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Abundance in Europe

2nd of September, 2026

Europe is a great idea, an idea that I love. The best way to serve it is to contribute to prosperity and abundance on the continent1, so let us think through how to do so.

First, some exposition on what is so wonderful about Europe, the idea and the place: It is no coincidence that Europe is home to the important breakthroughs in physics (classical mechanics, electrodynamics, relativity, quantum physics), the home of democracy, the home of the best art, the home of the industrial revolution. I'm not sure exactly why, but my best guess is that Europeans take ideas seriously; they realize that the fate of humanity is contingent on all our actions, and we can change it for the better or for the worse. They have a developed aesthetic sense. I notice this thoughtfulness in my European friends. I appreciate moving through and living in European cities, using European products. I think the world would be better off if Europe played a larger part in it.

At the same time, we are situated at the beginning of rapid automation of various parts (or all) of the world economy by AI2. Changes now have an unusually large effect, and if we're to steer Europe towards a bright future we'd better act unusually quickly and diligently. In a lucky turn of events, I have observed a growing number of capable people acting on this urgent situation. There is a hopeful possibility.

The best way to increase European influence is to grow the economy. There are no cheap tricks to growing the economy, you have to do it the hard way, but I do think some obvious handicaps await lifting. In the rest we'll focus on one aspect, namely to make a lot of new valuable companies happen. It might sound like making new companies is only one of many ways to grow the economy. Another one would be to make old companies more profitable. But I think making new companies is the only way to succeed; the world brought about by AI will be so different from the world that old companies are used to. Some new organizations will be highly successful with only a few employees, and thus much more profitable than old companies. Making a 200B€ biotech company with 5,000 employees is incredibly hard, but has become possible. It's harder still to make the 50,000 employees of the 200B€ Novo Nordisk ten times more productive. So startups it is.

What equipment are we missing on the path to 100,000 new tech companies in Europe? Here it's easy to get bogged down, but in my view there is a clear main answer. The answer is to make smart people want to start companies in the first place.

Starting a company is one of the most stressful careers out there, its most likely outcome is total failure. No wonder it's not attractive by default. So one cheap thing Europe could move towards is just giving props, status, and goodwill to people who at least try. It should be the hottest thing imaginable for the smartest, most thoughtful people to start a company.

Then of course, there are the more material barriers to starting companies. Like regulation, speed of registration, minimal capital needed to form a company. I think the importance of these is often overestimated, because someone smart and committed is not stopped easily by such trivialities. A committed founder knows that they are right and just need to look harder. The United States also has horribly complicated laws, people just try harder to find a way around them. But on the margin material improvements do make a big difference of course, and so it's all the better to see things like the new EU-wide incorporation structure fix some of it soon.

A decent mental model for all of this is to copy everything that works in the Bay Area one to one: A megaton of venture investment, in numerous and driven venture firms, standardized investment terms like the YC SAFE, YC itself for that matter, something like Stripe Atlas.

So we need to grow commercial culture in Europe. Doable. Now comes a more tricky aspect. From personal observation, someone in Europe who is capable and excited about starting a company will often try to escape to the Bay Area. This makes sense; there they can be with who they perceive as their peers and enjoy the material niceties of a well-developed startup ecosystem. Who would blame them. Here comes the trick though: I will blame them. Hey, what are you doing over there, leaving your country after freeloading on your family, city, community, culture, country to serve some other place you don't even care about? One way to increase the number of great new European companies is to increase European patriotism among smart people to non-zero levels. Talented Europeans starting companies in the United States don't seem to care much about the prosperity of their home continent. Now, there exists a kind of vulgar patriotism already, one that isn't too concerned about the best possible version of Europe or its constituent countries, instead focusing on preservation of an imagined past state. Instead, I imagine a patriotism that constantly asks for the best possible version of Europe. I like the example of national flags. When I see someone has a national flag in their backyard, their room, et cetera, I catch myself assuming that they are exactly the kind of backwards person who is neither equipped nor willing to effectively contribute to the prosperity of the country. I would often be wrong in that assumption, but it's been a sure deterrent against even thinking to put up a flag myself. This used to be different; the current German flag for example was originally heralded by republican university students in the early 19th century; people whose political goal was unification of disparate German monarchies to one state with a parliament, free speech and free trade. It's inspiring that they only needed a small minority to start a huge change for the better. The small minority we'll want to have put flags up are young technologists. If we have them on board, we can set goals more ambitious than the unification of Germany: to start 100,000 tech companies, double European GDP in a decade, or whatever else we like.

We have already asked for two big vibe shifts, the rise of both commercial culture and 1830s-style patriotism in Europe, so I wouldn't blame you for condemning the above as an idle daydream. Surprisingly though, I am beginning to see something close to both shifts already happening in my personal surroundings. Some examples: being invited for coffee with a >2B€ valuation fusion startup in Germany (yes, that exists), researchers in Boston telling me they want to return to the EU because of the increasingly strict US visa policies, and coming across memos by new wave of data center buildout think tanks in Brussels. Someone I met over lunch in Berkeley straight up told me they are starting an industrial robotics company in Munich with the explicit goal of improving Europe's geopolitical leverage. This is all circumstantial evidence, but of the kind that I find hard to ignore.

I think the bright future of the European idea and the European continent is severely underappreciated. But facta, non verba. Below is a list of concrete things you can do to bring about prosperity in Europe.

Mail me if you are doing one of the above, or have more ideas. I'll add them to the list.

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