Why there are only few startups in Eastern Europe?

I see a lot of chatter about this: why there are not more startups in Romania? What about Bulgaria? Hasn’t Poland bright engineers and idea people?

We do. The problem is that 99% of the ideas we see are only marginally improvements over the companies that exist.

Usually the ideas look like this:

Let’s do a GREEN FACEBOOK! Let’s do an Angry Birds with dolphins! Let’s do a Twitter just for us! We will kill it!

These ideas are not bad, and VKontakte and Baidu are proof that local ideas can succed. But everybody around here ignores the timing and the context of those startups. They just start a company selling a product not so different from this big and popular product and then act surprise as nobody wants to use it.