Scaling Europe
00:14:57 · Margarethe Böhme
[00:14:57] S1: It's a good question. I think, like, all the different hubs... That's the kind of beautiful thing about the Nordics is that all these different hubs have... They're specialized in different things. Like in Finland, you have amazing technical talent, like, often super overlooked. In terms of, like, what they've built in defense and health tech and more, like, regulated industries, it's amazing. And, I mean, the same kind of goes for, like, Estonia. Now Lithuania is popping up as well. And when you look to Denmark, you have great companies coming out of there. Also, like, say, the Lunar founders just did Repoto, or you have great companies in the current YC batch from Denmark. The only one I might be a bit more iffy on is Norway considering the legislation and everything, which makes makes it quite hard for founders to build from there. But I wouldn't really look at it in the way that, like, what's the next Stockholm? My hope is that the Nordics come closer together, and that's kind of what we've tried to do with Founder's House in Stockholm and Founder's House in Helsinki. Because I think that we're such a small region, and we've always been a region that has kind of outperformed in terms of our size, our population, and all of that. Like, we've set the standards for the world with, like, Bluetooth and the seat belt, IKEA, like, all these amazing innovations that have come from different Nordic countries. And I think that, like, the strength lies in us being able to build together. So that's kind of my hope for the Nordics instead, that we can become, like, a region that's a powerhouse.
00:16:32 · Sebastian Johnson, Margarethe Böhme
[00:16:32] S0: Interesting. And would you take the way like similar to the, you know, Founders House has gone from Stockholm to Helsinki. Do you think there could be an equivalent Wave Ventures for Southern Europe? Right? Could this model work in other parts of Europe where perhaps they have similar... Like... But is that part of the vision? Do you think do you think you could expand? [00:16:51] S1: Well, I mean, never say never right now. I think, like, I really believe in the Nordics, and that's why we are staying Nordic. And we are focusing on, like, our geography and what we know. But, like, I think it would be amazing for Europe to have more similar funds and also initiatives like founder sales. Because when we... I... My colleague and I, we did a, like, Europe tour for founder sales this summer, and we went across to, like, Zurich and Munich, Paris, Berlin, London. And and we realized that, you know, in many of these places, there are really these hubs that, like, connect all of the young builders. Like, one of the best ones I saw was JFloor and ETH, pretty new, but they were doing amazing work. Some great ones in Munich as well. But, you know, for the really large ones like Paris, Berlin, and and London, there really wasn't that much. I mean, now I know that, Billa, who has Tech Europe, he is he is doing, he's doing some work there, which I think is amazing. But I just hope that, like, this would spread because it's done such amazing things for the Nordics.
00:17:57 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:17:57] S0: Yeah. I I could not agree more. And and and, you know, I think in some ways, like Stockholm was an amazing place to start because it was quite a close or small ecosystem. So it was like almost easier to suck people into one place. But like, I really feel like some of the bigger ecosystems actually almost need it more because it's so big and so spread out and we don't have this like density or this closeness that, you know, think like I was in Sokomo months ago. And within a day, you know, I've been to Lovable, I've been to Legora, I've been to Neko. You know, you could walk anywhere. I've been to I've been to founders. You know, you can walk anywhere and you can see everybody at the space of a day age. In London and Paris, Berlin, you just can't
00:18:36 · Margarethe Böhme
[00:18:36] S1: do that. But but, you know, I also think that there's, like, a broader... Like, it would be good for the continent as a whole if this happened. Because end of day, like, if you look at the technical talent building at the, like, Frontier Labs in The US, many are European. Like, there is no doubt that we have some of the best technical talent in the world. And I kind of... I thought about this a bit last month because in Stockholm, we've always had this tradition, right, of building global from day one. Like, even if you look back to our, like, traditional industry, they've done the same. And it's because we're such a small country, and we had to think globally early on. Otherwise, you know, the companies wouldn't exist. And I think that tradition doesn't really exist in, say, the DACH region, for example, where they, you know, they have such a huge home market that they could just stay and be comfortable. And I think that there's so so much could happen if more of Europe would be like the Nordics in that sense and start building globally from day one.
00:19:38 · Sebastian Johnson, Margarethe Böhme
[00:19:38] S0: Yeah. I think it's the biggest issue that we've had in The UK. You know, like ten years ago, we had this amazing wave of fintech companies, but like so many of them just stayed local. Revolut is the exception, but so many companies hit unicorn or like 1 or 2,000,000,000 valuation, and they then tried to expand internationally like six or seven years later, and they've kind of been quite successful with it. But it's because we had this really rich financial sector and this big economy here that was sort of just built for The UK. Now that's changing. But I mean, it was just like looking back, it was like one of the biggest mistakes I think so many founders made. Agree. Viewing the market [00:20:14] S1: is Imagine if we could get teams like, say, founding engineers, the best founding engineers from Zurich to join Stockholm based teams and great, like, GTM people from The UK and so on, and we could build, like, pan European teams. They would be able to compete so well on The US market. Like, we should work to be more interconnected, I think. Not about selling more in Europe. I think it's about building European teams that can outperform in The US.
00:20:14 · Margarethe Böhme, Sebastian Johnson
[00:20:14] S1: is Imagine if we could get teams like, say, founding engineers, the best founding engineers from Zurich to join Stockholm based teams and great, like, GTM people from The UK and so on, and we could build, like, pan European teams. They would be able to compete so well on The US market. Like, we should work to be more interconnected, I think. Not about selling more in Europe. I think it's about building European teams that can outperform in The US. [00:20:40] S0: And and I think it's that it's that, like, a serendipity that people talk that you get in San Francisco. It's like the everybody bumps into each other and everybody's building. That both increases the ceiling of ambition, but also, magic sort of happens when you bring equally ambitious, clever people together. And we just do not have enough of that. But we're out of time, Margarethe. Thank you so much for joining me. Massive congratulations on It your is so cool. I'm a huge fan of what you're doing. So stay in touch. Love to follow your journey and report on it as [00:21:07] S1: a pleasure. [00:21:07] S0: Thank you [00:21:07] S1: so much for having me.