Last night Seedcamp and The Accelerator Group welcomed Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures for a dinner here in London. Fred, as anyone who’s been following his blog will know, is on something of a Grand European Tech Tour, and we were happy to help him end his first day in London surrounded by the founders of 15 London startups.

Topics of conversation included: hosted processing and storage vs. true cloud computing, the question of whether European entrepreneurs receive a “black mark” from failure, where to base development, whether to expand monetization efforts geographically at the same pace as user adoption, the advantages of targeted local startups that seem to fend off even the biggest global juggernauts, the early-stage European funding gap, and the knock-on effect of having not only the founders of successful startups seed new ventures, but their early employees as well.

One topic of special note that came up was how having your idea validated can ease any number of processes and open doors – something close to our hearts at Seedcamp. We’ll follow up with a separate post on the topic shortly.

Yesterday also marked our first Tech-Dating event, as mentioned here earlier. While I was at the aforementioned dinner I’m told it was a success. We’ll have some additional details of that to come as well.