To the Europeans
across the West.
To the Europeans across the West
Europe's problem is not that it has forgotten how to build. It is that the institutions which once allowed it to concentrate immense collective capacity were forged for an era in which the frontier advanced far more slowly. That is how we built Airbus, Ariane, the European Community and the single market. But over the past two decades, as technological and industrial frontiers have shifted faster, we have fallen behind.
The next chapter will not be won by another treaty or declaration, but by changing the rules that determine whether an ambitious company can be started, financed, staffed and scaled in Europe. Today, too many of those rules work against the builders we need. Our labour laws penalise the founders who hire. Our capital markets remain shallow and fragmented. Our tax systems punish success and make failure costly. Our regulatory instincts, in a small irony we have earned, move faster than our industrial ones. Our best builders leave because very few institutions give them a reason to stay or to come back. Most of this simply requires national reform in: Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, London, Stockholm, Warsaw and beyond. One reform at a time.
We intend to back the founders who make Europe worth staying in, to fund the companies our continent cannot afford to lose, and to build the network that allows capital, talent and industry to act together across Europe and across the Atlantic.
We need enough of the right people, with enough of the necessary virtues, in enough of the right rooms, willing to act in concert under a shared set of principles. The next decades belong to those who know what they want, those who want it the most and those who know how to get it.
What follows captures Europe in its fullest sense, not merely the European Union.
To the Europeans across the West,
For years our nations have been condescended and vassalized to a level unbefitting. Let us put some respect on our names. Stop crossing the Atlantic only to announce our own decline. Pessimism is no mark of sophistication.
Be proud of who you are. Carry a chip on your shoulder. Understand the sheer weight of your inheritance with the backbone it deserves and the courage to accept that what comes next is in your hands to decide. That is a privilege and it is our responsibility.
At the heart of our philosophy lies a simple conviction that the fate of nations is decided by small circles of excellent people, united by a single purpose and a shared set of values. Alexander and his childhood friends, tutored by Aristotle, conquered the known world from a Greek backwater. A handful of low-born Spaniards, audacious almost beyond reason, conquered and converted the Americas in a century. Napoleon and his marshals remade the architecture of a continent. History properly read is not made from below but made by small groups of extraordinary men who refuse to accept the limits of their moment.
Some want you to believe that Europe is empty; it suits certain interests that you do. The truth is, Gentlemen, that our capital and talent exist. Europe's manufacturing base remains one of the three largest in the world, and yet European firms pay two to three times more for electricity than their American counterparts, and four to five times more for gas. It decides where factories are built, where capital is deployed, where companies are founded. Everything downstream of our industrial competitiveness sits beneath that number.
We therefore do not suffer from a shortage of capability but from fragmentation. We suffer from exporting our capital and our talent rather than compounding both at home.
Consider this: one in two unicorns founded by European-born founders is built in the United States. As disheartening as this may be, there is no point pointing fingers at those who left. As it should, ambition goes where ambition is rewarded. Our responsibility is to make Europe worthy of that ambition again.
Today, we stand directionless, soulless and full of cowardice. Forgive me for saying it plainly, gentlemen, but where have our giants of old gone?
Rebuilding Europe requires the alignment of three forces: capital, industry, and policy. Industry without capital cannot scale. Capital without industry finances somebody else's future. Both, without policy, lack the demand signals necessary to build anything of consequence.
Capital has an identity.
Nations that cannot build for themselves cannot decide for themselves. We believe in allies deeply, but only in allies who wish to be partners, not in arrangements that reduce us to subcontractors. We intend to stand alongside our partners across the Atlantic as the industrial base of the West, not beneath them. To us sovereignty is not an abstraction. It is the capacity to produce what we need, to sell what we make, to power ourselves and to deter what threatens us.
Europe holds some of the largest pools of private savings on Earth, trillions, deployed today into treasury bonds and index funds abroad. If we seek change, we need to redirect this capital to increase European productive capacity.
We are pragmatists and we reject declinism as both intellectually lazy and morally cowardly. We reject the notion that Europe's role is to regulate what others invent. We reject the quiet comfort of managing decline elegantly. The strength the nations of Europe will find, they will find in one another: in the manpower, in the capital and in the knowledge scattered across the continent, awaiting the reform and cooperation necessary to bring them together.
The next decades belong to those who dare; to the new industrialists and the polymaths. That is why we back the boldest and most ambitious European founders building the companies that serve our critical capacities.
We believe that a small circle of exceptional men, unified by values and purpose, anxious to prove greatness without sacrificing goodness, have the capacity to defy the fate of nations.
The Europeans
We bring together European founders, investors, operators, engineers, industrialists, policymakers and family offices across the West, around a shared set of values and a common purpose. The aim is simple: strengthen Europe's economic and industrial position, keep European talent connected across borders, and ensure that Europeans have a seat at the table when the decisions shaping our future are made. Europeans building in the United States are assets to Europe. Europeans building in Europe are assets to the West. We want both in the same room.
Off the record gatherings and discussion circles, held regularly across the West. The objective is to build durable relationships between people who would otherwise rarely meet.
Direct backing for exceptional founders through investment, introductions to capital, access to talent, and the full weight of the network: partnerships, connections, customer distribution and key relationships to help them scale as fast and as far as possible.
Great companies need customers. We help European companies find their first clients, open doors, secure early commercial relationships and build the partnerships required to scale. When a company needs an introduction, a customer or someone who knows how to get something done, the network should be useful.
Europe does not stop at its borders. European founders, engineers and investors building in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Warsaw, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen or elsewhere remain part of the same broader ecosystem. The Europeans creates a bridge between these communities, connecting people and capital across the Atlantic and across the continent. European talent abroad is not lost talent. It is an asset.
Europe needs companies, capital, technology and industrial capacity that give it greater weight in the world. We bring together the people willing to build that capacity, and connect them with the policymakers who govern and write the rules. Because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.
Building ambitious companies from Europe or for Europe.
Backing the people and companies rebuilding European capacity.
Building technology and industrial capability across the West.
Connecting European industry with the people building what comes next.
Connecting decision-makers with the people building on the ground.
Connecting long-term capital with exceptional European founders and companies.
A disproportionate share of our most ambitious builders, operators and engineers choose to pursue their ambitions on the American frontier rather than at home. To name only a few: the Collison brothers with Stripe, Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker with Duolingo, Demis Hassabis with DeepMind. European talent has repeatedly shown that it can build and lead at the very highest level of the global economy. We believe that this talent is among the finest in the world.
Yet that talent remains dispersed. Europe's diaspora in the United States is spread across companies, industries and cities. Many do not know one another; many underestimate how many others share the same conviction about Europe's future. There currently exists no institution capable of converting that shared conviction into coordinated action. The Europeans exists to provide that connective tissue: to bring Europe's best abroad into the same orbit and transform scattered excellence into a coherent force.
The great turns of history are seldom the work of crowds. Periods of extraordinary change have been driven by remarkably small groups of individuals united by a shared set of values and a common purpose. Alexander and his companions, Napoleon and his marshals, and Schuman, Adenauer, De Gasperi and Monnet each demonstrate the disproportionate influence that concentrated human agency can exert on the course of a continent. We therefore reject the idea that Europe's trajectory is fixed and that our role is merely to observe it. We do not need everyone. We need enough of the right people, bound by a common mission, prepared to act with conviction.
Capital is not neutral. Where it is invested determines which companies scale, which industries survive, which technologies are developed and ultimately where power accumulates. Europe possesses enormous pools of private wealth, yet too much European capital finances the growth of companies and productive capacity elsewhere. We want European capital to rediscover a sense of purpose and start backing exceptional European builders capable of adding to the productive capacity of our continent.
Europe's industrial weakness is not a lack of capability but fragmentation. In 1969 Europe decided to end America's aircraft manufacturing dominance. Airbus showed what becomes possible when French, German, Spanish and other European capabilities are combined into a single industrial champion rather than subsidised into competing national silos. Further examples, such as MBDA, a co-construction between France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy, show that when the strategic interests of Europeans align, expertise can be pooled to create global industrial leaders.
We want to reproduce that logic from the ground up. When a French engineer, a Spanish operator and a Norwegian founder meet through The Europeans and build together, the company is pan-European from day one. Its talent, capital, suppliers and identity cross borders naturally. Over time that creates greater industrial homogeneity, deeper cross-border supply chains and fewer incentives for governments to subsidise national competitors against one another. The goal is not twenty-seven national champions. It is European champions capable of competing in a bipolar world.
Talent without resources remains potential. Resources without exceptional talent are wasted. Europe needs both. The most ambitious builders require capital, technical expertise and networks capable of helping them scale faster. The Europeans exists to concentrate those resources around the people building companies that will transform Europe's future. Our capacity to write angel cheques will create a compounding ecosystem in which successful founders, investors and operators strengthen the generation that follows. Our job is to arm our best talent. Let it compound.
Europe's decline is not the fault of its people but the achievement of a political and administrative class that has forgotten who it serves. Too many of those who make our rules have never met a payroll, never built a company, never carried a physical product across a border, never had to explain to an engineer why a permit will take three years. They govern from an ivory tower and mistake the view from that tower for the country beneath it. The consequence is a continent that regulates faster than it builds, subsidises faster than it invents, and defers faster than it decides.
We do not lack ambition among our people. We lack a political class willing to step aside, and a legal and regulatory environment that lets the builders overtake the veto players. Our conviction is simple: those who build the future should be free to build it. Europe's recovery will not be legislated into being from Brussels, Berlin or Paris. It will be carried by founders, engineers, industrialists and allocators who know the terrain and are prepared to bear the risk. Our role is to empower them, connect them, and defend the space in which they can compete.
We are not against the state. We are against a state that has confused caution with competence, procedure with policy, and the elegant management of decline with statesmanship. Power belongs to those who build. It has always belonged to us and it is time we acted like it.
Work in progress.
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