Scaling Europe
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.