Europe’s Great Founders Must Unretire

Cultural values and social norms make it too comfortable for the continent’s most productive to enjoy their wealth.

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Friends, 

What will it take for Europe to succeed as a technological force over the next century?

In discussing that question with Helsing co-founder Torsten Reil, he shared an observation. Whereas great American entrepreneurs tend to continue building even after they’ve achieved prominence, their European counterparts often prefer to retire early. By doing so, they deprive the continent of decades of productivity and hamper its long-term innovation. 

Though it’s certainly not the only factor, it is an important one. To try and convince more great European entrepreneurs to keep building, Torsten and I have co-authored today’s piece. It explores this cultural difference, its causes, and its impact. 

We hope you enjoy it. 

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This is an opinion piece written by The Generalist’s Mario Gabriele and Helsing co-founder Torsten Reil.

In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. By doing so, it made a handful of startup founders and senior operators wealthy. Elon Musk earned $250 million, Peter Thiel clipped $60 million, and Max Levchin’s windfall totalled $34 million. Reid Hoffman, Roelof Botha, David Sacks, Keith Rabois, and others would have earned decent paydays, too.

It is a testament to the ambition of this group that PayPal’s acquisition was not the end of their building careers, but the beginning. It hardly bears repeating, but in the following years, members of tech’s most productive “mafia” founded SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Palantir, LinkedIn, YouTube, Affirm, Yelp, and OpenDoor, to name just the headline efforts. They brought cutting-edge technologies to life, fortified national security, created more than a hundred thousand jobs, and manifested over a trillion dollars in enterprise value.

Entertain, for a moment, a counterfactual: What if PayPal had been founded in Europe instead of California? Would its mafia have produced the same outcome? Would Europe be leading in rocket launches, electric vehicles, and defense technology? Or, influenced by milder environs, would its members have chosen simpler, less stressful alternatives – preferring to angel invest, dabble in side projects, and relax in the paradises of Tuscany or Cap d’Antibes.

For too long, the continent’s most productive founders have chosen the latter path. They have failed to use their experience, network, and ability to take progressively bigger swings. Peruse a list of significant European exits and look up what the founders are currently doing, should you need more proof. You will find plenty running diversified venture vehicles or spinning up marginal products, and precious few attempting to build something truly ambitious.

You need not consign yourself to Europe’s largest exits. It is perhaps even more concerning that founders who secure modest acquisitions seem content to quasi-retire. Scan the ecosystems in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and beyond, and you’ll find founders who earned a few million from a subscale acquisition and live in balmy comfort. In many respects, this is a rational decision. Starting and scaling a business is painful and stressful. But by stepping away from entrepreneurship early, these founders deprive the world (and themselves) of what they might have built with the lessons learned from their first venture.

Naturally, there are exceptions. Spotify’s Daniel Ek has propelled his music streaming platform to a $148 billion valuation, breaking a 52-year stretch in which Europe had failed to produce a company worth more than $100 billion from scratch. At the same time, Ek has launched preventative healthcare company, Neko, and was the founding investor in AI defense company, Helsing. (Torsten Reil, Helsing Co-CEO, is co-author of this piece.)

Two of Skype’s co-founders also deserve credit: Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla have spent eight years scaling Starship Technologies, an autonomous robotics delivery company. Though yet to transform its industry, it is nevertheless an ambitious project with the potential to make a greater impact than the founders’ previous business.

America does not seem to have this problem. Why? Because within the confines of Silicon Valley, it is socially damaging to take an early retirement. The best builders retain the respect of their peers through relentless ambition and remaining in the arena. Step out of it for long enough, and your relevance wanes quickly. The result is a culture that champions urgency, ambition, and continued exertion.

Long after achieving “post-economic status,” America’s entrepreneurs continue to launch new businesses. Thanks to Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, Palmer Luckey had a net worth of $700 million when he chose to co-found Anduril. Travis Kalanick could have retired after founding Uber, but chose to work on CloudKitchens. Jack Dorsey was well on his way to a mega-hit with Twitter when he launched Square. After co-founding both Twitch and Cruise, Kyle Vogt is building once again with The Bot Company. Nearly a decade after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, Reid Hoffman is still founding new businesses, most recently launching an AI drug discovery platform, Manas.

Not so in Europe. The old world venerates its old guard, even when its members are still in their thirties and forties. Rather than pushing its most capable citizens to utilize their productive years effectively, the continent’s culture celebrates their complacency. Thanks to widespread expectations around work-life balance and norms that dampen rather than amplify ambition, many effective entrepreneurs receive much greater social capital once they’ve stopped building.

The impact of this discrepancy is profound. Compare two elite builders in America and Europe. Conservatively, both have a total of four productive decades available to them, spanning from the age of 20 to 60. In America, a builder is likely to maximize all four of them, even if the character of their work changes. They may not log the same hours in the latter stages, but they rely on their connections and expertise to generate value. In the process, they train a new generation of founders and create technologies that might accelerate later progress.

Meanwhile, the European builder might tap out in their late thirties, moving through the remaining two decades at 0.5x speed. What might they have built had they expected more of themselves? How might society have benefited? How many younger founders might have been galvanized by superior apprenticeships?

If Europe were thriving, perhaps this could be excused. However, the last six months have made it unignorably clear that the region badly lags the US and China and needs a new technological renaissance to remain relevant and protect its interests. Now that Europe cannot rely on America, it must build lighthouse businesses worthy of staffing the technological talent it produces, particularly in artificial intelligence, deep tech, and defence. Failing to do so could cause a mass brain drain and box Europe out from the most consequential technologies of the modern era.

Europe is equal to these challenges, but only if it can rely on its best builders. We should not celebrate entrepreneurs who retire early—we should encourage them to go for it again rather than shelving their ambitions. It is time for those with the skills and experience capable of galvanizing technological and commercial breakthroughs to step off the sidelines and get back into the game. Tuscany can wait.