Quotes of the Day

Europe's sleepy venture-capital scene got a jolt last month when eBay completed its $2.5 billion acquisition of Luxembourg's Internet phone company Skype. Investors who had shelled out about $25 million in less than two years to buy into Skype pocketed around $1 billion from the deal, venture-capital sources say. The practice of investing in risky startups has long been regarded as a largely American way of doing business. But the windfall that descended on Skype's investors and its Swedish and Danish founders has many Europeans asking, "How can I get some?"

For answers, they might tune into Dragons' Den, a weekly hour-long bbc television show that kicks off its second season on Tuesday. Like The Apprentice, it's about getting ahead in business, but instead of wringing its pleasures from the moment host Donald Trump declares "You're fired!", five deep-pocketed venture capitalists pass judgment on a pitch from a hungry entrepreneur. After a humiliating Pop Idol-like grilling, the investors decide whether to put their cash into ideas that range from tailor-made clothes for professional women, to a piece of furniture that crosses a beanbag chair with a hammock. The five dragons (the investors) don't have the fame or the toupee of Trump, but the show's success signals that Europe is equally entranced by wheeler-dealers.

The bbc wasn't sure a program about marketing plans and bottom lines would light up the screen when it aired the first six-week season of Dragons' Den last winter. "It was a terrifying prospect trying to make equity stakes dramatic on prime time," says series producer John Hesling. Yet the show caught on by word of mouth, and the audience grew steadily with each episode. Some 3.2 million viewers tuned in for the season's final installment in February. Part of the appeal is that investors are putting real money into real business plans, compressing months of negotiating into 12 cringeworthy minutes. Deals can even fall apart after the cameras stop, just as they do in real life and rejected entrepreneurs can find their money elsewhere. The bbc is planning an hour-long special in January that follows up with winners and losers. Dragons' Den owes some of its success as well to its tough-guy style. The dragons sit in an unfriendly warehouse studio (the den) fingering stacks of £50 bills and interrogate the would-be millionaires who climb up a tortuous flight of dingy stairs to reach their lair. In a filming session one hot day last July, two men who arrived to pitch a leak-free vomit bag for car-sick kids sweated through ridicule as they described how the bag "turns a warm bodily fluid into a gel." One dragon responded with a lecture on the physics of projectile vomit and dispatched the hopefuls with the curt reply, "All I have is a piece of plastic that doesn't leak."

After their ordeals are over, contestants are interviewed by the bbc's economics editor, Evan Davis. His post-mortem questions and mid-segment voice-overs offer some of the show's most educational moments as he cuts through the rapidfire jargon of the negotiations. In the first series, contestants Barry Haigh and Graham Whitby surprisingly rejected dragon money for a gadget that gives baby strollers a gentle rocking motion. In case the viewer wondered why, Davis explained that Whitby and Haigh wanted the $265,000 they were offered, but not the dragons' control of the company. Perhaps one of the most important lessons Dragons' Den teaches is that failure doesn't mean defeat. In the first season, the dragons shredded Rachel Lowe when she couldn't remember her financial numbers and she walked away empty-handed. But she went on to sell her colorful Destination London board game — players are cab drivers racing through a hazardous day in the British capital — to retailers Hamleys and W.H. Smith. The game has become one of Hamleys' top-sellers.

The timing may be right for Dragons' Den. In the past few months venture funds have been flooding into Europe in search of future Skypes. Through September of this year, some €2.3 billion of venture capital has been raised in Europe, almost twice the €1.4 billion raised in all of last year, according to VentureOne, a San Francisco research division of Dow Jones Newswires."Europe is starting to become more like the U.S., where failure is regarded as scar tissue if you can demonstrate that you learned from your mistakes,'' says Danny Rimer, a partner with London and Geneva firm Index Ventures, one of Skype's' four venture backers. With Dragons' Den serving as an edgy self-help guide , the second season could breathe even more fire into Europe's entrepreneurial enthusiasm than the first.

• MARK HALPER / London
• A hit BBC show puts entrepreneurs through the wringer as they beg big investors for startup cash