The very successful German private investor who had asked me to join him on the panel opened the debate on "The State of the Start-ups" by saying that he was depressed because investing in the internet over the past decade had seen a wholesale transfer of value to US companies who had acquired  VC-backed innovation out of Europe. He went on to say that Europe had a structural disadvantage and started late.

I do realise that what I am about to say is heresy to some and bad manners for pointing it out to others, but Europe did not start late when it came to the web. It was the British Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. On 25 December 1990 he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the internet at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) based in Geneva.

Take a stroll through Wikipedia, and you will find that the early steps in the settlement and commercialisation of the web were happening from 1991 to 1994 in the US by Steve Case of AOL, Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Marc Andressen of Netscape. What was invented in Europe took its giant early "making money" steps in the US, and not only by Americans, but by entrepreneurs who used the American embrace of the new to build fortunes on the back of the seismic change that the internet was bringing.

So should we be depressed? No - all sorts of opportunities abound for new company growth out of the UK and Europe. Europe has had global champions in enterprise software (Business Objects, SAP, Sage), music labels (EMI) and semiconductor firms (Dialog, ARM, Wolfson).    Each of these sectors are changing beyond recognition right now, in business model, industry set-up and where the power lies. The winners who maintain their dominance of the industry though are able to shift to the next paradigm by embracing change early and wholeheartedly. So if you're running one of the firms which I mention above, you should be looking at where the new companies are which are changing the landscape of the battle for the next decade while you maintain your troops on the current battleground.

When I worked on the PowerPC chip (which was put in Macs) in the early 1990s, one could have been forgiven for thinking that Apple might slip into irrelevance. In 2009, with the Apple iStore, it couldn't look stronger. What happened? The founder returned and innovated along the lines of the company's values.

In the UK, we have amazing entrepreneurs from Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse, Lloyd Dorfman of Travelex, to Alastair Lukies of Monitise - each who have created successful platforms, not just products. Whereas Jobs is held up as a hero, why do we have such a hard time calling the entrepreneur a hero here in the UK? Those men and women who are building the future in the UK choose to live abnormal lives to create global leading firms out of the UK. Their greatness is our greatness. Let's get not only comfortable with that, let's celebrate it. It's a better place to be.