Stefan Mesken

Europe needs insanely ambitious builders and investors. Right now we have neither at the scale this moment demands. It's incredibly easy to blame politicians for everything. But Europe has another huge issue: we lack agency. We need a far higher density of ambitious builders — people who start the hard companies instead of waiting for permission. Every industry that compounds — AI, cloud, chips, robots, space — is being built by the US and China. AI. No European lab competes with OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. Mistral is the only contender, and an order of magnitude too small. This is the platform layer everything else will run on, and we're not in the room. Cloud. AWS, Azure, Google — almost 0% European. Our entire digital economy runs on rented American servers. That's not a market we lost. It's leverage we handed away. Chips. We don't design them (Nvidia, Apple), we don't manufacture them (TSMC). We own exactly one company — ASML — that builds the one machine the whole world needs. It could be Europe's first trillion-dollar company. Miss the rest of the chain and we lose that too. Batteries & rare earths. Up to 98% come from China. A dirty, low-margin business — but lose the supply chain and the economy stops overnight. Northvolt was our shot. It collapsed into the largest bankruptcy in Swedish history, yet we should try again and again and again. Autonomy. Waymo and Tesla in the US. Baidu, WeRide, Pony in China. Robotaxis hit European streets in 2026 — running on foreign tech. Robots. China ships 87% of the world's humanoids. The bright spot: Germany's Neura just raised $1.4B from Nvidia and Amazon. One real bet. We need fifty. Space. SpaceX launches 80+ times a year; we're rebuilding from behind. No reusable rockets, no Starlink alternative, no answer yet as compute moves to orbit. All of this is fixable. Not by subsidizing the past or regulating the future — by funding people audacious enough to BUILD. Europe doesn't have a talent problem. It has a courage-and-capital problem. Build. Build. Build.

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.

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.