It seems to me that the large home market is probably the biggest advantage US startups have (together with comparatively easy capital and a healthier attitude towards new ventures).

In Denmark for instance JustEat and Trendsales were pretty successful. Both have a heave part of logistics involved though.

If you are making something digital then always think of your home market as a market of 6Billion people.

Successful startups out of Denmark 100% digital but none of them choose to stay there.

Tommy Ahlers Zyb (aquired by vodafone) and Podio (acquired by citrix). TrustPilot.com, Zendesk (moved to the US), Unity (moved to the US)

I agree that you should look at the world as your home market, but in practice there's more to it than that. Just opening shop in another country usually means incorporating for example. Our founder has mentioned a few times that his biggest regret was setting up shop in England after Sweden, instead of going after the US directly. In hindsight, the gain/pain ratio would've been a lot better.

Also, as dagw hinted at, the Norwegian oil industry has a tendency to suck in pretty much every talented engineer in the country. The oil industry is currently desperate for engineers and is importing skilled and ambitious people from all over the Northern hemisphere (Italy, France, Finland, even Thailand). I know people with degrees in applied mathematics who work with offshore oil drilling. The salaries and benefits you can get in this industry have a tendency to dwarf what you can expect as a salaried IT consultant. (For instance, the average salary for offshore oil workers in Stavanger is now more than 170,000 USD/year. Granted, offshore work pays better than land work, but many on-shore workers also have salaries in this range).

It stands to reason that tech will attract less talented people with a competitor like this. However, I would love to hear it if someone could disprove my theory. I don't have extended contact with the Norwegian CS crowd outside of my own university.

On the other hand, it seems everyone else is working in Consultancies. I don't know what to make of that.

I'm a Norwegian-American dual citizen and have often thought of spending a few years working in Norway. I would like to establish rapport with with interesting people and companies, particularly in the startup community.

Would you have any thoughts as to how I could go about getting introduced and involved?

FWIW I'm fully bilingual, although having never actually lived in Norway or attended school there, my writing is probably slightly below college level.

"Although Norwegian law is based on the principle that dual citizenship is not acceptable, Norwegian authorities cannot answer for what legislation in your home country says about citizenship."

"In other respects than in the abovementioned No 1 and No 2 dual citizenship is allowed."

In my case, I was born and raised (mostly) in the US with a Norwegian father who is still a Norwegian citizen (permanent work visa). Therefore, I have held dual passports since I was a teenager and submitted the formal application for full citizenship when I turned 18.

While a lot of work was put into my application, including references from family and friend, I believe the most important element, from a legal standpoint and otherwise, was my immediate family.

https://www.uio.no/english/studies/mn-masters/modat-master/s...

regarding moving back to the US: you can always take a local job in the oil industry or perhaps in a global company like mckinsey and then move back when you have some real experience (it should be easy to get a job here)

Here's the "Jante Law", or Law of Jante, he mentions at the end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

"... a pattern of group behaviour towards individuals within Scandinavian communities, which negatively portrays and criticises individual success and achievement as unworthy and inappropriate."

[1]: http://artplant.no/

In typical protestant style, working hard and becoming wealthy and successful is concidered virtuous, as long as you dont "act different" but remain "one of the people".

Of course the opposite culture exist in big cities, were hipsters and celebrities try to be as flashy and individualistic as possible.

Anyway, I don't think The Law of Jante is a real impediment to startup culture, the real cultural issue is that Scandinavia doesn't have the same risk-taking culture of the US.

Exactly. Courage is the biggest problem here.

The term "venture capital" doesn't exist in the Norwegian language. The closest translation is "risikokapital" which literally means risk capital.

This says a lot about our culture.

That's a big leap. In Danish we just say "venture kapital". There are thousands upon thousands of direct loanwords like this. I wouldn't read anything deeper into it.

http://highsoft.com/

http://highsoft.com/

EDIT: the deadline was in april; but not sure the position has been fulfilled yet

They all seemed to be in desperate need of more technical employees, and some are forced to outsource parts of their software development, not because of high Norwegians wages, but due to a lack of demand on the Norwegian market.