Tuesday this week we had the Amsterdam TechCrunch meetup, the last city in the Summer TechCrunch Euro Tour before I kick off again in September.

In just over a month and a half I tracked down startups in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome, Dublin, Istanbul, Athens, Barcelona, Zurich and now Amsterdam, not including the TechCrunch Pitch! event in London recently. The picture of Europe I am building up is of a place where there are startups as hungry and thirsty for success as any in the U.S., but the kind of hothouse cluster you find in Silicon Valley does not yet exist - at least not to that level. The Silicon Valley of Europe is not a place. It’s a state of mind. And the synapses in that mind, which is spread across Europe inside the heads of excited young entrepreneurs, have only fairly recently started to form. That’s something I hope to improve by creating more opportunities for startups in Europe to network. In the meantime, this event wrap-up is the first of the ones I’ll be doing about the Euro Tour events over the course of the next few weeks (now that I’ll