Well, I’m back in London, the city I’ve lived in twice and have visited at least a dozen times. Next week I speak at the FOWA conference, but today through Monday I’m seeing friends and meeting with startups.

I just had lunch with Saul Klein, the VP of Marketing at Skype and a Venture Partner at Index. I’ve known Saul for a few years now and it was good to catch up. The topic of conversation at lunch was how alive the startup scene is throughout Europe. It’s clear that Skype brought a new level of confidence to European entrepreneurs, who are more willing than ever to stay here and start their companies, whereas in the past they’d be moving to Silicon Valley.

Saul just wrote a blog post about this very topic. The one thing that strikes me about the tone is that it seems to be urging people here to realize that it’s ok to start their company in Europe. The whole thing boils down to “Come on guys, seriously, Skype showed that Europe doesn’t need silicon valley to achieve a global success, and look at all these examples of really interesting startups.” And he’s right. We talked about Netvibes, Last.fm, Allpeers and many others over lunch. And some, like Pageflakes and Bebo, started here and have since moved all or some of their operations to Silicon Valley.

Index Ventures is really kicking ass. They are getting into a lot of U.S. deals even though they’re based here in London. Mobissimo and SpotRunner are two of them. Of course, the fact that Index was a Skype investor certainly helps get them in the door. Saul tells me they are aggresively looking for interesting U.S. deals to invest in.

By the way, if you are trying to get in touch with me, my London mobile number is +44 (0) 7942 245659.