Clark Parsons

@DadaJudith Counting down the minutes until the Brussels „actively monitoring the situation“ statement. Time to limit access to ASML, Zeiss, etc.

Every European VC, and any VC with European portfolio companies, and every European company building with AI, should be pushing Europe to face hard trade-offs and build leverage - NOW. Drastic action must follow today.

Europe 2031 just dropped. A five-year scenario of our continent's slide into AI irrelevance, by Judith Dada & the people who advised European leaders. It’s pretty dystopian. But it doesn't have to end where it ends. A few weeks ago I sat down with Judith in front of the Acropolis, birthplace of Western civilization, to find out what it takes to make Europe into a global AI powerhouse. Judith Dada is one of the sharpest voices on Europe, AI, and what needs to happen next. She is a GP at Visionaries Club, runs Relativity Collective, writes one of the best blogs on AI and Europe. The numbers she lays out are brutal. Europe has 5% of global compute. The US has 80%. Europe is 25% of global GDP. That math ain’t mathing. So we talked about the hard trade-offs: - Why Europe shouldn't try to rebuild every layer of the stack from day one, but instead own a few choke points where the world can't circumvent us, and use that leverage to build the rest over time. - Why we need the second-best AI labs here even if they never become number one, because those teams spawn the next generation of companies that do AI for medicine, energy, research. - And why the real problem isn't regulation or paper trails. It's that not enough people in Europe have had their wake-up moment yet. Her bet on fixing it: get the best young people across Europe to know each other from the youngest age. Exposure to ambition breeds ambition. It's the single most powerful force anyone can experience. Full conversation in the video. Filmed where it all started. 🦾🇪🇺

Today feels like a good day to reshare this clip of Ariane Aerospace’s CEO calling SpaceX’s reusability plans “a dream”

@christianreber Just saw two founders of them onstage at #BAD1 in Berlin. So much happening in Europe now in this sector.

If you get excited about investing in SpaceX, there are 3 very exciting early stage space companies in Europe as well: 1/ isaraerospace.com 2/ exploration.space 3/ atmos-space-cargo.com

@martinvars At a defense & space breakfast today in Berlin, met a lot of space defense startups working in this realm. Lots going on up there indeed.

I am at a conference outside London in which I am learning interesting details about the Russia Ukraine war. It is the first major war fought partly in space, and almost nobody outside defense circles has noticed. It began on the first morning. February 24, 2022, a cyberattack hit the Viasat KA-SAT network and knocked out Ukrainian military communications before the tanks had moved far. The opening shot of the invasion was aimed at an orbit, not a city. Since then the space front has never gone quiet. Russia jams and spoofs GPS across the theater every day, degrading the guided munitions and drones that depend on satellite positioning. Both sides now treat the navigation signal coming down from orbit as terrain to be contested. The reconnaissance war has been even more decisive. Ukraine owns and tasks an ICEYE synthetic aperture radar satellite that sees through cloud and darkness at sixteen centimeters of resolution, fine enough to read a footprint from space. One satellite, the ICEYE-X36, has produced over 4,000 images, located 238 air defense and signals intelligence units, and cued strikes on 153 fuel depots and 17 naval bases. A single node in a constellation, rewriting what a mid-sized country can see. Then came May 2026. Russia repositioned five Cosmos military satellites onto the same orbital plane as that ICEYE satellite. An unprecedented maneuver. Either preparation to interfere with it or a message sent in vacuum. The fighting has climbed into the orbits themselves. What has not happened yet is kinetic. No satellite has been destroyed in orbit during this war. The space front so far is hacking, jamming, spoofing, imaging, and now shadowing. The line between maneuvering near a satellite and disabling one is thin, and it is being tested in real time over Ukraine. Anders Fogh Rasmussen put it plainly. This is the first major conflict in which both sides relied on space, and it will not be the last. Every future war planner is watching this one to learn how the high ground works now. The high ground is 500 kilometers up, and it is already occupied.

Most of Europe has not yet absorbed what AI is about to do to us. The few who have are not saying it loudly enough. We wrote Europe 2031: a five-year scenario of the continent's slide into irrelevance, how AI is driving it, and what can still be done to change course.

.@EU_Commission reply on Siri AI roll-out in the EU

the Belgian Prime Minister today at the “One Europe, one market” event: "there are twice as many people working on compliance compared to innovation in Europe."

"It's an incredible opportunity to strengthen the European economy." Former Italian PM @EnricoLetta tells #EuropeToday the EU Inc initiative that will see corporate rules seamlessly applied to start-ups across the EU is Europe's chance to become "more united." Watch:

@SebJohnsonUK This is what happens when you hire @hrklmann 😉

Europe has just minted another Decacorn as ICEYE gets valued at €10bn! 🇵🇱🇫🇮 The satellite company has raised €1bn in a funding round led by General Atlantic. It values the company at an INSANE 4x versus its latest round in December. There’s a lot of excitement for European defence as well as a push for space sovereignty at the moment. ICEYE ticks both boxes. LETS GO

@michaelmiraflor Amazon Prime in Deutschland

How do people in Europe stream the NBA Finals? Please help. Both legal and illegal recommendations are welcome.

this dude doing beach boys harmony builds really scratches a brain itch ( @ chriscronmusic on IG)

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man. The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero. The FBI located the man within a few days. He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City. The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave. He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father. He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris. When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship. He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion. He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg. He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry. He decided he wanted to fly. In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed. Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation. Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first. Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it. Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet. He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red. He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket. The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service. His application was rejected. The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service. He was the only one who was not. For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word. When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him. He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years. He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp. He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was. He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life. He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center. He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for. A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it. He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday. He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday. He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag. In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously. It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him. He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history. The French had been calling him a hero since 1917. The Americans got around to it in 1994.

“It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people did for another.” -#DDay veteran Andy Rooney on the young 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy 82 years ago. Required watching for every young person today!

The agency model is built on waiting to be asked. @rorysutherland thinks that's about to break. Love the bold prediction about the future of Cannes becoming a marketplace of ideas!

I am so hype for this World Cup bc we’re going to hear sentences like this that have never been uttered before

This is such an important point. Another reason the EU‘s new Scale Up Fund is more than just a funding mechanism. @EZaharievaEU

If Helmut Kohl was Chancellor right now he would have already proposed a 10 point plan for Europe‘s future, with an expanded federal system like this.

Does anyone else need more proof that a) the Polish tech ecosystem is zooming up b) @mati will be to his country‘s trajectory what @eldsjal is to his and c) Europe is just getting started on living up to its potential — still time for investors to get on board and go long.