Why are big technology companies no longer emerging in Europe? A group of entrepreneurs creates a movement to recover pride

In Europe you don’t work, you live too comfortably and there are no powerful universities. These beliefs are a repeated mantra that may be based on some realities, but less than what they want us to believe from the United States. “When you talk about Europe as a place to startups “It is very easy to fall into negative things, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Andreas Klinger, Austrian investor and one of the promoters of the movement or ideology of European accelerationism (eu/acc, for its acronym in English). Since the beginning of May, this “meme, which is more of a shared opinion and energy” has brought together 2,000 entrepreneurs, investors and interested parties in a Discord community where they share complaints, ideas and meeting proposals. In Spain it has circulated quickly on social networks and WhatsApp groups of people in the sector.

Effective accelerationism is the name of the original movement, which comes from Silicon Valley and is at the origin of the name of the European proposal. “The e/acc is a meme that is used for many things. When people started responding to this it was because the e/acc movement in the US has this techno-optimistic energy of solving problems with technology and innovation,” says Klinger. The creator of the label, Canadian entrepreneur Guillaume Verdon, tweets from an account with a highly viral name: Beff Jezos (playing on the name of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos). From there he promotes any technological initiative and rubs shoulders with Elon Musk or Sam Altman. “Eu/acc was born as a subgroup of those who want to accelerate technology in the US, but I would say that in Europe it has evolved towards the objective of seeing how to promote entrepreneurship and technological acceleration,” says Syrus Akbary, Spanish founder of Wasmer in Silicon. Valley.

This European accelerationism is not just about defending European values ​​or its talent. It also has a handful of things to criticize, which can be summed up in a single word: fragmentation. The European Union’s original idea of ​​creating a single market achieved the difficult challenge of a single currency, but the road remains full of obstacles. “The diagnosis is correct. The main problem is one of scale and fragmentation. The EU single market was created to be able to compete with the US,” says entrepreneur and co-founder of the AI ​​Institute and Medbravo, Andrés Torrubia, who regrets that this is not happening at the moment.

“One objective of the EU is to end legislative fragmentation to have legal certainty, that the same conditions apply in several countries,” says lawyer Elen Irazabal, specialized in technological issues, who explains that this variety is not necessarily something negative for that there is more competitiveness, but adds that “bad examples are often copied.” Torrubia adds: “In Europe there is no country big enough, perhaps Germany, for the internal market to allow a company to become huge. In the EU it was already seen in the 80s that it could not compete with large markets like the US having twentysomething small markets.

The difference in legislation creates endless rules that must be learned and applied for each country. Despite these limitations, Europe has created some elite technology companies, such as Spotify or DeepMind (now from Google), but many European projects often end up in the US to raise new rounds of financing. “The problem is when the company starts to waste money and you need 20 million,” says Sergi Martorell, co-founder in London of Glass.ai. “The problem here is that the market is fragmented. If I want to sell from the United Kingdom to Germany, France or Spain, it is more complicated because there are different regulations. And if I want to go public, there is no Nasdaq in Europe,” in reference to the large technology market based in New York.

These fears have not scared off a handful of founders who have made Paris the new headquarters of AI in Europe. In addition to Mistral, owned by Microsoft, another group of young engineers from DeepMind have achieved 220 million initial investment, a huge amount, for their new company called H.

This interest in AI in France may not be just a coincidence, believes Tanya Suárez, member of the jury of the European Commission for Innovation and founder of the IoT Tribe accelerator: “I have daily conversations with the Commission to try to solve this European problem. They can do certain things, but other initiatives fall from the national level, where there is little desire and little competition; Here in Spain, especially, it continues to not be given the necessary attention. In France they are managing to change things. There are many problems that have less to do with starting a company, or with investment, and more with labor issues,” she says.

Discussions in the Discord group vary greatly in focus. Some focus on regulation or bureaucracy, others on highlighting the variety of legislation and many also on how to highlight the timidity with which Europeans defend a continent full of talent and that has done many things well. A viral post with more than 6 million views on Although the European healthcare model is a success, the post continues, there are many other things to reform to maintain it.

What chances of success does an ideological meme like this one of European accelerationism have? A clear objective is to make concrete efforts and reject the image that is imposed from the United States. “The bad thing about the meme is that it is in people’s minds. They end up believing it and it has a point of truth. Promote European pride of course, but not as nostalgia. I want some hope, that my son and nephews can work in companies here, instead of being consultants for American companies,” says Torrubia.

Compare Europe with the US, not with Silicon Valley

The lack of a single market has harmed the emergence of giants such as in Silicon Valley, but there are large companies that compete in several European countries, such as the German Zalando or the Polish Allegro. From Europe it is also believed that the entire US is like San Francisco, but it is another mistake, says Klinger: “We continue comparing Europe with San Francisco when we have to compare Europe with the US. Each European country is doing something very well and other things are not. as well. For me the biggest problem is that everything is completely different. If you are from the UK or France, there is a good investment ecosystem. If you belong to others, then good luck.”

Agility and speed are words repeated in conversations. “I don’t think people emigrate because in Europe they can’t create a startup powerful. The problem is that there are examples like Stripe, from Irish founders, who perhaps would not have been able to do it in Europe as fast or not as powerful. In Silicon Valley you have a critical mass of operational people that is difficult to find in Europe,” says Martorell, who also points out the fragmentation of technological clusters between Cambridge, Paris, London, Barcelona, ​​Berlin or Lisbon.

Not all European entrepreneurs see, however, that a movement is necessary to streamline Europe: “Europe is a huge continent. And just as there are productivity differences between states in the US, there are also countries in Europe that are much more productive than the US as a whole, and there are other countries that have lower productivity,” says Thilak Rao, founder of Private LLM.

Could this meme be another effort to achieve lower taxes or reduce necessary regulation? “As much as people advocate protectionism, companies and talent go where the best conditions are. What I complain about is that if you want to encourage a strategic sector, you have to act. If it has been diagnosed that there is a market problem in Europe, you have to provide incentives in many ways. Because if not, stop what happens: my best-prepared friends in Telecommunications have either gone abroad or work for American companies,” concludes Torrubia.

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