Our new e-book, Europe’s Alternate Tech Future, rewrites thirty years of European tech history and asks what the path not taken is really worth. Download it free here.

In September 2024, Mario Draghi said out loud what many in Brussels already knew. Europe had fallen behind. The productivity gap with the United States was widening. Europe’s best founders kept moving to California to scale. And the continent would need an extra €750–800 billion of investment every year just to stay in the race.

Two years later, the numbers are starker. In 2025, European startups raised about $44 billion in venture capital. American startups raised $320–340 billion. The US has at least eight tech companies worth more than a trillion dollars. Europe has none.

It is tempting to treat this as destiny. It isn’t.

Europe held the strongest hand

Go back to 1997. The World Wide Web had just come out of CERN. GSM, a European standard, had become the language of mobile phones worldwide. Nokia and Ericsson were on their way to dominating the handset market. A Finnish student had released Linux. Europe had the largest wealthy consumer market on Earth, world-class universities and a century of engineering excellence.

So here is the question we set out to answer: what if, starting in 1997, Europe had made a different set of choices? Not a different continent, not different people. The same Europe, making different decisions at a dozen crucial moments.

The problem was never ideas

The alternate timeline opens with a report. In 1997, a (fictional) Swedish economist named Anna Lindqvist diagnoses six blockages that stop Europe from turning breakthroughs into global companies:

1. Culture. Starting a company is seen as risky, even embarrassing, and failure follows you for a career.
2. Capital. Pension funds hold trillions, but national rules keep almost all of it out of venture.
3. Fragmentation. Selling across the single market means mastering fifteen legal systems.
4. Scaling. Companies hit a wall at 50 employees, then sell to American buyers or stall.
5. Talent. Hiring a researcher from Bangalore takes a year; Europe’s best engineers leave for California.
6. Demand. Governments fund research generously, then buy from incumbents.

Her conclusion became the line people quote:

“America does not have better engineers than Europe. It has better reasons for engineers to take risks.”

In our world, Europe answered with the Lisbon Strategy of 2000: big goals, no enforcement. In the alternate world, Europe answered with law and money. A second-chance directive made honest failure survivable. Stock options were taxed only when shares were sold. A 2001 reform let pension funds put up to 5 percent of assets into venture and growth equity, backed by a €20 billion Yozma-style fund of funds. Europe launched accelerators before Y Combinator existed, offered two-week visas to engineers and founders, and in 2006 adopted a Scale Doctrine aimed squarely at the hard middle years of a company’s life.

Meet Europe’s missing giants

The heart of the e-book is a set of company cases: Europe’s own versions of the firms that shaped the last thirty years, and the people who built and backed them.

• Vela, Europe’s Google, founded in Zurich in 1999 by a Swiss mathematician and a Nigerian-born computer scientist who came to ETH on a fast-track research visa. Its first check came after a 30-minute demo in a café. Its Eric Schmidt was a Danish telecom CTO who ran the company for twelve years.
• Kernelia, Europe’s Microsoft, built on Linux in Helsinki and on Europe’s public sector as its first big customer.
• Agora, Europe’s Facebook, which launched in eleven languages at once instead of dying at the border like so many real European social networks.
• Corvo, Europe’s Nvidia, Meridian, Europe’s Anthropic, Talos Defence, Europe’s Anduril and Orbitalis, Europe’s SpaceX.

The people and companies are invented. The turning points are not. Skype was sold to eBay in 2005. Nokia missed the smartphone. DeepMind went to Google in 2014. ARM went to SoftBank and KUKA to Midea in 2016. In each case, the problem wasn’t the buyer. It was that Europe had no domestic capital able to match the offer. In the alternate Europe, a pension-backed growth fund and a screening framework gave European bidders that chance, and the companies stayed.

Running the numbers

Fiction is only useful if it teaches something, so Part 4 of the e-book models the gap, with every assumption stated.

What the alternate Europe hasFigureAdditional technology valueabout €19 trillion (€22T vs €3.3T today)European tech companies worth €1T+7, together about €13.3 trillionAdditional jobsabout 10.5 millionExtra direct tax revenueabout €300 billion a yearExtra GDP per person, central caseabout €5,400 a year

To put €300 billion a year in context: it is more than the EU’s entire annual budget, and close to 40 percent of the extra investment Draghi says Europe needs.

The single most powerful lever in the whole story is the least glamorous one: pension money. European pension funds put just 0.01 percent of their assets into venture capital in 2024. In the alternate Europe, the best pension venture programs earned 34–41 percent net IRR, the average about 18 percent, and every retired teacher and nurse owns a slice of the continent’s tech success.

The choices are still available

The alternate timeline is fiction. Its lessons are not. Each turning point corresponds to a real choice, and most of those choices are still on the table:

• Unlock pension and insurance capital, with Yozma-style co-investment to grow experienced fund managers.
• Deliver a real single company form, the long-discussed “28th regime.”
• Build scale-up capital that can match any foreign offer for a strategic tech company.
• Make failure survivable and stock options competitive with the US.
• Treat compute and energy as one infrastructure, and make procurement a launch pad for young companies.

The e-book lays out all eleven recommendations, alongside the full alternate history, eight company cases, a decade-ahead scenario to 2037, and every number behind the model.

The alternate Europe is not a fantasy of a different continent. It is the same Europe, with the same talent and resources, that made different choices at a dozen crucial moments. The next dozen moments are arriving now.

Get the report

Download Europe’s Alternate Tech Future (free, 56 pages) →

And join Christian Rangen and Scott Newton live on Monday 23 November 2026 at 19:00 CET (Oslo) for the launch webinar, where we walk through the story, the numbers and what leaders can do next. 45 minutes, live Q&A, free to join. Register on Zoom →