Question for Michael Arrington: If Europeans are Lazy, What Does that Make Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerberg?

Michael Arrington is back from Europe and he’s got an axe to grind. Perhaps he was “jetlagged, sated and cranky” because he found that young Parisian women weren’t attracted to the boorish powerbroker from Silicon Valley simply because he’s the editor of some strange blog called TechCrunch.

In a post entitled “Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch”, Arrington writes:

…the joy of life is great, but all these two hour lunches over a bottle or two of great wine and general unwillingness to do whatever it takes to compete and win is the reason why all the big public Internet companies are U.S. based. And those European startups that do manage to break through cultural and tax hurdles and find success are quickly gobbled up by those U.S. companies. Skype (acquired by eBay) and MySQL (acquired by Sun) are recent examples.

The crowd jeered but the stark reality of it all is unavoidable. And the fact that the panelists on stage, all either American or living in America, suggested that you can somehow succeed with a startup while maintaining a healthy work-life balance is unfortunate. Too many people choose to be entrepreneurs as a lifestyle, without realizing that it takes everything you have and more to win. And if you aren’t in it to win, why not just take that nice job down the street that gives you five weeks of vacation.

Two hour lunches are great. But when you have investors to answer to and employees (and their families) to provide for, something has to give. Perhaps that’s why many of Europe’s hardest charging and most successful entrepreneurs tend to move to Silicon Valley, where they are surrounded by like minded people.

The panelists would have better served the audience by urging them to help shift European culture to be more supportive of their entrepreneurs. These people need a fighting chance to survive, and just telling them what they want to hear isn’t helpful. Joie de vivre is fine once you’ve sold that startup and have a summer house in the south of France. In the meantime, get to work. Le Web needs more Europeans on stage next year, and it just may be you up there telling the world how you overcame European culture and grew a successful company.

Arrington’s myopic, simple-minded approach to “success” (which he calls “winning”) is naive.

I’m all for hard work and hustle (I tend to put in 16 hour work days myself) but as I’ve noted before when Jason Calacanis made similar statements about leading an workaholic lifestyle, maintaining a healthy work-life balance is actually important to success. Productivity is not necessarily correlated with hours worked and effective people are rarely those who walk around overweight, tired, depressed and looking ten years older than they are because they do nothing but work.

Instead of responding to Arrington’s stupidity with a logical argument, however, I thought it’d be better to ask the question: if Europeans are lazy, what does that make Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerberg?

By Arrington’s definition, these appear to be three Americans who epitomize the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial spirit and who are “winning.”

So let’s see what they do.

Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo, describes himself as a workaholic.

Yet a look at his activities shows that he has quite a bit of time on his hands. He has admitted that he travels too much, spent time helping Arrington with TechCrunch50, responds to articles about industries he’s not involved with, posts a fair share of useless shit on Twitter and his blog, speaks on panels, helps locate the owners of missing dogs, whores for media attention and he has enough time to play poker for hours on end (he claims he does his best thinking while losing money).

I call bullshit. Calacanis’ work-life balance seems a little bit too healthy for a CEO who laid off employees a few months ago and suggests that Americans need to work 120% harder. In fact, I might go so far as to call Calacanis a fucking hypocrite but you probably already came to that conclusion yourself.

Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose is the founder of Digg, co-founder of Revision3 and generally an Internet celebrity.

But it’s not all work and no play for the Silicon Valley bachelor who has plowed through just about everybody. He has plenty of time to tweet (he didn’t have enough time apparently to Pownce), and thanks to an informant, I am told that Rose’s Facebook profile is quite active as well.

Thanks to the photos he’s posted on Facebook (which I’ve included below), we know Rose has plenty of time to drink, go to baseball games, travel, rock climb and generally act like a 30 year-old kid.

Like Calacanis, Rose’s work-life balance seems very healthy. If Michael Arrington thinks two hour lunches are problematic when an entrepreneur has investors he needs to be busting his ass for, I can’t help but wonder how problematic he thinks the Kevin Rose Internet celebrity lifestyle is, especially given the fact that Digg reportedly isn’t profitable and obviously hasn’t produced an exit.

Mark Zuckerberg

The wunderkind behind the world’s most popular social network, Facebook, is a staunch defender of his work-life balance. He sleeps late and comes into the office when he wants, he won’t meet with anyone about business when he has plans with his girlfriend and he has plenty of time to travel the world for “pleasure and contemplation.”

Mark Zuckerberg may be the youngest illiquid paper billionaire in the world but he doesn’t seem to be working too hard for all that paper money. He has Sheryl Sandberg stabbing backs and taking names so he doesn’t have to.

Michael Arrington is Full of Shit

Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerberg are all clearly enjoying life. Perhaps a little bit too much given the situations their companies are in. From poker to rock climbing, tweeting to travel, I wonder if Arrington would classify the lifestyles of Calacanis, Rose and Zuckerberg as being demonstrative of putting in “everything you have and more.”

Of course, he already has, which is why Arrington is full of shit. His “work hard, don’t play at all if you want to ‘win’” mentality is pure hogwash. Hard work is a prerequisite for success but hard work and a healthy lifestyle aren’t mutually exclusive.

In the world of Silicon Valley, where most new startups fail and most wouldn’t survive a month without funding from VCs who now destroy wealth more than they create it, working 18 hours isn’t going to change the fact that your shit Web 2.0 venture is not going to be acquired by Google for $500 million. It will fail no matter how hard you try to “win.”

If all that was required for success was a workaholic lifestyle, every day laborer, farmer and miner would be a billionaire. These people work ten times as hard as the khaki-wearing bourgeois “entrepreneurs” who inhabit Silicon Valley.

In fact, I’d argue that the idea of the hard-working Silicon Valley founder is largely a “myth.” No, I am not saying that they don’t exist. But just like individuals in any other profession, there are a few winners and a whole lot of losers.

Show me a founder who is bootstrapping a new affiliate marketing business from his apartment in Phoenix, Arizona and who has invested $25,000 of his personal savings to do so and I’ll show you an entrepreneur who is working hard because he has skin in the game. Show me a founder who just raised $7 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson for a bullshit software company and I’ll show you an “entrepreneur” who has every reason to believe there’s no urgency because he really doesn’t have a lot to lose personally.

But don’t tell any of this to Arrington. He has good reason to believe that you can’t do anything but work. After all, he’s had to sacrifice a lot for his “success” with TechCrunch. He’s overweight, the bags under his eyes appear to be on permanent display and based on his attitude on stage at LeWeb, he generally seems like an unhappy person. If Arrington represents the “joy of winning” where do I sign up to lose?

Arrington’s biggest problem is not that his view of the world is distorted by his presence in Silicon Valley. It’s that he’s culturally ignorant. When he writes that Europeans should “shift” their culture “to be more supportive of their entrepreneurs,” he makes the assumption that he even understands European culture in the first place.

Given that Arrington’s recent trip to France saw his “first foray into a Michelin three star restaurant” and that when he travels, “jeans, tshirt, Jet Blue and Motel 6 is how I roll,” I think it’s safe to say this: Arrington wouldn’t know what culture is if it hit him in the face because he’s clearly an uncultured person.

The reality is that today’s economy is global and companies that succeed will increasingly be global in nature.

To successfully navigate the global economy, you cannot be the Ugly American, which is exactly what Arrington is. If you want to do business in Japan, for instance, you need to understand that the way business gets done is different than it is in North America. It’s ironic that at LeWeb Arrington noted that “we’re starting to get our ass kicked by Asia because they work harder than us.”

Japan is one of Asia’s most important and hardest-working economies and incidentally, in case Arrington doesn’t know, started becoming an economic powerhouse in the 1960s. In the 1980s, it practically bought the United States.

Business negotiations (especially of the substantial kind) usually do not take place at the same pace in Japan that they do in the United States. Before real negotiations may even begin, there is often a social process that takes place in which no business is discussed. Discussions on matters such as family dominate, even though Americans may find these discussion to be “trivial.”

It may take several days before real negotiations begin, and once they do begin, the other side is difficult to decipher if you don’t understand that there are very real differences between how individuals from the two cultures “say” the same things. For instance, Japanese negotiators will often tell you what you want to hear, leading you to believe that a deal will happen, even if they are not at all interested. They may not even tell you “no” directly; they’ll often wait until you lose interest.

Additionally, a difference in values exists. Japanese businesses are traditionally focused on the long-term (hence part of the interest in social matters such as family), whereas American businessmen are usually focused on the short-term.

The point is that whether you’re doing business in Japan, France, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, India or Brazil, understanding that there are very real cultural differences that impact the way business is conducted is crucial. No one business culture is superior to the other and to succeed, you have to understand and respect the differences between them, whether or not you personally like those differences.

Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest auto manufacturer in terms of sales. France’s AXA is Europe’s largest insurer and may purchase pieces of AIG’s rotting carcass. Russia’s OAO Gazprom is the largest natural gas producer in the world. China’s China Mobile is the largest mobile phone operator in the world in terms of subscribers. Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco is the world’s largest oil company and is thought to be the world’s most profitable company. Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev is the world’s largest brewer after gobbling up Anheuser-Busch the same way eBay apparently gobbled up Skype. India’s ArcelorMittal is the world’s largest steel maker. And Brazil’s Petrobras is arguably the world leader in deep-water oil exploration and drilling.

Note to Michael Arrington: the center of the world is not Silicon Valley. Google, eBay and all the other Silicon Valley powerhouses are great companies, but they don’t make the cars that are in your garages, they don’t provide insurance to your most important institutions, they can’t supply the natural gas your allies in Europe need, they don’t operate a mobile network for more than 400 million subscribers, they don’t extract the oil your economy requires to function and grow, they don’t produce the beer you drink and they don’t manufacture the steel that is used just about everywhere you look.

In short, while Arrington obsesses about the superior entrepreneurial spirit that supposedly exists in Silicon Valley and which has brought us a whole lot of nothing over the past several years, the very essentials of life are increasingly produced by a global network of companies run by businessmen that Arrington simply doesn’t have the ability understand since they don’t fit nicely into his notion of the workaholic Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Let me put it this way: while Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerberg are working hard (playing poker, having drinks and sleeping in), there is a group of executives from Saudi Aramco enjoying a two hour lunch and discussing the $60 billion they’re investing (in cash) over 5 years in 5 mega-projects that will ensure that Arrington’s Porsche Boxter has gas in the tank.

Arrington doesn’t even know these lunches are taking place and he’ll never be invited to one. He may be a powerbroker in the Silicon Valley tech startup world but the Silicon Valley tech startup world is a two-bit player in today’s global economy. While Arrington was “working hard” typing a blog post from a Motel 6 in Newark, New Jersey after spending some time in Paris sitting on a stage engaging in mental masturbation about entrepreneurship, businessmen in Japan, France, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, India and Brazil were doing what they do day in and day out - keeping the real wheels of the global economy spinning.

The irony is striking.