In a hotel lobby in Brussels, I met an African Union delegate from Cameroon. When I told him I was from Seattle, he said, “Seattle? Microsoft!” Then he told me he was having problems installing Microsoft Office and he pulled out his Macbook Air. After I walked him through installing the free trial, he turned to me and said, “God sent you from Seattle to help me.”

I just came back from visiting Brussels, Amsterdam, Turin, Budapest, and Berlin as a German Marshall Memorial Fellow (MMF). While others I met in Europe during my four-week learning tour also expressed respect for Seattle’s contribution to the tech world, none topped the sentiment expressed by that African Union delegate.

Because the MMF aims to increase transatlantic cooperation, I got to meet with political, non-profit, and business leaders to discuss important issues and trends in their communities. I also made individual appointments to meet with tech leaders in each city. I concluded that while Europe still looks to the US as the world’s tech leader, there are some things we can still learn from Europe and, particularly in Seattle, apply to our own tech community.

Celebrate our own global entrepreneurs

The European tech leaders I spoke to stress that precisely because their countries have small markets relative to the US, they must have an international outlook from the get-go and that’s it’s critically important to attract global entrepreneurs to help ensure that they are developing for a bigger market. Locally in Washington and nationally, the tech industry is rightfully very focused on increasing diversity in terms of women and underrepresented minorities. But we have failed to celebrate another kind of diversity, that of our global entrepreneurs. We could do more to promote how tech entrepreneurs from all over the world come here to start businesses.

Seattle should own being Seattle

When I visited tech leaders in Berlin, I was impressed. Berlin is constantly compared to London as Europe’s second top tech hub much in the same way Seattle thinks of itself as the second hub after Silicon Valley. But Berlin does not define its identity in relation to London. Berliners think Berlin is just…Berlin. When you see marketing material for Seattle’s tech hub, there is an implicit and sometimes explicit comparison to our Californian counterpart. Maybe Seattleites just need to start thinking of Seattle as just…Seattle.

Have a bigger presence in Europe

Europeans don’t think of Seattle as a place to locate their startups because there is not as much capital there as in New York and Silicon Valley and because they believe Seattle cares more about Asia than Europe. While President Obama is focused now on passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that would ease trade with Asia, American companies that want to do business in Europe are waiting for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to get signed. If that goes through, Washington tech companies stand to benefit too. We need to be ready for that.

If you’d like to read what I wrote about the tech community in the individual cities I visited, please check out my blog posts in the Puget Sound Business Journal: Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Turin. The post on Budapest will be up soon.