For years, ambitious European technology founders heard the same advice: to build a global software business, you’d eventually need to move to Silicon Valley. The Bay Area had venture capital, experienced operators, and many of the world’s largest technology companies.
CEO and founder of Omnea.
Today, some of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies are proving otherwise. Lovable, based in Stockholm, has just achieved a $13.3 billion valuation and reaches nearly two-thirds of employees of the Fortune 500. ElevenLabs, founded in London, achieved an $11 billion valuation in early 2026 and surpassed $500m ARR later in the year.
AI has rewritten the economics of building a company: foundation models, coding assistants and automation tools let small teams create, iterate and scale with far fewer people than previous generations needed. Success now hinges on attracting exceptional talent, not on being near Sand Hill Road.
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That changes the question for Europe. It’s no longer whether we have the talent or the capital to build globally significant technology companies. We do. It’s whether that talent becomes founders, or stays employees.
Europe has the talent
London has become one of the leading hubs for frontier AI talent outside the United States, supported by organizations such as Google DeepMind, the Alan Turing Institute, and Imperial College London. The capital’s King’s Cross area has become a focal point for AI research, startups, investors and global technology companies.
Elsewhere, cities including Paris, Berlin and Munich continue to cultivate world-class engineers, researchers and product leaders. I have lived in the US before, but I chose to found my own company in London for exactly this reason: the talent I needed was already here.
The fight for future founders
The expansion of American AI companies into Europe underlines the strength of that talent pool. OpenAI and Anthropic have both expanded their London research and engineering operations, joining Google DeepMind and Microsoft AI in competing for the same engineers, researchers and product leaders that emerging startups need.
These companies can offer salaries, resources and career paths that no early-stage company can match, and for many skilled operators, joining one is the logical choice.
The cost is largely invisible. Every experienced operator who spends a career inside a global AI company instead of starting one is a company Europe never gets to build. The result is fewer breakthrough companies and fewer founders to inspire the next generation.
Operators make the best founders
Many of the strongest founders start out as operators. Before launching their own companies, they spend years learning how to build products, attract customers and scale organizations, developing judgement against real business problems.
I’ve seen this progression in practice. Before co-founding ElevenLabs, Piotr Dąbkowski worked alongside me at Tessian, a cybersecurity company, where he was building AI-powered products years before the current wave. The judgement he developed there as an operator helped shape what became one of Europe’s most valuable AI companies.
In the AI era, successful founders are defined by more than technical expertise. They have commercial judgement and an instinct for seeking out problems that need solving. These qualities make them valuable employees today and position them to become successful founders tomorrow.
They’re also exactly what I hire for. We look for traits over skills: people who seek out responsibility before anyone hands it to them, and who want to understand how the whole business works rather than just their corner of it. Technical skills matter, but those are the operators most likely to build something of their own one day, and they create enormous value long before they do.
Back them at the point of the leap
As technology becomes more accessible, entrepreneurial ambition becomes the scarce resource. So support for aspiring founders has to begin long before they start seeking venture capital. Many experienced operators already have the expertise, networks and market insight to build successful businesses. What they lack is the confidence, encouragement or early backing to leave a stable job.
At my own company, we’ve put money behind this belief. Anyone who has been with us for five years can make a single pitch and get $250k to go and build their own company, along with office space and the backing of people who’ve worked beside them for years.
There’s no cap on how many founders we’ll fund. It isn’t a perk designed to wave people out the door. It’s a recognition that the people best placed to back a first-time founder are the ones who’ve watched them work, and that when I left my last company to start this one, I had to pitch strangers instead. Programs like Entrepreneur First have shown the value of backing exceptional individuals before they even have a company. Europe needs more mechanisms like this, wherever they come from.
This is how ecosystems compound. Former PayPal employees, the so-called “PayPal Mafia”, went on to found or help build companies including LinkedIn, Palantir and YouTube. Europe is beginning to generate its own founder networks, with former Skype employees founding companies such as Wise, Bolt and Starship Technologies. Back one generation of founders and they build the next.
Europe has the fundamentals in place: exceptional talent and a maturing investment ecosystem. The missing link is the pipeline from operator to founder, and today’s scaleups are the ones who can build it. Every operator who takes the leap expands Europe’s capacity for innovation and entrepreneurship, and makes the whole ecosystem more self-sustaining.
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