Europe

“The product culture is stronger in America, and the services culture is stronger in Europe, and in particular in London and the UK.”

“Europe, if you look at the tops of billion-dollar tech exits, or unicorns, or whatever you want to call them in the last 20 years, there's been, or 10 years, rather, there's been over 30 coming out of Europe, and there's many more in the pipe.”

“In 2010 when I was partner at Next Generation Finance Invest we yeah, looked at Europe, and we had I would say around 30 companies we would have defined as finance two point oh, or fintech, how you call it.”

“We started EasyNet, which was the first consumer ISP in Europe.”

“Yes, I think between, well, Myself, Tim Jackson, I would say Gil Dibner are probably the three.”

“Doug has one of the largest angel-less syndicates in Europe, With over 350,000 pounds backing him now.”

“It's a great moment right now to be investing in Europe but there's definitely an opportunity to bring a bit of, like, that style and expertise to Europe, right?”

“If you're trying to hire teams that have, you know, that financial services experience, then London's by far the best place in Europe and one of the best places in the world to do that.”

“Bucks is Europe's largest mobile trading platform and app, with an incredible 175,000 active users.”

“We quit Foursquare end of 2012, and we had to go back to Europe because we didn't have any visa at that time to stay in the U.S. Because we were just, we quit our job, so we had to go back in Europe in the winter of 2012, and then we launched Sunrise February …”

“Europe is producing more STEM students every year over the last 10 years compared to the U.S.,”

“What Europe needs is entrepreneurs, investing entrepreneurs, and I think you're the best guy to do this.”

“There's not as many funds focused on the sort of B and beyond. That are very much, you know, local European funds. You know, there's only a few of them. There's literally less than, well, I would say there's really two or three if you look pure, pure VC funds.”

“Even though the, you know, I think the amount of capital that's being invested going into VC today is about 30% more than last year, we're still six or seven times smaller than the US. And if you go into the later stages, we're about 12 times smaller.”

“In Europe right now, there's a lot of money going into seed in Series A”

“Europe's got great founders. It's got the capital now. It's got the great technical expertise as well. But what we don't have, we haven't had people that have been through big companies multiple times and can take companies from fifty million in revenue to fiv…”

“And I'm very adamant about this. I think Europe's incredibly well-positioned going forward to create the next, not billion, but ten billion dollar companies.”

“However, what it's done is it's actually raised the bar for the follow-on rounds of financing. So now when you need to raise that Series B or Series C, there hasn't been the commensurate growth in capital available at those stages, which means the bar is highe…”

“The web has shifted away from an infrastructure-led, ah, play to what you do on top of the platforms that are already there. It's about the creative, the design-led, the services-led businesses that you can build on top of what is there.”

“Now, because the web is not about the infrastructure, it's about what you do with it, once again, Europe is producing some amazing, leading fashion companies whether it's Bonne-Privé five, six years ago that came out of France, or Ux and Net-A-Porter merging r…”

“You know, I'm not sure there's going to be one or I, I'm not sure it's, there's necessarily for one to emerge. I think London is, is doing well. Berlin is showing a lot of energy, but you also have you know, Tel Aviv and you have Madrid and Barcelona and you h…”

“This is something we talk about a lot. Not necessarily YC Europe. We think about China, and we think about India a lot. It's something that, That we haven't figured out quite how it would work yet. I think YC is changing so much and has changed so much in the …”

“We're always going to be a small firm, but I think we can be a little bit bigger so that we can support our entrepreneurs the best way. But, you know, we want to be, I don't think we want to be a big firm. I don't think we want to be and doing growth deals. We…”

“If you look at what Europe does best, or has historically done best, it's a lot of enterprise software, and sort of less You know, less consumer and less sexy.”

“I think because America is a single market with one language, and you've got a lot more high-profile VCs on Twitter, you know, other, like other entrepreneurs, that they can, like, amplify your message a lot quicker in the consumer space.”

“Realized that there was a lot of interesting stuff going on with venture and entrepreneurship and, you know, way more interesting companies being set up in Europe than there ever were before I'd left, you know, 10 years earlier.”

“I think that idea has well and truly been replaced in the U S where it's okay to do that if you want to do that, but it's also okay to stay in charge. So you have, you know, very, very prominent cases like someone like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, or Jack Dor…”

“If we look today, there's probably A little bit more seed capital than potentially is there to find the great deals.”

“The growth phase is getting more, more intense, and there's maybe too much capital chasing the few really high quality deals.”

“There'd be a huge much more venture money available in America, but conversely here in the UK, we have there's more government money and tax breaks here as well as in Europe.”

“Well, you endgame, you have to take a plane to San Fran at some point to sell your company, because nobody can swallow a company in Europe over, you know, a billion dollars.”

“It's often quite easy to look at what's going on trend wise in the U S and then see those same, same things happen over here a bit later.”

“I think on all levels, London is just the number one ecosystem in Europe. And that won't change for, you know, either for a long while or ever.”

“It's also pretty clear that in terms of momentum, Berlin is probably or is, in my eyes, the clear number two in Europe.”

“I think Europe might be the most exciting venture opportunity on the planet right now.”

“And I think very often, especially in Europe, Founders are being made to feel extremely guilty when things don't work, whereas in the US you find these attitudes very different, which is like, hey, we tried, it was a big ambitious problem, you know, turns out …”

“I think the US is still Faster, more transparent, more professional. I think there's a better, ah, there's a better VC landscape in the US. Just people understand, like I said before, you know, the more tolerant to people failing and losing money and so forth,…”

“You've got this country that's got, what, like, eight million people, and it's got more NASDAQ-listed companies than all of Europe, plus China, plus Japan combined.”

“I think the first one is that there are very few European acquirers. So you know, a lot of these potential acquirers are all, you know, based, based on the West Coast, pretty much. If you're a pure tech company, and I think there's, you know, not that many com…”

“At index, we have both a thematic and a geographical approach, especially in Europe, you know, because the European ecosystem is still quite fragmented. And if you want to do early stage in, you know, in France and Germany and in the Nordics, you kind of have …”

“The IPO market in Europe is, you know, is, is not extremely strong because there is a lack of culture on, around tech and in, in those places.”

“Or a third part path, which is more prevalent, I think, in Europe than in the US, you come in through the ranks of private equity or banking and then come in as an investment side.”

“Active Series A funds, which for us meant funds that have done at least five Series A investments in the last three years. And we looked at West Coast versus New York versus Europe. West Coast, I think that's something like a 140 active Series A funds. New Yor…”

“So head of product is probably the hardest role to find in Europe.”

“No, because the capital is global, highly mobile. The biggest occurs in Europe are Google, Microsoft, SAP, and I don't care. And now Chinese companies Chinese companies, Japanese companies, I think that that makes it less of a problem. So big companies will be…”

“I would like to see Robin hood become an international financial services company. I would like to see us scale like internet company scale, not like tech or not like financial services companies. I would love to be live across. All of Europe, I would love to …”

“They're going to go and build the third wave, which is the 10, fifty, hundred billion dollar companies. And they're obviously not going to be competitive with the types of companies built in San Francisco in the same fields, not in sort of the information sear…”

“There was 700 funds in Europe in 2007. After the crash, there were about 400.”

“So in Europe and Asia, where public transport is more prevalent and more used, I do think that a fleet-based approach, where you take out your phone, press a button, and an autonomous car comes and picks you up, But you don't necessarily own that car. It's sha…”

“We at Sapphire focus on early stage firms, US, Europe, and Israel, predominantly folks with series A exposure.”

“Dropbox had 70% of its users outside of North America, and the biggest chunk of those were in Europe”

“If you look at most SaaS companies, and really, I think, most companies that generate revenue, 30 to 40% of their revenue will come from Europe”

“We've just sent a bus around Europe to go collect 20,000 short videos of native speakers in context.”

“We've got more engineers in Europe than the US by 700,000.”

“Looking at Trivago business model, there is a set of Peers. So, so set of company who you would say like in the same space as us, every single one of them is listed in the U S yeah. So there is none of them is really listed in Europe.”

“I think that's a little bit different in, in Europe actually. Yeah. So, but it's not because there would not be also competent banks in Europe, but it just, they cannot focus so much. Right. So, I mean, they have to cover often way more different companies. An…”

“The concentration of, like, good tech people is probably better In Europe compared to, like, the competition you have here in SF. I mean, you have, like, crazy good people here, but the local industry is startup, so you are going to compete with so many other …”

“Facebook ultimately ended up doing the same thing where they were literally buying ads in Europe against individuals' names so that they could convert those people onto Facebook as a platform.”

“European entrepreneurs have that discipline because they're required to have that discipline, that you don't have the size of market and the cohesion of market that you have in the U.S. And so you really have to nail that regional example and experiment first.”

“There's more research papers, AI research papers that is coming out of Europe than anywhere else, but European AI entrepreneurs get one-tenth funding of US entrepreneurs.”

“The U.S. Has a better underlying rate of growth and more economic vitality. On the other hand, I think that the U.S. Lacks the national leadership, which might be required to get us through this. My guess is that the, well, in this little instance here, I'm go…”

“Japan and Europe, for example, have been trying to accomplish two percent inflation for years, and they can't make it happen.”

“If you take Silicon Valley and Seattle out of it, the US actually would be worse than Europe if you took those two out of it.”

“If you fast forward five years, there won't be much of a delta between the two, so that's not going to be the problem.”

“US and Europe is too easy. You're going to work very, very, very hard to make the life of the one percent, five percent better. If you move to Latin America, you're going to work very, very hard to make the life of 99% of the people, 70% better. So, ultimately…”

“Online penetration of food is three to five percent still today. Now, I think the US sort of leapfrogged a lot during COVID, but if you look at Europe, It's still in that, you know, one meal out of 21 a week is online. So I think we're super, super early.”

“When Jim was at Citicorp Venture Capital, one of his first jobs was to go to close down their English operation because there weren't any good deals in Europe.”

“So arc is an eight week seed catalyst program for us founders and European founders. It's going to be two separate cohorts and we actually launch in Europe first.”

“With Hoppin at the seed, I think it was one of the most, quote unquote, expensive seeds in Europe at the time.”

“Why does some of these European payroll and HR, workforce management companies, not knocking on Europe, but why do you need a rippling for Europe? There's no Airbnb for Europe. There's no Google for Europe. Why do you need a rippling for Europe? Why do you nee…”

“I think midpoint last year, there was a lot of conversation, not just with our board, but investors on how fast we should be moving in Europe. And a lot of folks were really pushing us to expand to Germany faster expand to other areas in Europe faster.”

“The problematic behaviors that you're describing, which by the way, you are spot on. And I hate to say this cause I absolutely love Europe, but it's a bigger problem in Europe than it is in the U S. And the re the reason is because so many of those people are …”

“What we have in Europe is, 90% of our companies are family businesses.”

“But the reason I think it's harder is because, you know, if you start, let's say in France, then you have an addressable market that is, you know, basically the worst size, right? Because it's actually too big for you to branch out early. But too small for you…”

“And so I actually made the decision to scale back and shut down Europe. Because it was just splitting our resources.”

“They have the U S in the, in this space of the time, since we last spoke has gone from well behind Europe, the UK, amongst the major industrialized countries in addressing climate change to putting in place, you know, the measures now driving with the investme…”

“The only European countries that can rival country that rival the US in terms of the quality of job for an academic or a scientist is Switzerland.”

“Because they're going to regulate all innovation out of Europe, and not embrace this technology to drive them forward.”

“That being said, I've met many more investors that I'm impressed with in the U.S. Than in Europe, right?”

“I think enterprises are inherently ignorant and lazier than we give them credit for. And they like simple solutions, especially in Europe.”

“It's a joke, but not without some element of truth to say that Europe's a museum, Japan's a nursing home, China's a jail, and Bitcoin's an experiment.”

“Europe is probably 10 years late compared to U.S. And China, and with a new regulation, we are probably going to take 50 years more.”

“10 years ago, VCs in Europe were all from the financial industry, you know, there is nothing about financial industry, finance in being a VC, a little bit, of course, but it's mostly about entrepreneurship, and so 10 years ago, all the VCs I was working with i…”

“One of the percent of the LMs that were trained these last three years would be illegal in Europe.”

“It's a bit cultural dependent because, you know, there are parts of Europe where that's just not a thing. Like people just, people think you're trying to pull a fast one on them. If you say, I'm going to give you equity. And so it is, you know, case by case. B…”

“What Europe is going to try to do is overregulate everything and just completely destroy innovation.”

“Months, many months, minimum.”

“The US, if you have failed as an executive after building a new startup, you know, they will give you a second and a third chance. At that time, Europe was not like that.”

“I think that level of complacency in these industries, in these big countries, has stopped innovation and have permitted that a lot of these emerging markets, these technologies have leapfrog to a place today where, where Brazil, China, India are ahead of U.S.…”

“Everything that you know about competition will be 10 X what you'll find in the US.”

“You know, Larry Stummer's quote is still pretty good that Europe's a museum. I think that's probably pretty apt.”

“Their entire approach is off. Right. So it's just completely off. And so the right approach is what we see everywhere, what we see in Canada and in Europe and in UK where parliament or legislatures work, work to put in place proper laws.”

“And I think Lithuania has a bit of an exception because it's a very young country. They really want to build themselves up, want to prove themselves. So there's a very strong work ethic there.”

“I mean, we pride ourselves that Europe has grown a lot, but still relatively speaking has lost a track with America and China.”

“We're seeing all these new companies coming out, we're seeing new unicorns, they're coming from 65 cities, you know, 10 years ago, they came from three cities coming all over Europe, much bigger market, remote working, can put teams together that we couldn't s…”

“It is, of course, holding Europe back compared to the US. Now, there are several reasons why US, why Europe is growing less fast than the US. And it struck me, I spent a month in New York in November and met with a lot of companies, and you just, there is a di…”

“And when I look at our portfolio there's a reason only 10% of our portfolio is invested in Europe.”

“We could not operate only from Europe, and that we needed to go to the US very quickly.”

“That is not going to happen. We are not going to see many more European growth funds be built in the next few years for sure. Not in the next three to five.”

“I mean, Europe produces incredible talent, but what you see is a lot of the best talent in Europe is going to move to an environment that's more friendly to startups in terms of regulatory, in terms of funding, in terms of pools of labor, in terms of tax rates…”

“Every time we've messed up is when we over rotate a bet against Europe.”

“I think that is going to set Europe back in competitiveness more than it's already been set back in competitiveness over the last 20 years.”

“If I'm in Europe and I'm starting a company, I would get out.”

“And so when you look at kind of the key markets for AI development, where the US is first and China is second and Israel is third I think those are likely to be less regulated than most, and certainly than Europe, and so these, those will be advantaged economi…”

“Like, why does Silicon Valley work? Because the most ambitious and talented people in that area become founders. If the same thing happened, In the UK, in Europe, in India, we'd have very similar outcomes.”

“The United States now has sort of stronger multi-generational aristocracy than Europe has.”

“In the first six months of 2024, Europe did not launch a single orbital rocket. You guys did not send a single kilogram of matter from the surface of the earth into space.”

“I think it's probably Europe. Like a year ago, I would have been slightly more optimistic about Europe than I am today. I think Europe has made every wrong decision in the last year and like really kind of Solidified its place amongst dinosaurs.”

“I think we're moving away from free speech very quickly in Europe.”

“I think there'll still be great companies created in Europe. I just think that the rate, like the probability of those things happening will be lower than in many other places and lower in Europe on a proportionate basis than it was. 20 years ago.”

“I would say that there is a difference in the states People feel like their job is a much bigger part of their identity, and I think in Europe is just less of a phenomenon, and when you feel that your job is important to you personally, I think you put in more…”

“The other thing is the process versus initiative. Like, I think if you go back to that spectrum that I described, like, you can get stuff done with initiative or process, and you come to the middle, I think my experience is that, again, this is generalization,…”

“You know, this is actually one of the things that I had to adjust, is that for every let's say, 20 maybe 10, 20, if it's specialized role, candidates that you get in the U.S. That are solid, maybe you get one in Europe. And that actually really slows down your…”

“I actually think it's more kind of like the younger generation across Europe and the US. I think especially people who maybe this is their first job, and they had a job that is, like, pretty just cushy from the perspective of, like, you know, all the benefits …”

“I have found no shortage of people in Europe that, or in America, there's a stereotype about Europe But the fact of the matter is that people who want to join races and do truly their life's work, they're built differently, and you can find them all over the w…”

“Look, there's certain heavily regulated industries, and I don't know them very well, but I'm sure eventually they're at a disadvantage. But that doesn't hold, for example, for most of SaaS, and also neither for most of marketplaces.”

“So I think status quo, we have to be short. Government is just, yeah.”

“In Europe, 62% of large enterprises still don't know what Slack is.”

“In Europe today, We're not producing the chips. We're not producing the energy. We don't have the foundational layer models. So in that sense, these countries that don't possess those three elements are not really sovereign countries when it comes to AI.”

“I'm not sure if we're not gonna get it, I think we're just gonna get it last. It's gonna just, it's just gonna take longer.”

“First, I think we do have enough domestic capital now, like the amount of incredible and not incredible funds in Europe. There are too many. I think there's too much money for two little good entrepreneurs.”

“I think there's a lot of interesting and very challenging structural issues facing Europe. And I think fundamentally, again, it's coming from a very, very American perspective. There's an ambition. There is a, you know, seeking and working towards a better, br…”

“I think what actually, what we underestimated was that micro-mobility is just a category that will work in almost every city in Europe.”

“There is way too much money in Europe and there are way too few opportunities. And the result of that is you see this concentration of capital into the few obviously good ones, and the prices are just fucking nuts. And I mean, the amount of mediocre to poor la…”

“Still to this day, Bolt is the largest ticket Sequoia has ever done into Europe.”

“We today are one of the few players that's fully vertically integrated, so we have our own hardware team, so we design our own squatters, we have our own team in China where we manufacture them, we then ship them to Europe, we have hundreds of warehouses, we t…”

“If so, I'd say that it's very hard to find strong people leaders in Europe who actually understand tech companies and who have actually built organizations of thousands of people that I agree with. There's just almost no tech companies of that size in Europe.”

“I think that there's a lot of things going on well in the world of technology, but I think it's absolutely insane that we have war going on in Europe. Russia attacking Ukraine, killing people, and everybody's just basically forgotten about it.”

“We became overnight from being, having almost no presence in that sector to becoming the largest micro-mobile to operate in Europe. Still to this day, nobody operates with such a big fleet in so many cities.”

“The US defense budget has like, 14% R&D, which translates into ninety-four billion own R&D a year, which is, ah, allotant, which is proprietary findings that then finds its way. In Europe, it's four percent, and so nine billion.”

“And in Europe, we are at all .5% of GDP. So we are under financing innovation by factor eight in comparison to the levels that made us wealthy in the fifties, sixties, seventies.”

“If you think about the 2000 and early 2010, there were no technical founders. So that, and I thought lengthily about In fact, why is that? Because we had the copycat nations where the Samba brothers built the machine rocket internet, but this was basically an …”

“When you look at deal cycles, when you look at deal pricing, when you look at quality of deals, I think we have dramatically too few good companies for the amount of cash that we have, which is why we're seeing the exorbitant prices that we are in Europe.”

“So I think on the very top of the pyramid, it's exactly the same. You will, people fight like maniacs, and there is everything that you do in order to get somewhere, but I think the broader base under the bell curve is more complacent, more entitled,”

“Trump has a point, because it's pretty naive to think that everybody else pays and we don't need to pay, yeah.”

“So, the necessity, when it comes to embracing innovation To cooperate with the VC world and VC-financed innovation is way, way higher in, in Europe than it is in the U.S.”

“So right now we have our penetration of market share. I would say it depends from five percent to sometimes 70%. On average, I would say 10%. So if we manage to go from 10% to 30, 40% market share in our top 10 markets, so there will be already probably four X…”

“U.S. Companies, they always win Europe, and I almost never see an exception, so I think it'll be very cool to tick this box.”

“Over time there just won't be, I think the capability even of partners and as it looks to also not the willingness to do so.”

“I don't think that there is a lack of capital in Europe. Certainly not seed, series A, symptoms even series B.”

“I'm not sure whether we'll be able to create those companies kind of in the next two or three years to a point where they provide sufficient sovereignty, but I'm very sure we can do it over the next five to 10 years.”

“I, look, I think it's better for the world and better for Europe if Europe increases its defense spending. Now, I understand it was the right thing after World War II and the right thing with the Marshall Plan and the right thing to create interdependence to d…”

“I still do think that The chance of success is higher if you're in the US on the west coast. I think there's a lot of pros, especially like the last six, seven years got a lot better to build here, but do still think that there is a lot of advantages to be in …”

“In Europe, I think people, again, for good and for better and for worse, right? I think people are, they think less like that, right? As you of course know, like stock options in Europe, people still view it as like, A random lottery ticket, not really as part…”

“Honestly, I don't really have a strong sense that people work way harder in the Valley. I actually don't like, I know a couple of great friends who've moved over there and opened offices. And I have not heard from any of them that like, wow, people just work s…”

“Europe has all the AI regulation and none of the AI companies.”

“I don't know if the world right now needs yet another emerging manager, yet another micro cap fund. I think what we need is like five to 10 dominant Superstar venture funds in Europe, kind of the way in the Bay Area, they're like, 10 or 15 of those.”

“I think most of us become momentum investors in this industry. We write the check largely to get the next markup, not to build the long-term, durable, big company of tomorrow. And I don't think there are that many people in Europe who do those kinds of things.”

“When you look at what's happening in AI, you got DeepMind down the road in London, you got Meta running its AI stuff in Paris, like we are for the first time ever in European history on par from the company creation or technology creation as the US in not a ni…”

“So what I, for me, you know, watching everything, it feels like with Europe, there's a lack of a willingness to take risk, right? There's a black mark if you get it wrong, like everything's about downside protection. Whereas in the U S it's like, that was a gr…”

“I would say by the end of this year, you should have 100 station Fs. And by the end of next year, you should have a thousand.”

“Ireland is our beachhead into Europe, right? That's the regulatory region we want to work with, and that's where we want to domicile out of.”

“No, I don't care. I have zero, I, this is something I makes me wonder sometimes. I understand the narrative and so on, but I am absolutely not fearful. Let's be successful first and then we'll talk about the politics.”

“The most important thing is talent and culture, and it's, More raw, there's more raw available talent in Europe.”

“And they all make sense and they have good intention, but in collectively, it's just a big burden on, on, on those European companies. And I think a little bit unfairly that they are not the same criteria for other companies competing in Europe. So I think thi…”

“I think in three to five years, I would like our technology to have been used to solve two important societal problems. I would like it to be used to have found a therapeutic for, ah, an affliction that, that impacts more than a million people a year. I would …”

“So there's going to be a wave of more M&A, right? Especially if, you know, pros and cons looking at the stock market, but if Trump remains pro M&A, You know, as long as your pesky Europe doesn't get in the way this is going to be a golden age of M&A. Like, jus…”

“If you look at where talent is being born in, like, AI across Europe, and you look at where it lands in terms of where it stays, actually the UK is minting about the same talent it's keeping but that is a net-net, actually. So we're losing talent to the US and…”

“Chip design, which is where 75% of the value in the semiconductor space is, is what NVIDIA is, what Qualcomm is, what Broadcom is, all basically semiconductor design companies that basically sell chips, that they get them fabbed. By TSMC or whoever. So that, t…”

“And there's probably, what, two to three trillion can be spent over the next five to eight years in Europe, in defense, actually, and all layers, not just final product, but like components, and there's lots of layers here, I think.”

“I've become a whole lot more optimistic on Europe. I think, frankly, everything that has happened in relation to US, I've become so much more bullish on Europe. We will rebuild the critical industries.”

“And the ways that US cannot be trusted anymore to be the protector of Europe.”

“If we don't, if we can't guarantee that the Android solution works, regardless of what people do in the US, we cannot trust it.”

“If we talk about anything that gets visual audio information, robots, cameras, we probably want to control who has access to the information we gather, and who has access to a kill switch.”

“Defense contributions, you know, we were not at two percent in Europe before Estonia was ahead, but in, and Poland was ahead, but, you know, we need to get to three, four, five percent everywhere. And same in other critical industries.”

“In a way, the best thing that could happen to Europe is if the U.S. Made it really hard to immigrate for founders. You know, if they made it really hard, if they restricted immigration such that you know, people like me couldn't, couldn't move there anymore, t…”

“But I can guarantee you Duolingo would not have been able to raise any money in Europe.”

“Europe has 60% of the global inbound travel.”

“We spent fifty billion a year in VC in Europe. The US is north of two hundred billion.”

“If I'd go back in time, it's another lesson for a lot of founders. I would have not gone as early. I would have done more in Europe. I think we would have had even more growth and more profitability.”

“If I want to hire, let's say the next chief product officer, At Get Your Guide, it's almost impossible to do that in Europe and need to go to Silicon Valley because the density of people who have done that scale have served tens of millions of customers a year…”

“Trade Republic, which you know, is a very successful fintech company, probably one of the most underrated companies in Europe, you know, they're absolutely crushing it.”

“So Europe for KKR is an eight billion dollar fund. It's the largest standalone investment fund in Europe.”

“Yes, of course we need a European SEC. Yes, of course we need A bit more of one pan-European place where people can go public. It's extremely important.”

“We absolutely over-regulated that space. We need to unleash the power of that technology, technological innovation, and not stifle it by too much innovation for sure.”

“Short answer to your question is, yes innovation, what, you know, what you know best Is the answer to these problems. But I wouldn't be so negative. They are coming now much faster than some people realize.”

“If you were to try and come up with three or four reductive reasons why the U.S. Has created so much more economic value than Europe, I think if you're intellectually honest, you would say that in the U.S. Companies are allowed to ask for forgiveness, not perm…”

“Well, what's live right now in Europe, fully live, is public stocks. And we've got about 200 plus of all the big ones.”

“If you pick somebody in Rappi or iFood or MercadoLibre, the energy and the passion of those people is, in my experience, two, three X is no more of what I see in, in the average here in Europe, right?”

“We'll see what, you know, Q three and Q four look like, but in the U S this is going to be the lowest year since 17 in Europe. Same. So it goes back a bit further, maybe to 20 16.”

“We consistently invest about half in Europe and half in the US”

“A culture of like humility and low ego and working really, really well together as a team that I think is stronger in Europe and like this way of thinking in terms of efficiency and doing much, much more with less that's also stronger here.”

“Stronger on an absolute basis, weaker on a relative basis.”

“Europe's not in the race right now. I mean, maybe it can find a way to be in the race, but I don't think it's in the race. You've got the US and China as the two groups that are leading in AI.”

“I think you want to be able to build from Europe, but not built only for Europe. And I think those two get conflated where sometimes building from Europe meant, okay, you are building for European ecosystem, which isn't the right thing. You still want the glob…”

“Helsing with this mission, its execution its access to capital, talent should be the company that gets disproportionate share of defense in Europe.”

“From the people that I work with, we certainly work very hard in Europe. So no, I think there is the drive, and there is the desire there to work just as hard as our Americans.”

“There's two kinds of risk. There's mistakes of commission, where you do something that's a mistake, and then there's mistakes of omission, where you don't do something and it's a mistake. And the United States is terrified of making mistakes of omission. When …”

“Then Europe's economy is going to be a tourist economy. People are going to come here to see the quaint old buildings, and that's going to be it.”

“If you think about deals revenue split today, 50% comes from the US, a little over 35% comes from Europe, and the rest is that kind of rest of the world”

“Well, so I'm never going back to Europe to live.”

“So, like, if you look at the, what the Brits and Europeans pay in terms of, you know, cost per kilowatt, it's roughly 25 to 30 dollar cents. And the US is 10 to 15 dollar cents. In China, it's eight dollar cents.”

“80% of it is the exact same. Hard work. Pipeline generation. All of that stuff is applicable in Europe, just like it is in the US.”

“I had this heuristic, which was if we can sign and serve two of the AM law, 200 law firms from Europe we are ready to open in the US.”

“I find that there is an increasing level of hating the successful, hating the rich. I see it on Twitter. I think in Europe it's even worse, but it's come to America, unfortunately.”

“Like that's roughly what the continent needs for full sovereignty, right? To have as, at least as much infrastructure locally as there is within the alphabet holdings sort of pool. Over the next four years.”

“Independence at scale, at every part of the AI infrastructure stack, like land, PowerShell in Europe, that's sovereign, it's local. Compute infrastructure, that's local. And models that are trained locally, by the way, fully open, so they can be deployed and c…”

“I think with geopolitics, I think there needs to be like a European neoprime for defense.”

“I feel like Europe is like the sick man of the world right now. I feel like Europe could have some of the foundational, civilizational, like of Western culture that came out of here, London, England, right? And it feels that like they're not seizing the opport…”

“Again, I think Europe, especially now that the UK has left the European Union, needs to double down on Prussian economic theory of Friedrich List and his co-conspirators and just define excellent games that create internal markets.”

“The other thing is, this is true in general of hiring in the Bay Area, the loyalty is a lot less high than you would get from hiring in Europe. Because in Europe, people really value a good company and a good job, and it's just not the same thing in New York o…”

“You have to get rid of these ridiculous regulations.”

“I just think it's hard to find the types of people harder, I should say to find the types of people, particularly outside of the UK in Europe that are willing to put the effort in that I think is required to be successful. I just think it's challenging.”

“There has emerged in Europe a sort of be afraid of it, then regulate it, tax it, or sort of mentality that works against entrepreneurship.”

“I think that it's going to be difficult to change because there's just so many strong network effects around talent, right? When we have the best talent, even I know so many Brilliant French researchers that go to work at OpenAI and dropping in DeepMind, right…”

“I would accept that, yeah. I think that maybe it's worth having some post training capabilities because there is going to be value to distillation and some of the work that happens after foundation models are built, and there's definitely going to be some valu…”

“It's actually something that we had to sort of educate people on in Sweden. And in Europe, I think it's, people are just not used to the venture thing. They don't know how to value equity the same way.”

“It should. But it doesn't yet.”

“In the US, people are generally less risk averse, so like, they'll, they'll be ready to jump on a lot of things to test. I think in Europe, people are more risk averse. People in Europe, and I'm super generalizing now, but I think Generally are more, I don't w…”

“Probably on the, like, frontier model lab side.”

“In Europe, I mean, it's a, it's tough. I think that there were some, there was some good positioning that Europe had, you know, a few years ago, a few decades ago with nuclear that I think hasn't been, you know, delivered on as much as of late, but that would …”

“I've been pitched four to five European Towns or European instincts. I mean, literally four to five separate ones.”

“And so we are focused more and more in on hiring in Europe and outside the US.”