress and take advantage of being early into a market. And it shouldn’t just provide an injection of cash, although this is clearly the main benefit – a good investor should also provide additional value to the business in terms of support, guidance and connections.

My advice when raising money is to raise more money than you need and also to raise it from the right people. Raising money is time consuming and financial projections are generally too optimistic and it’s for these reasons I’d try to raise more money than you think you need, assuming it’s available.

At MessageLabs we raised $30M from US based investors but only about half this amount was built into our ambitious expansion plans and associated cash projections – we didn’t know how we were going to use the rest of it but we were certainly pleased we took it when we did. We raised the money for MessageLabs in 2000, after only 18 months, but there was such momentum in the business and the   overall market for any Internet-based business that we were able to achieve a great valuation and choose from a long line of VC’s. It then turned out that it took a lot longer and cost more than we had expected to scale the business globally. One of the reasons for this was that we made our share of misteps along the way – one of which was an over-reliance on channel partners to sell the service that didn’t work so well when it comes to selling a SaaS service and another was that we needed to completely rethink the architecture of our service in the face of the huge growth in email volumes we were processing. But, most importantly, it’s just a reality of life that things generally take longer and cost more than you imagine they will.

A common subject for discussion among both governments and investors is how to create the right environment to produce more entrepreneurs.  Last month, we saw Cameron launch ‘Tech City” in London. At about the same time, we had the NESTA report suggesting that Europe is less dynamic than the US, meaning it’s more difficult for new, innovative, companies to penetrate the established order.

Everybody knows that entrepreneurs like to think of new things and set up ventures to take them to market.  These early stage, high growth businesses are the main driver of economic growth. Despite this fact, there are very few places in the world that actually make it easy for an entrepreneur to start a company and go on to build it into a true global success story. This says to me that it is clearly very difficult to get the formula right.

To my mind, there are four main ingredients to create an ideal entrepreneurial environment:

Talent + Funding + Attitude + Government

Let’s take each one at a time:

Talent

Clearly, you need to have talented people to start and grow successful companies. This includes the talent and imagination to think of new ideas and better ways of doing things and also the talent to take on risk and turn those ideas into a successful business. I think some of this you are born with and is then further developed by working with other great entrepreneurs or by going ahead setting up a business and learning from the experience.

Funding

I believe there’s a revolution happening in the world of computing and communications that we haven’t seen since the rise of the PC in the 1990′s. This revolution can best be described as cloud computing. The broad concept of ‘cloud computing’ includes terms such as on-line services, software as a service and on-demand computing.

The cloud computing revolution means that more and more computing and communication resources are moving to the ‘cloud’ in the form of infrastructure, platforms, services and applications all of which used to be delivered through physical products or premises that we could actually see and touch. This new form of computing means that resources are residing in the cloud and are therefore available at any time and from anywhere, giving complete freedom of choice and mobility to the user.

In addition to enabling greater mobility there are numerous benefits to this new computing model including the lack of upfront costs; fixed monthly pricing covering all service, support and upgrades; quick and easy set-up; access to vast amounts of data that can be used to constantly fine tune and improve the service; and the ability to empower users by giving more people access to resources without the need for a PC on every desk. All the user needs is any device connected to the internet whether that is a PC, a tablet, a smartphone or a laptop and they can access their information, their services and their applications instantly.

This blog is about all aspects of the cloud computing revolution including the entrepreneurs, the leading players, the investors and the new trends and technologies. But most importantly, it will be about the emerging, fast-growing businesses that will play such an important part in this major transition – challenging the very foundations of the IT industry.