European Ambition

It was a dead thing. There is no other description for it: a building without a head. For fifty-six years, the people of Florence walked past a decapitated cathedral, the pre-dead corpse of Santa Maria Del Fiore.

Since 1380, the city of Florence had abandoned it with a 150-foot hole at the top, lopped off at the neck to drink weather. A person of that time could have lived a full life staring at that absence, the invisible dome, a translucent shell of anti-bricks.

What else was there to do? Santa Maria’s early architects had built themselves into a conundrum. The cathedral needed a dome. But to construct one was impossible. Not simply difficult but mathematically, logistically impossible. No one had built one of this size before, let alone in this style. Creating the necessary scaffolding required trees that didn’t exist, more timber than Tuscany produced. And so, for fifty-six years, Santa Maria remained headless.

I.

On December 6, Spotify hit a $100 billion market capitalization for the first time in its history. Amidst bitcoin’s run to $100,000 and the dizzying switchbacks of various altcoins, even a very earnest speculator might have missed such news. Of those who spotted it, many would have given it little more than a shrug.

It was a landmark moment, however brief. For a few hours, Europe had finally produced a $100 billion company this millennium. The last company that achieved this milestone — that was not a spin-off or the result of a merger — was SAP. The German software company was founded in 1972, began trading publicly in 1988, and is valued at $309 billion at the time of writing. (ARM Holdings, though founded in Cambridge in 1990, is majority-owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.)

Over the same period, America produced Microsoft ($3.3 trillion), Amazon ($2.4 trillion), Meta ($1.6 trillion), Nvidia ($3.3 trillion), and over a dozen other centacorns. China has produced Tencent ($483 billion), Alibaba ($212 billion), Pinduoduo ($136 billion), and a clutch of other winners. This is without counting the healthy parade of private companies SpaceX, ByteDance, OpenAI, and Stripe that will enter this club in the coming years. A calculation by MIT researcher Andrew McAfee suggests America’s “from-scratch” have added $30 trillion in market value to its market over the past 50 years, 70 times Europe’s tally.

What explains this difference in performance? Wealth alone does not account for it. The United States may lead the world with a GDP of $27.3 trillion, but even without adding the United Kingdom’s $3.3 trillion, the rest of Europe still produces $18.3 trillion. That surpasses China’s $17.8 trillion. (It is true that America’s economy is accelerating much more quickly: up 11.4% since 2019, compared to 3% in Europe; but this is more symptom than cause.)

Nor does talent. Europe is home to many of the world’s best universities, including great technical institutions. It is not an accident that DeepMind’s roots stretch to Cambridge and UCL, for example. Talent from European research labs played critical roles in the development of CRISPR, mRNA vaccines, and the World Wide Web itself.

What about time? America is the seat of silicon and has been since the semiconductor revolution of the 1950s. Perhaps Europe is not meek nor unproductive but simply earlier in its evolution. Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Skype and Atomico, argued as much in a recent piece, commenting that the US’s “40-year head start” made market cap comparisons frivolous.

This is stated as if Europe could never have created a head start for itself, as if Silicon Valley crash-landed into California rather than being produced by the consequence of talent and capital and culture. It frames Europe as a divine laggard, placed behind the world’s superpowers by an Act of God, huffing and puffing to catch up. (It also does not explain how China has sped ahead of it.)

As evidence of Europe’s strong ecosystem, Zennström highlights the continent’s 350 unicorns and its three most recent $100 billion tech businesses: ASML (founded in 1984 as a joint venture with ASM and Philips), ARM (founded in 1990, also as a joint venture and owned by Softbank), and Spotify. Though Europe needs optimism, this does not make for convincing evidence.

Regulation provides a partial explanation. For the better part of a decade, European bodies have exhibited a growing hostility toward tech entrepreneurship and a desire to control it. Rather than galvanizing the creation of continental champions, they have cast themselves as the world’s grown-ups, a patrician pencil-pusher intent on maintaining the “rules.” This shows up in poorly implemented, innovation-clogging dictums like GDPR and the failure to undo laws devised for a previous epoch.

In Germany, for example, startups must have a notary read their full financing documents in person, as Air Street Capital’s Nathan Benaich highlighted on X recently. Even more egregiously, the notary’s compensation is a percentage of the transaction size. In short, Germany has devised a system that wastes both the time and money of its startup founders and discourages investors from participating.

This is not an isolated example. Europe has traditionally had much harsher bankruptcy laws than the US, penalizing entrepreneurs who try and fail. Even those that succeed face headwinds: Fredrik Haga, founder of crypto analytics unicorn Dune, recently shared how Norway’s garbled tax regime forced him to leave. (Albeit, in his case, to another European country.)

Does regulation fully explain Europe’s malaise? Is this a continent bristling against its manacles, waiting to be unleashed? Or is there something different, something deeper happening?

II.

After 17 years of living in America, I returned to England this summer. It meant that over my 35 years, I have almost perfectly split my time between the United States and Europe: born in London to an American mother and Italian father, raised around the city, departing to the US for university.

There is a kind of spiritual rightness in returning to the origin. In making your life into a loop — going backward to go forward. That is what it has felt like to be back, biking over the Thames or walking the lamplight-burnished cobblestones of an Old World capital. It is a continent in which miracles of culture lay around the corner.

And yet it is that word, a word that Europe suspects it owns, that represents Europe’s greatest obstacle: culture. Wealth, talent, and regulation may all play their roles, but culture sits upstream, poisoning the water.

In a steady progression since perhaps the end of the Second War, Europe has allowed itself to become meek, fretful, and masochistic compared to America. Ask an outsider to describe European culture today, and you will hear words like “refined,” “genteel,” and “urbane,” as if the object of attention were a Noel Coward play rather than a superpower.

This assessment is offered in the spirit of the great British writer Julian Barnes’ words: “The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.” Europe is too passive to be vicious, but it is being foolish.

In my lifetime, there have always been meaningful cultural differences between Europe and the United States. It is fundamentally uncool to try in Europe, to believe too deeply in yourself. What Americans celebrate as ambition, the Brits call “tall poppy syndrome.” Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries heed Janteloven, a collection of ten laws originally intended as satire but that have become part of the region’s cultural make-up:

1. You’re not to think you are anything special.
2. You’re not to think you are as good as we are.
3. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.
4. You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are.
5. You’re not to think you know more than we do.
6. You’re not to think you are more important than we are.
7. You’re not to think you are good at anything.
8. You’re not to laugh at us.
9. You’re not to think anyone cares about you.
10. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.

Most of Europe, either explicitly or implicitly, adheres to the spirit of Janteloven, particularly when compared to America. This is not to say that America is not without profound faults. But since returning to Europe this summer, I have come to appreciate how the distance between these mindsets has widened over the intervening years.

I hear it most often from entrepreneurs themselves. Entrepreneurs who are the equal, at least, of their US counterparts. Despite the mollifying balance of their surroundings, these are people with blazing drive, ingenuity, and purpose. Over the past five months, I have probably met with more exceptional founders than in a similar period in New York.

Invariably, these founders make similar observations: that hyper-ambition is seen as gauche and low status. That working ferociously, even at a product of one’s own making, is perceived as a chump’s game. That success is allowed, within reason; the trendy ten-person digital agency is a triumph, the 1,000-person platform an excrescence. They hear this from their more timid peers, from the investors who tell them to lower their sights and plan for an exit, from employees who fastidiously guard their work-life balance, from friends who say they need a vacation, and from a geriatric apparatus devoted to its rules. If America amplifies entrepreneurial ambitions, propelling them westward on rumbling covered wagons, the net effect of these European norms is a permanent dampening.

After a recent trip to America, one fiercely driven European founder texted me his thoughts: “My biggest realization is how HUGE the gap is in terms of culture, IQ, and ambition between the US and Europe.” (I don’t observe an IQ gap, but certainly spot the cultural ones.)

Many, confronted by this, choose to leave, trading a European city in which they might have built a giant for the United States. After meeting a remarkable, propulsive founder at a coffee shop in London, for example, I learned that he was airlifting his company to San Francisco the next week. In discussions with a fascinating Iberian team this month, I learned they planned to make the same migration.

American venture firms not only encourage this relocation but lubricate it, smoothing the visa process and removing logistical challenges. As they should. It is hard to imagine Europe’s venture firms finding many takers for the reverse offer.

III.

Few believed that Pippo Brunelleschi could fulfill his promises. Trained as a goldsmith, the Florentine had no formal architectural education. Yet he succeeded in earning the opportunity to build a dome for Santa Maria Del Fiore through his ingenuity, conviction, and ambition. “I propose to build for eternity,” he supposedly declared upon receiving the mandate. Many doubted he would build for more than a few months, so implausible did his plan seem.

In personality, Brunelleschi was the consummate founder. By turns charming and cutthroat, he obsessed over every aspect of the project, keeping much of it secret. To work with him was to devote yourself to his vision. His teams worked year round, uncommon for the time, and had food and diluted wine hoisted up to them to avoid wasting time. His genius for mathematics and engineering allowed Brunelleschi to devise new scaffolding structures and machines to manage the construction process and increase output. By doing so, he completed the dome in just sixteen years, remarkably swift for the period.

Brunelleschi’s Dome did not simply give Santa Maria Fiore a head. It reframed what people of the time thought possible, raising their eyes higher. In its marvelous engineering and astounding beauty, it demonstrated the virtue of ambition. It is not a coincidence that it galvanized and became the defining architectural symbol of one of human history’s most productive periods: the Renaissance.

Modern Europe is full of Brunelleschi’s; I have met them. These are people building audacious, n-of-1 businesses that aspire to be global champions, not national ones. That believe that $100 billion is not the ceiling for an ambitious venture, that Europe can do more than simply keep pace, that leaders can be forged here, too.

It is for this reason that I am long Europe. Despite its issues and the deep pessimism that has sunk groundward like heavy fog, I believe in European greatness. I expect us to create some of the most consequential companies of the next generation. But if that is to happen, we will need more than increased investment or friendlier regulations (though we need those, too). We will need to reframe our culture, to re-understand what it means to be a European.

It does not mean presiding over a museum of lambent antiquities. It does not mean cherishing your bank holidays and capped working hours. We are not required to live smaller or safer lives; we do not need to focus on the marginal, the incremental. We propose to build for eternity.

There is no better place to start than with new rules. With the anti-Janteloven, what we might call Brunelleschi’s Laws:

1. It is virtuous to build.
2. It is even more virtuous to build big things.
3. It is virtuous to believe yourself capable of greatness.
4. It is virtuous to be willing to work ferociously to prove it.
5. It is virtuous to confront real risk in doing so.

To believe this is a beginning.