Upside Special - The Inside Track Of European Venture in 2025

The real stories behind the headlines affecting European Venture.

This week Mads, Lomax, Andrew and I are all out and about at various conferences and events speaking with European LPs and GPs about our ecosystem - themes and trends for 2025 and beyond, how we grow, how we go toe-to-toe. The pitfalls, the breaks and beyond.

Interviews with:

Jone Vaituleviciute from First Pick
Francesco Perticarari from siliconroundabout.ventures
Charlotte Palmer from Integra Global Advisors
Mike Sigal from Sigal ventures
Dan Smith from Repeat Ventures
Antonio Miguel from Maze Impact
Ozge Oz from QNBEYOND Ventures
Philipp Herkelmann from EU Inc
Andreas Klinger from EU Inc and Prototype

Timestamps:

00:00 Introducing Dragons with Andrew Scott
07:40 Lomax goes toe-to-toe with Silicon Valley
13:05 Jone from First Pick and her Lithuanian adventures
15:15 Francesco from SiliconValley Ventures on 2025 deep tech opportunities
16:36 Oz from QNB and his one big ask
17:12 Charlotte from Integra - what to look for in emerging managers
19:50 Mike Sigal breaks down the European capital challenge
24:20 Dan from Repeat on renewed LP positivity
25:22 Antonio from Maze on Trump crushing Impact - or is he?
26:35 Mads with EU Inc founders Andreas and Philip - Why Europe why now

Transcript

Dan Bowyer (00:00)
Welcome to Upside, where we dig into the real stories that are living behind the headlines affecting European venture. This week, Mads, Andrew Lomax and I are all out and about speaking to various GPs and LPs about what's going on affecting the European ecosystem. So Andrew, my man, we've just got back from Morocco, from Marrakesh, where you and Lomax put on a fabulous event. It's the fourth edition of Dragon Chasers. But before I say any more,

What is Dragon Chasers and why did you both start it to give us some context? Well, I'm going to start with what is a dragon apart from a fire breathing, flying mythical creature. It's also the company in your fund, which returns the whole fund. So one company returning the whole of your fund that you invested from. It is also for the LPs, the limited partners that invest into VCs. It can be a fund that returns the whole of their fund. So that's where the name comes from. And beyond that, it's an invite only.

community of leading GPs and LPs. And the idea is to build deep relationships between the individuals. And we do that via exclusive retreats and unique experiences and dinners and really be much more than just an online community. know that it's easy to derive these things, but actually it's an incredibly important environment because from my perspective on the other side of the desk, we don't do what the Americans do. Just as an example, where they're much more collaborative, they're much more engaged and across Europe.

because of the language differences, because of the different countries, because of the different regimes, we don't do what needs to be done. And from my perspective, watching what you and Lomax do, you are doing something incredibly important. tell us more about kind of the origins of it and what the conversations were that started it all. Great. I appreciate that. Thank you for the kind words. I think that's true. Obviously the Bay Area is, you know, the origin of VC and it's a relatively small area.

And as you say, it's far less fragmented and VC is a network game. It's about sharing deal flow. It's about getting the follow on funding. And as a VC, it's also about having the relationships to raise your fund to start with. So the genesis of Dragon Chasers really came from years ago. Lomax got back from a conference in San Francisco called Braze, which is a fantastic emerging manager conference and was complaining about the quality of the events in Europe. And I said, well, you know, why don't we do one? So.

We spun up something called allocate and we did that for three years, which is essentially Europe's first pitch conference for VCs to pitch to LPs. It was very successful, but the ecosystem started to have other pitch events and it was something that we felt that problem was being solved by the people. Going back further, back in 2009, I co-founded something called the ICE network, which is still going. It's about 600 founders. It's based out of London, but has founders all over Europe. And that was...

based around a retreat where you go away with other founders and some investors and you build those deep relationships so you can share knowledge and gain wisdom and you have a trusted support network because it's the only job being a founding CEO. five, six years into being a VC, I just really missed having that peer group, having that support network. And so I said to Lomax, look, we've done allocate, we've got this base, we've got this network.

But I think there's a much bigger opportunity here, which is to create the ICE network for VCs and LPs. And so we both created the first Dragon Chase retreat, very similar recipe, which is you need to come on a retreat to be part of the network and kind of the rest is history. We've now got 180 VCs and LPs representing about 50 billion in AUM. And as you say, we just did our latest retreat in Morocco and hopefully it's adding a huge amount of value to the ecosystem.

I think it does. mean, again, coming from being a customer of yours and having been on every single dragon chaser. It's so much better. you have. You're a foundational member. I'm the original, the OG. having been to all of the VCLP events and Superventure at the time of recording, it's the 20th May, so the time of recording Superventure I think is in two weeks or next week.

So, which is the Berlin LPGP conference and you get a bunch of manuals and it's all very stiff and there's lots of blue suits and LPs get pounced on because they're like founders pouncing on VCs startup events. VCs pounce on their investors, their LPs at these events. It's, and I don't think it wins. think it's just such a bad framing for relationship building and we need to get to know each other. We need to understand. We need to build the bridges across Europe. So I think it's just, it's.

It's such a refreshing approach to building network across Europe and building building really rich relationships. So I really value it. But can you tell us who's in and what the criteria are and what they get and how it works? Because that might be something that people want to know. Yeah. So you need to have an active fund because it's not based around raising money. Like the whole point of the event is to build deeper relationships and that can be LP to LP relationships. It can be LP to GP relationships, but also GP to GP relationships.

Now we all run different sizes of funds and organizations. have this many of the same problems that you have if you're running a regular company. Ultimately, if you're a general partner or a founding partner of a firm, you are an entrepreneur and you have the challenges of people and team and what your product is, you know, what is your thesis and making sure you support your portfolio and finding the right deals. And all these things are better done if you have a trusted peer group to do it with.

You know, we spend so much of our lives doing business of working that why not do with, with people you like and you know, and it's more than just this sort of transient loose connection after having maybe a lunch meeting or running into them every year at Superventure. And so I think there's the feedback has been this huge value, not just building those GPLB relationships, but actually peer relationships. get, I get massive value from.

from the deal flow naturally happens. So VCVC, because we talk, because, have you seen, how do you think, or what does this, how does this work for you? So there's the trends and themes. And obviously we do fireside chats. We do lots of networking bits, but in fun scenarios. We're going to do interesting and engaging things, but you're sat in a bus for 20 minutes talking to somebody. So that's, that's, there's just a lovely natural way of enthusing conversation, but what, what's next? So.

building the bridges across Europe is obviously an intrinsic part of Dragon Chasers. What's next for the community? Is it just more of the same, but bigger? How do you see this evolving over the next five years? I think other territories makes a lot of sense just because it's an international business. We also want to make sure we're serving the more mature end of the market. So the larger funds, the larger institutionals, be it pension funds, insurance companies, the excels indexes of the world. And that's for two reasons. First of all, because as

fund managers become more successful. Some of them may increase their fund size, they may become larger and larger funds. And for that you have different challenges. But also ultimately our mission and our vision is to accelerate Europe and to accelerate getting more money into technology businesses that can scale and be successful because we believe that's the best way to help humanity. And that sounds highfaluted, but ultimately that's what we're all here for, right? We're here to make money, but we're also here to fund the businesses that

make the world work better, to make society work more efficiently, to find the cancer vaccine or drug, to have cleaner ways to travel. All that stuff stems from having the funding and the capital and smart people backing smart founders. And as a VC now, this is a way for us to hopefully accelerate that outcome. Hello, Max. We're in beautiful Marrakesh in Morocco. Why are here?

We wanted to find something more conducive to the long-term relationship that GPs and LPs have. When you commit to a fund, it's a 10-year commitment. In these days, these funds last potentially 12, 15 years, so it's a long-term relationship. So we wanted to find a format of an event that is more conducive to building those relationships in a trusted and safe setting. So we evolved the conference into the format that we have now, which effectively is an unconference, getting...

the highest quality people we can together in an amazing location away from the humdrum of normal life, away from electronics. It's really about authenticity and sincerity in a long-term relationship building. we have now run four events. Off the back of that, we have a community of now 180 GPs and LPs. And obviously Europe is always playing catch up with the States. So this feels like a very different way to get...

Europe talking and building and doing and sharing. I don't know how much what the AUM figure is for people in, we're probably talking 60 to 100 billion of just people here today. Total AUM is about 50, 60 billion. So where does that fit in the European picture and how will this accelerate our ability to do more in Europe and go toe toe with the Yanks? So US venture total AUM 1.5 trillion.

European venture total AUM roughly 250 billion. So we're a long, long way behind in terms of capital, but also in terms of the number and quality of venture firms. If you look in Europe, you have a very, very small cohort of tier one venture firms, whereas in the US founders have a lot more options there. And LPs have options for many, many, many high quality firms that have returned capital to investors on a...

many many times. As Europe matures we need the next wave of firms to come in and pick up that mantle and I feel Dragon Chasers is really about that. We've roughly got one fifth of Europe's AUM sat in a hotel in Marrakesh and you're doing this for a reason. We're doing this to build relationships, build up Europe and it feels quite integral. You could say like what's the point in another you know another community, another conference, another event. We have event fatigue in our industry but if you're building a venture firm

or if you're a limited partner investing in firms, there are not a lot of places where you can go to both meet people and share problems in an environment like this. And I think the reason why this is important is, for example, the general partners running funds, we don't talk about deal flow, for example. Like we talk about problems like firm building. I hire people? Do I not? Like, what does my platform look like? What's my differentiation towards LPs? What's my differentiation towards founders?

How data driven am I, or is it very artisanal and very manual? All of these kind of things, how much do I raise for my next fund? Who's the typical LP profile? What's the go-to-market strategy on that? I think all of this firm building that in Europe today, there hasn't been a really good, safe, important place for that where GPs can go to discuss that and also get input.

from LP. So this is what we're creating. And this is why we think it's both differentiated and important because, you know, for more capital to flow into European venture, you need better quality general partners running funds, which then attract limited partners to invest and commit money to those funds. And of course they can deliver those funds to startups. So I think we're solving a very important part of the challenge of bringing more capital into venture. I'd almost argue that we're Americanizing the conversation.

I think that there's a very big pay it forward. I think in Europe, generally, we can be a little bit more closed, a little bit more almost ironically transactional, because you would always say the US is more overtly transactional per se as a society than Europe. But I would say in European venture and startup world, this concept of paying it forward, helping people out, not expecting an immediate return, knowing that if you put good deeds into the ground,

that good things will come back to you, but it doesn't matter when. And I think sometimes in European adventure we've actually haven't really kind of imbued that into the ecosystem. And so the whole ethos of Dragon Chase is we're all in it together, we all help each other out, we don't expect anything in return.

Ego's left at the door and it's been very, very powerful. The other thing that I take away is that obviously a big part of our audience that we speak to is founders. And it's nice to expose for founders that I'm sure they will judge us being in the sunshine and doing fabulous things. But it's very important, I think, that the whole stack from founder to investor, so to GPs like us and to LPs and RLPs, LPs, what's happening behind the scenes and there are things afoot. So what's the future for Dragon Chasers? What else are we going to do? So firstly,

Dragon Chasers is a non-profit organization that is run by GPs on the side of their day jobs. This is not a commercial events organization. So we have, think, that gives us the ability to think about growth and improvement in a non-commercial way, which I think is very, very important. If you look at some of the main conferences, they're driven by gross profits and getting people through the door, et cetera, and dilution happens from there. So I think we want to retain that kernel of quality and allow people...

to interact in a relatively compact setting because we are all about this long-term relationship building and helping people out and big conferences aren't the right format for that, we've learned. It's Joan, isn't it? Yes, it's Joan. Which firm are you from? First Pick. First Pick. Like from NBA, like when you choose cheap underrated players and then they become superstars. There you go, that, love that name convention. Now you're at Dragon Chasers, why are you here? What's your agenda? Why did you come? I'm here for...

of the community because you know there's half of the people that you already know all of them are super lovely and there is half of the new people that you know they're gonna be lovely and since a couple of years ago that I've joined it has helped me insanely to like shape my fund and invest and raise money so it's incredible value I think it's the most valuable thing I can do in the whole year. Now we're here from Lithuania and what's happening in Lithuania give us the scoop on the ecosystem there and what's the good the bad the ugly going on in Europe.

Singleswine is

experiencing it 10 years ago, so it's like really booming. It's a big ecosystem. We have big AI talent coming up there. It's very, very early stage and we have companies going to like 12 million ARR in six months. So you can imagine what's happening there. I think we are in a very right position to be investing. I suggest all of the funds to look a little bit in Lithuania, but it's really the place to be right now. Also for seed, series A's and later. Are there any themes or trends that you're seeing in Lithuania?

and then maybe further across Europe. I think like we are super mixed on industries and verticals, but on the AI side, it's very much semi-focused AI products, which are rather...

like as B2C go to market so this is what we are seeing like super strong go to market which is focused on SMEs but they run through like they run super fast on marketing and in like outbound sales and everyone's using very similar playbook and if you had one kind of wish for 25 or one outcome for 25 what would it be? For the market not to crash. no more tariffs from Trump? No more tariffs, no please. Yeah that probably would be that. Because we are

I'm a little bit afraid that it could be a hype in the bubble. do you want to see happen for emerging managers in Europe 2025? If I'm allowed to have wishful thinking, I would love a united European market where capital can fully free flow and like the LPs, especially the government ones, don't dictate like fragmentations of it. there any other themes or trends that you're seeing in your firm? Quantum is getting very close to prove.

real-world application. mean there are some real-world applications but I'm saying like genuine stuff where wow, like people would pay a lot of money for it like fluid dynamics simulations that you can't do on ⁓ simulations of a quantum system. Right now anything that you can do in a quantum system except for certain random numbers you could simulate. ⁓

but I get into the level of supremacy. think probably not this year. I don't know, who knows, maybe, but I think we're very close. Energy, again, people keep joking that fusion is always 20 years away. I think we could be within that decade and I think the results are getting us close enough that you can start to feel, okay, it's getting closer. And of course, AI is creating demand for small nuclear reactors. So again, the whole energy field, it feels like it's finally finding reasons to double down.

climate wave or whatever, like green type of thing. And then of course, defense. My name is Ozge. I'm the partner at QMB on Ventures. This is the CBC arm of the QMB group, one of the biggest financial institutions in MENA. I'm here to meet new people, new emerging fund managers, fund of funds. You know, we always want to expand the relationships because this is a people's business. So this is one of the best events ever to, you know, get to know people, really get to know people. I'm excited about

companies that can use AI in a really like a high value way and then change industries in a like a meaningful way. Charlotte Palmer, I work at Integra Global Advisors. We are a registered investment advisor, but operating as a multifamily office based out of Stamford, Connecticut. I'm based in London. I predominantly work on the VC side where we look exclusively at emerging managers in four key geographies, US, Israel.

Latin America and Europe. And 2025, what themes, trends are you most excited about? Several things. I think AI is going to have such a big boom. That's kind of an obvious one. But where it goes and I think exit route scene, I think will be a really interesting one. There's a whole sentiment around our vertical AI companies really going to IPO and that can be the mass market. And then it's a couple of years. And are they going to be set up for that this year? Perhaps not. I think there's going to be a big move in

I don't want to the climate space because I think that's shifted slightly. I think we're looking at more planet positive as a sentiment and utilizing different words to describe climate and investing and sustainability. I think there's going to be a big pushback on impact. I think we're seeing that where a lot of European LPs are prioritizing it. I think health is going to be really interesting this year. think going to big shifts, big movements and life sciences. I'd like to...

a little bit more time learning myself. That's a market not been maybe appropriately adapted to venture yet and there's no one really doubling down and doing what I'd maybe like to see in that space so I think university's been out to life science, biotech, deep tech, out of the early technologies would be really cool. And last question, what do you look for in an emerging manager? I love this question, no one ever asks me and I think I guess the core question to know when you're on an initial call.

And it's funny, I was talking about it with an LP last night. It's really hard to describe and it's terrible feedback, but it's someone who can tell their story really well. They have self-belief, the amount of calls I do when someone says, I think I'm the right person, but if you can't back you, I can't back you. Storytelling, be articulate, be passionate. Also, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Everyone thinks that they need to bring a USP or this is our value add that no one else is doing or we've got proprietary deal flow in this lens and actually...

You could just be doing something someone else is doing but better and I'm happy with that. So I kind of have four key criteria. Team, does it make sense? Do you work well together? Is there strong relationships? Track record, don't come to me with a FinTech proposal if your experience is in biotech, it's not going to make sense. Strategy, what is your portfolio construction? What is your value add? And what is your deal flow? Are they a little bit differentiated? And finally terms, just be vanilla. No one likes people that are doing crazy things.

Mike, tell us who you are and what you do. My name is Mike Siegel. I am a former multiple-time entrepreneur, a former GP from 500 Startups. I spend my time advising both founders and emerging fund managers. I said I really would like to be involved and since I wasn't an active GP, I wrote a cheque to sponsor the event so that I can meet these wonderful folks. And since then, I've been sort of an honorary member of the team. And you were in the Bay for a while, you've been in Europe for a while.

What are the similarities, differences, trends, themes, pull-aparts, closings together? I guess the way that I think about it, and this formed, I lived in Europe 2000 to 2004, and at the time there were only a handful of ECs and really almost none who had ever been operators. And what I realized was that the venture industry, like every other industry, goes through these boom and bust cycles. And...

In Silicon Valley, you have an industry that's sort of 80 to 90 years old and has gone through many, many generations. The industry in Europe is much, much younger, but it's learning much faster. So I kind of look at the VC industry in Europe as what Silicon Valley was 10, 15, 20 years ago in terms of the earnestness and the enthusiasm with which GPs are out there to support.

entrepreneurs. It still hasn't gone through as many cycles as what the valley has, but the pace of learning is much steeper, I would say. So that's one thing. The second thing, obviously, is it's dealing with a cap on liquidity in that there isn't growth capital, there isn't public market access that is native to Europe and still has to look to U.S. markets, U.S. help.

⁓ LPs, U.S. acquirers for a lot of liquidity and I think that's hampering still a lot of the opportunity given that there's probably more great STEM graduates coming out of schools in Europe than there are in the U.S. There's certainly no lack of ambition. There's certainly no lack of interest in buying new things and doing things differently and better. So it's an interesting dichotomy in that.

all the possibility is there but there are still certain constraints. Everyone says when are we going to become the Silicon Valley? I don't think that's the point. I think we need to become something else but when do you think Europe is going to mature as an ecosystem? It's a really difficult question to answer because I think there are some structural impediments to

capital moving as quickly as venture as we have known it requires, right? There's actually more capital sitting basically locked up in Europe than anyone realizes, but, you know, in pension funds and savings plans and in sovereign funds, but even large public market investors in Europe still go to the U.S. for the vast majority of their investing. there's some, whether it's cultural, whether it's structural, whatever it is, I

I can't even begin to imagine.

until Europe decides that it wants to generate whatever its own brand of liquidity on this industry. What's exciting you most for 25? So having been through a bunch of market cycles, what's really exciting me is that venture globally is going through another iteration. We're trying to figure out what innovation and venture is going to look like for the next 10 years.

innovations came on the back of things like AWS for compute and mobile for distribution and things like AngelList and Carta for bringing down the transaction costs of doing investments. We're now in a world of generative AI where there's far less capital required to scale many kinds of businesses and I think that opens up a lot of opportunities to grow really great businesses.

that maybe they don't become super deca-deccorns, but they become really valuable. And I think there's an opportunity to come up with new capital tools to fund those. Tell us who you are, what you do. Dan Smith. I run a fund called Repeat. It was called Jigsaw. We're back to being entrepreneurs globally, ex-US, predominantly European focused. Precede to Series A. And what does 25 hold for us as an industry, do you think? It feels like optimism's coming back.

investors ready to start deploying LPs waking up. So yeah, I feel like we're on the rebound. I mean, I think we're out of the water in the macro sense of things, but at least there's a sense of optimism around the asset class. Maybe that's partly interest rate softening. And I think there's a lot, maybe partly influenced by this event, but there's a lot of renewed optimism around Europe, I feel. We have a big US institutional base, and I definitely see that from the US institutional community as well, that there's more appetite for Europe.

maybe also buffeted by the fact that the US is a bit of a shambles at the moment. but yeah, I think on balance, on the macro, on the financing side of things, things looking up. I think Europe's got a lot going for it as you look at kind of quality of traditional industries here. R &D spend is almost comparable to the US when you look outside of tech and AI is perfectly optimized and primed to go after traditional industries. So I think we're actually in a phenomenal opportunity in Europe. I'm Antonio. I run an Impact VC Fund based off in Lisbon. We invest pre-seeds, Pan-European.

in climate and healthcare. I'm excited about what we are doing on impact because I think it's needed more than ever. I'm scared about how the threshold of what is acceptable keeps ⁓ going down and I want to contribute to make it go up. We're looking a lot into new materials for carbon capture which hold a lot of potential and you know it speaks business so it's something that interests us a lot. A lot of innovation in healthcare as well.

powered by AI, so excited about it. And have you been impacted by Trump basically telling the world that we don't have to care about climate, impact, sustainability? I don't know yet. I started getting a lot of questions about it. It has not reflected into withdrawals from commitments or things like that. But I get the question a lot. I think we've got a strong supporter basis that ⁓ is not going with the trends.

They are committed to what they're doing. But I don't know, let's talk in a few months. I am here on the sidelines of the EU VC Summit with Andreas Klinger and Philipp Herkelmann. They are the founders of the EU Inc movement and they gave me an opportunity to ask them a few questions about the background for the initiative and also what might be next. Andreas, if you wouldn't mind, start off by telling us why are you doing this?

So basically a bunch of us got very frustrated over the last few years with the negativity towards the European startup ecosystem. And especially last year, the hostility from the US VC ecosystem towards Europe got like literally like ridiculous.

And so basically we're thinking, are the few things if you change that you could create a step function improvement for European tech. so instead of like sending a long, long release, we were like, Hey, here's very specific things that can be changed. And we wanted to actually not just like make this suggestion, but actually drive this suggestion. So we focused on the pan-European legal entity. So the main idea is basically a standard to incorporate, invest stock options.

across Europe and basically have the equivalent of delivering Stripe Atlas on these kind of safe nodes like we have in the States. And by that essentially unlocking the currently very much siloed European ecosystem. No international people want to invest because it's just too good and somewhat too complex. So our point of view is if you standardize this, you would like through standards to create confidence, through confidence you create momentum and out of this you accelerate the whole Asia system. Terrific. And some might say that we used to have this, the English Limited Company.

was perhaps the closest you got, but with Brexit, that option is removed. What do see the role of the UK as being in this new world of EU ink? So we believe that there's one European ecosystem. And as we hear on this conference, a lot of people talk about new parolata, which includes the UK. Also, like we also talk about Switzerland. Switzerland has a lot of fantastic talent, deep tech talent. And deep tech is built not in garage. Deep tech is the future of Europe and it's built in ecosystems. So if we...

talk about the European ecosystem, we need to talk also about the UK. So how can we create an interface that allows founders and investors to work seamlessly across borders, not only within Europe, but in best case as well, including the UK and include Switzerland as well. From our point of view as like crazy VC founder kind of people, there is no reason why the UK, Norway, Switzerland and all the others couldn't join the EU. The only question is if there's political will, but if there would be theoretically they could easily join the public.

So political will obviously always can be a challenge. People have voters, they have their own interests. One of the challenges that have already been leveled we saw was from some of the Baltic states that said, listen, if we support EU Inc that might erode our competitive net, how are you seeing the ability to navigate those challenges to still get to a point where you can actually take this great idea and make it real? It's funny that bureaucracy in Europe is such a default and such a compass on default.

that it's actually a competitive advantage if you like, just a government and modern country, right? Actually, Estonia is like a very strong supporter, for example. We have multiple people from Estonia actually actively helping. They're advising in multiple areas and making introductions. They also want to help with the actual tax lag behind it. So if you have ex-socco like Baltics, specifically talking Estonia, for example, they see this as an opportunity to actually push the whole market, this environment setting. I don't want to talk for them.

the series is supposed to the whole European market and through that make you one of the leaders in this. So level up versus level down. Yeah. And I think what is very important is that the people who are actually investing, the people who are actually building the founders and the investors, there's actually very little ambiguity about that this is much needed no matter from which country they are. So everybody was experienced with this ecosystem. Everybody who is actually creating jobs, is creating value wants this.

The critics or the fear sometimes comes more from like perspective saying I'm giving up a competitive advantage because the transparency into like what is the overall value creation that will be unlocked is not very clear yet here in Europe. And I think this is all the part what we are working on to make it to show this a value creation a little bit more with more clarity to also like parties or parts of the ecosystem that are not too close. The only proper critical so far

have been national leaders who prefer their own political power over like the power of their own economy. If this makes any sense to you. ⁓ like the biggest benefit of like we have Brexit here in the UK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That little bit smaller in every country can be an issue. This is like why we want to, for example, in the proposal.

We push for sanitization of corporate law, we push for sanitization of investment in corporation, all these kind of things. But taxation and employment, for example, stay local. And the main reason is because we want the member states to understand that the idea here is not to take their power, the idea is to get more money into their countries. Which you would assume they would be behind. You'd hope. Make the bar high bigger. Yes. Yes. You assume my biggest learning in politics is it's closer to meme culture than it is to like anything else.

It's all about narratives and making sure that founders and investors, unicorn founders especially, speak to their national leaders and say like, hey, this is important. This could be like the one step function improvement for our whole generation. And if they help with this narrative, if they push locally, I think this is absolutely doable. Amazing. Well, you've been able to create a lot of momentum in a short amount of time, clearly in many ways pushing on an open door, as you say, something that many people see as important. At the same time, we acknowledge there are bureaucracies.

their entrenched rights. As all good founders, I'm sure you have thought about what needs to happen if we can't get to where we want to get too quickly. Do you have thoughts on what is the plan B? What is the plan C? What's the plan D? What might happen if we can't get straight to the 28th regime? To me personally, is no plan B. are now like, people don't realize that like we like since COVID in a global economic crisis, that the world will be reshuffled after this crisis. And we take our order, like our place in the world order for granted.

We do not have hyperactivity jobs in Europe. all right now in the States. We are customers of the States from multiple industries. And if we do not get tech innovation to actually work and build companies that are good in innovating, but also growing fast, we won't have the hyperactivity jobs of this generation and the next generation. So this isn't about like, there's like maybe a little bit less bureaucracy and a little bit more fun. This is about European sovereignty. This is about making tech innovation actually work here. It's mission credit then.

We need to keep the ambition extremely high because if you do not achieve now a good solution, an optimal solution for European startups, you might create like a decade long blocking on a suboptimal solution. And we had already like a 20 year login on the SE, which was not very beneficial for like any founder or any venture capitalists in Europe and all for the European ecosystem in general. I think

What we have to do from our side is we stay extremely close to the decision makers. We deliver not only like a decision, we deliver a proposal which is developed with like leading law firms like Oreck, Bird and Bird, Kool-Aid to like really go hands on and with detailed instructions that there's not only like a imaginary like vision about what has to happen, but it's detailed. Okay, this is how to, this is how we can achieve this. So very customer centric, if you would say it like this.

Very good. And finally, you probably already thought about what comes beyond the 28th regime. Hopefully we can get it implemented. Do you have any ideas for what's next? So I highly recommend. So from my point of view, the three big step functions we can do in Europe is like one incorporation investments is the EO Inc basically. The next one is getting more capital into OVC. This is like a lot of associations, a lot of people working on that. The third one is making actual IPOs possible in Europe.

Right now, if you as a founder, if one of my founder right now with IPO in Europe, I would consider suing this person because it's seriously, it's currently not an option for any founder to actually do a proper IPO in Europe, mainly because each individual stock market is not strong enough. We need some solution for this. I have ideas, but in reality, what needs to happen is there needs to be people like us who say, you know what, like this is annoying, let's fix this. Get a WhatsApp group, five, six people who are experts in this.

and figure out like what are the different ways to solve this and pick one and get the community behind it and like figure out how to do like EUI tools. Will Hercleman and Andreas Klinger, thank you very much. Thank you very much.