 and welcome to the launch of the State of European Tech 2021. I'm Tom Weymeyer from Atomico, a report co-author and your co-host for today. And I'm Sarah Gumarit, co-author, also co-author of the report and co-host for today, and we're both joining you live from London. This is now the seventh year of this report, but our goal remains the same, to capture a snapshot of the European Tech ecosystem and showcase the amazing founders and teams creating immense value through breakthrough innovations all across the continent. By charting progress, we're seeking to highlight the scale of the opportunity in Europe, as well as spark new ideas about how to fully realise European Tech's potential. Since its inception, we've become accustomed to breaking records, and 2021 did not disappoint. But there was one notable difference this year, the scale and pace of the growth. It truly is like nothing we've ever seen, both in terms of value creation and investment. It's been a watershed year. The other job of this report is to help us better understand the people within the tech community and the issues that make them tick. Today, you will hear a range of voices, from the CEO of Europe's most valuable private tech company, to the first female founder of a tech unicorn in Europe, to a former gang leader, turn community activist, entrepreneur and investor, who's now at the forefront of an effort to create opportunity for black founders. We'll hear vivid examples of the European Tech flywheel in action, where success creates the conditions for future success, as well as exploring some of the most meaningful challenges facing European Tech. This is the most comprehensive report we've ever conducted, and the conversations it's inspired are truly memorable. Now, before we get into the data, I want to acknowledge all the people who make this report possible, to the survey distribution partners, and the more than 5,000 members of the community who lent their voice to our survey, making it our largest yet, to our panel of more than 60 industry leaders who shared their expert analysis in the report, and to our data partners who shared their invaluable datasets with us. And our report partners, Slush, Oric, Silicon Valley Bank, and Bailey Gifford. Thank you. And with that, let me hand over to Sarah. Thanks Tom, and a huge thanks from me to all our partners. 2021 was a groundbreaking year for European Tech on several fronts, affirming its position as a global tech player. But first, the headline number. We're set to cross the milestone of $100 billion invested in a single year. To put that into perspective, this is 10 times the level we were excited about when we launched our first report back in 2015, when $10 billion were invested in the ecosystem. Things are moving so fast, we can hardly keep count. We hit our print deadline with 98 new unicorns, and then two more followed the very next day, taking us to a nice round hundreds. The total value of public and private European tech companies is now well over $3 trillion, and yet growth is still accelerating. So how did we get to $100 billion? Well, in short, we've seen the pace of investment break records every single month this year. By the end of November, we had already hit $94 billion. So with one month still to go, and the impact of reporting lag, we expect to end up closer to $120 billion when all has been counted. This leap forward is driven largely by mega rounds. Indeed, rounds of more than $100 million are up 10x from just five years ago. They've arrived on a daily basis this year, barely taking the weekends off. This growth also comes from a deeper pool of investors than we've ever seen. US investors are more active than ever, participating in 28% of all deals up almost 10 percentage points from just two years ago. And the presence of certain crossover investors cannot have escaped anybody's attention. Hardly surprising, given they participated in a third of all mega rounds. This helped funnel more capital into the top two quartiles of countries. Europe's most mature markets disproportionately attracted these larger rounds, resulting in huge leaps in countries like the UK, France or Germany. Dozens of countries across Europe are still at the very start of their journey. So we're not even close to reaching the full potential of Europe as a whole. But the potential is absolutely here. You just have to look at where great success stories are emerging from. Founders have built billion-dollar companies from almost 100 cities across 28 countries. Great companies truly can come from anywhere in Europe. Europe also broke records on unicorn fronts. And it's not just the frequency, but the magnitude that's changed. We have not produced 40 deca-corns across both public and private markets. 26 of those are VC-backed, compared to just 12 last year. And we've also arrived at the era of European big tech. ASML is valued over 300 billion dollars, while ADIEN looks set to become Europe's first VC-backed 100 billion dollar company. With compounding businesses and massive markets to address, they still have so much upside ahead of them. 2021 has also been a watershed year for liquidity. Across M&As, IPOs, direct listings and even SPACs, Europe Tech saw a combined 275 billion dollars in exit value. And more than half of that came from venture-backed companies. Exits are a healthy feature of a functioning market, not a bug. And this level of liquidity, both in terms of talents and capital, is vital for European tech success. So it won't be a surprise to anybody that we've seen rising valuations across all stages. At both the early and late stages, they have taken another jump. And though there remain big differences between prices in Europe and in the US, which says a lot, given the high-popping numbers we've been seeing here recently. But looking at the median valuation doesn't really tell the full story. If we look at the top quartile, as a proxy for what's happened in the most attractive and most contested opportunities, pricing levels look very different. In fact, almost 3x the market average. 40 million seed rounds, 100 million series A's and billion dollar series B's have arrived here in Europe too. The European tech is creating value faster than ever. And looking back at the trajectory so far is quite remarkable. It took a long, multi-decade journey to hit the first trillion dollars in ecosystem value. And that milestone was only reached 3 years ago, in December 2018. The second trillion followed in 24 months. And this year, the third trillion arrived in just 8 months. That's 3 million dollars of value created every single minute. Of course, it's not lost on the industry that this has happened against an unprecedented macro backdrop. Both VCs and LPs cite inflation, interest rates, and public market sentiment as the biggest risk in tech over the coming years. Tech has never been more attractive during a period when growth and yield has been otherwise hard to find. But what happens if this changes is clearly top of mind for the region's investors? But the shorter-term cycles of the markets should not detract from longer-term structural trends. Irrespective of what happens with macro, European tech's success is powered by two important tailwinds. First, the relentless march of technology that is transforming every aspect of the economy and society. And second, the virtuous cycle that has been firmly set in motion that we call the European tech flywheel. And this is systematically recycling talent, capital, and know-how back into the ecosystem, ensuring success breeds more success. So let's break down the different pieces and start with talent. This year, we've commissioned new datasets to better understand talent trends, including working with Deer Room to build a snapshot of tens of thousands of current European tech founders and senior leaders. And one thing we wanted to better understand is just how much talent is being recycled from one generation of companies to the next. Is this idea of a talent flywheel real? And the answer is absolutely. 38% of the founders and leaders in our sample have experienced working for two or more companies from both newer and more established generations of tech companies. And 19% of them have experienced working at a European unicorn. Now this matters because it's how knowledge, networks, know-how are passed from one generation to the next. It's how that experience of building and scaling companies is paid forward and how companies learn to execute better and faster against bigger ideas with bolder ambitions. We've also mapped Unicorn Mafias with greater precision than ever before, identifying almost 6,000 founders that have started companies having previously worked for a European unicorn. The top 15 Unicorns alone have more than 2,000 alumni founders. That's an average of more than 130 each. And what's even more exciting is the best is yet to come. Unicorns founded in the past decade count for 44% of the total count and yet they only make up 25% of today's alumni founders. In other words, the full potential of today's Unicorn offspring has yet to be realized. And what compounds that optimism is seeing that European tech companies are getting better with each vintage. More recently founded companies reached Unicorn status faster than any prior generation. For example, the class of 2000 took six years to produce its first Unicorn and then only delivered one more during the whole of the first 10 years. By contrast, the class of 2015 already has 16 Unicorns among them and only six years have elapsed so far. So not only do we have founders and operators with the best credentials and execution capability, we also have the strongest pipeline of early stage companies we've ever seen. Remarkably, Europe now has a share of global early stage funding that is on par with the US, having rapidly caught up over the past decade. Now, we've spent a lot of time talking about unprecedented capital flows, but before we move on, we want to make one thing clear. Raising capital is never easy and access remains unequally distributed. 18% of founders say it's actually become harder to raise capital this year compared to last. And another 40% feel nothing has changed. And this is felt disproportionately by underrepresented founders. Female founders are two times more likely than white men to say it's become much harder to fundraise. And founders from ethnic minorities are three times more likely to say that same thing. This is also reflected in fundraising data. We partnered with Extend Ventures to create what is the first ever European wide snapshot on funding to ethnic minority founding teams and leadership. And the data is sobering. Just 11% of capital invested in the companies in our sample to date went to founding teams and executives from ethnic minority groups. And only 1.8% of the total raised to date by these companies has been captured by black founders. Capital and therefore the ability to bring new ideas to life has been overwhelmingly allocated to one group of people. And beyond doing the right thing, expanding the total addressable market for talent and ideas is the only way to keep up with tech employment growth. While European employment as a whole has grown by 0.4% over the past 24 months. Tech startup and scale up employment has grown by 19.4%. That's a 50x difference. And so as this search for tech talent intensifies, it is becoming more of a bottleneck alongside ever present challenges around funding and regulation. Europe needs to do everything in its power to meet this demand for talent, not least creating a policy landscape that is more favorable in this regard. And in the meantime, as they always do, founders are taking things into their own hands. Our survey shows they're doubling down on remote roles, opening up positions in new locations and increasing their focus on purpose and values. Employee share ownership plans are also crucial. And while there's real progress on this front, there's still some way to go. The not optional campaign which is raising awareness of the issue and seeking to change Europe's policies that govern employee ownership is a necessary and important step. We're also encouraged by the share of talented women leading today's European tech companies, especially amongst the younger generations. For leaders in tech with less than five years experience, women make up a much higher proportion at 29%. It's great that younger cohorts of leaders are more gender diverse, but to address our talent shortages, we'll need to get these numbers even higher and retain them in the industry long term. So let's now take a look at how this generation of more experienced talent is shaping an exciting path for European tech. There's certainly no limit to the ambitions of Europe's boldest founders. Europe is a launchpad for moonshots. From nuclear fusion to electric jet airliners, from carbon capture to green steel and biochemicals, we see European founders taking on the hardest problems known to humanity. We're also seeing them play defining roles in shaping the development of Web3. Crypto investment is up 5x and Europe has already seen eight crypto unicorns emerge with five this year alone. Europe's crypto OGs have navigated many cycles and are seeing the rewards for their conviction and patience. Zooming out, FinTech remains a dominant theme in European tech. The region's FinTech companies have raised almost $22 billion in just the first nine months of 2021. And perhaps unsurprisingly, enterprise software so surging growth too, with investment at more than $12 billion over the same time period, which is double the amount raised over the whole of last year. Purpose and impact are also top of the agenda. Investment in companies addressing key social and environment challenges soared again in 2021. In fact, Europe now has the largest share of capital invested in early-stage purpose-driven tech companies on a global basis, accounting for 61% of all founding at pre-seed and seed stages. Planet Positive is the most common focus amongst these, which is not surprising given both the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. And it's not just founders who want to do good. 80% of all tech employee respondents to our survey said impact is such an important consideration when choosing where to work. As you can see, this year we've made huge leaps in FinTech, deep tech, climate tech, crypto and much more. And these bolder and better companies are attracting more well-class investors and helping to drive exceptional returns. European VCs deliver truly stellar performance this year. But more impressive is the fact that they've outperformed U.S. peers for the past two decades. Whether you look back over a one, three, five, 10, 15, or 20-year horizon, European VC is the star performer. And they've also massively outperformed the European buyout index for the past 15 years now. Yet in spite of this, institutional investor allocations to VC remain tiny. For every dollar invested in European VC by pension funds, $19 are allocated to buyout funds. In fact, the region's pension funds allocation to VC barely hit $1 billion per year. So that's just 0.018% of their more than $3 trillion of assets under management. And this raises important questions. Are they placing a right-sized, risk-adjusted bet on the future? Are enough Europeans capturing the value from European tech success? So with a deeper and more experienced talent pool, the strongest ever pipeline of startups, better and bolder ideas, well-class investors, we've created a strong flywheel in Europe. And the result is outcomes that exceed expectations in both the public and private markets. We've seen $100 billion of M&A value this year, including the $8 billion sale of Vault to DoorDash and $110 billion from public listings, including a record $11 billion direct listing by WISE. And we finally saw SPACs arrive in Europe in a meaningful way, bringing with them another $62 billion of deal value across 15 completed processes. European tech has never seen bigger outcomes, and founders have never had more options to find liquidity. But having said all of this, there's still huge upside potential in European tech. Europe's a vast economic powerhouse. It accounts for 22% of global GDP just behind the US. It accounts for 19% of all public equity value outside of tech. But Europe's not punching at anywhere close to that weight in technology yet. It accounts for just 7% of aggregate global tech market cap. That's a fraction of the 71% share held by North America. It's clear there's still tremendous room to grow. So let's come full circle and look at what we might expect for the next decade. You can't predict the future, of course, but we can and we should try to understand the direction of travel. The 10x growth in the value of the European tech ecosystem since 2010 translates to a compound annual growth rate of 23%. And that in itself is impressive. But even that's surpassed if you just look at what's happened since 2015. Growth has accelerated since then to 35%. And keeping in mind that outcomes have always exceeded our expectations so far. There's every reason to believe to expect future growth to beat on the upside in the long term too. And whichever way you model it, whether you go highly conservative or not, we're going to see trillions of dollars of value created by technology over the course of the next decade in Europe. Thanks, Dom. I know we've shared a lot of data. But we've really only scratched the surface of what's in the report. In fact, we have more than 400 charts in there and over 100 quotes from the industry's most insightful and influential voices reflecting on this groundbreaking year for European tech. So please, don't forget to check it out after today's event at www.stateofupntech.com. And to commemorate the year Europe smashed all expectations and to say thank you to the StoWet community who every year mixed time to take the survey and contributes to one of our core data set that informs the report, we commissioned 10 state of European tech NFTs from Amsir's studio and we will be giving them to 10 lucky winners who helped spread the survey far and wide. So drum roll please and let's have a look at the first state of European tech NFT collection. It was only fitting to give you all a piece of our very own European tech flywheel, given it underpins the success we have had this year in European tech. You can go and check the full collection by scanning the QR code, but I just couldn't resist showing you two of my favorite ones. I have to say they look absolutely beautiful and what a fitting way to commemorate 2021. Congratulations to all of the winners. We will be in touch with you after the event. And we'd now like to introduce Chris Grew from ORIK who will deliver a few words before we get stuck into their conversations. Hi, I'm Chris Grew, a partner at tech law firm ORIK. In the five years that ORIK has been supporting the state of European tech, we've seen the amount of investment grow exponentially. And again, this growth trajectory continues with new record levels of investment this year. At the same time, it's been an absolute joy to witness the report evolve into a platform for everybody united by a common drive to contribute to European tech success. And this year is no exception. Here are a few key trends that ORIK has seen this past year. First, Europe is experiencing the strongest pipeline of early stage investment. Second, European startup market is putting up remarkable results across the company life cycle spectrum. Rapid investment and big exits are now the norm for Europe. Thirdly, the European tech ecosystem is marching to the beat of its own drum, gaining significant ground internationally with unprecedented investment volume and valuation growth. And finally, as the report is now recognized as the industry benchmark, we're also happy to see it continue to highlight issues we all need to address collectively, especially diversity, equality and inclusion. These are extremely exciting times to be part of the European tech inventory ecosystem. And honestly, ORIK could not be more proud to be part of that. We hope you enjoy the show. Thank you. Thank you so much, Chris. Now, let's go to Helsinki, Finland, where Mika Hutinen, the CEO of Slash, who've been our partner since the very inception of this report, will introduce our first discussion. Hi, and welcome to Helsinki. I'm Mika, CEO at Slash. And for those who don't know, Slash is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to create and help founders to change the world. The thing that we are maybe the most known of is our annual event held in Helsinki around November and December. I think some of you visited Slash last week, but for those who didn't, I hope to see you next year in 2022. Slash has partnered up with Atomico for the State of the European Tech ever since the day one in 2015. We think that it's absolutely necessary to build the data infrastructure to understand where we are in Europe and where we should head next. Talking about that, the next discussion is incredibly important, not just only for me, but also for the Finnish ecosystem around. The next discussion will be moderated by maybe the most well-known Finnish entrepreneur, Ilkka Paanen, and co-founder and CEO of Supercell. And with Ilkka, he's joined by not just only one, but actually three former Slash CEOs. Mikki Kuusi, co-founder and CEO of Vault, COO Riku Mäkellä, and the VP of new markets, Marianne Vikkula. And one of the reasons why this discussion is so special for me is that these three people have defined the ambition level for me and for many others over and over again. When I was 19, I look up to these people when they were building Slash, and now after the success of Vault, they once again defined the ambition level to new heights, and they continue to inspire me to build different things in the future. I hope you enjoy the discussion. Hello, my name is Ilkka Paanen and I'm the CEO and founder of Supercell. And I'm here in Helsinki at the Vault headquarters together with three very special people, Mikki Kuusi, who's the CEO and founder, Riku Mäkellä, the COO, and Marianne Vikkula, VP of new markets. So I want to start with an obvious question. You guys just announced a massive deal, whereby a DoorDash acquires Vault. Value of a deal is 7 billion euros. Has that sunk in yet? I don't really think so. We've been working incredibly hard over these last seven years, and even more so in the last few months and weeks leading up to this point. So it kind of feels like we've had this very tall mountain we've been climbing over these years, and whenever you've gotten to a milestone, whether it's like raising an A round of 10 million or C round of 100 million or a 7 billion euro exit, when you get to the top of the mountain, you're like, we worked so hard to get here, and we were looking at this point and thinking and dreaming that maybe one day we could get there, and once you get there, it's kind of like, huh, we're here, but there's a new mountain, and we're only getting started on that one. So I don't think it really has sunk in yet, and there's a Zen Buddhist saying I like, which goes that before enlightenment, chop wood carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood carry water. So that's kind of how I feel like at the moment. Mariana, how do you feel? I mean, can only echo. Few very, very hectic weeks behind. It's been an amazing journey, but it will continue being so, so we're not going anywhere. Very cool. Well, I think anybody that's been in the position of perhaps not that type of sale, but a big financing event or something knows that it's a bit of work to get across the line, the actual hours you have to put in, and I think that kind of hinders your ability to see the situation when it's actually done. So I think we're still in that kind of mode and sort of processing it, but I think it's starting to, starting to sink in slowly. You get to the goal. It's good to celebrate. It's good to feel good about it. But the reality is that, you know, on Monday you'll go back to work and you have another mountain to climb. So what makes the three of you very special in addition to Volte is that you, all three of you guys have been the CEOs of Slush, the big tech conference that's happening here in Helsinki. So you sort of bring a very unique perspective in a sense that you, so yes, you've been the CEOs of Slush and then obviously you build Volte to where it is today. So what type of role did that experience sort of has played in your, how you think about your careers and also like how you thought about scaling Volte? Building Slush was a fantastic like experience for both as a CEO and as an entrepreneur, because we were just like, you know, bootstrapped operation without any financing, you know, being able to pay our salaries if we had made enough partnerships and ticket sales in the month, ultimately taking a lot of risk to build something where we like in the years I was running Slush we tripled every year. And as an event, it basically means that you're tripling your cost base and trusting that you will get the revenue in the months to come to actually pay for that cost base. So I think it was this kind of an experience that molded all three of us as leaders when it comes to how you build something from nothing and how you kind of lead something through very, you know, demanding times. And see what world class looks like as nothing like that had been built before. You had to figure out what does the best in class look like when you don't know what the best in class is. What would you say was the most important lesson you learned through Slush experience that you applied at Volte? To take an individual lesson would be rather difficult. I think what I'll say first is like one of the things we're going to talk about today is sort of these network effects, these flywheel effects, if we call them that of kind of people having success or learning from one thing and then going to apply to the next thing. And that's what I always thought Slush was. It was a school. And by the way, it wasn't a school for the three of us. It was a school for thousands of people and still remains a school for thousands of people. And all those people are going to go on to do really great things. Hopefully, actually, I'm fairly certain of it that they will. But that's the number one thing. What would I take away on a concrete level? I think it's a lot of the little things like sort of first-time manager of 10 people, first-time manager of 50 people screwing something up, doing big mistakes in hiring, doing successful hiring, like all the kind of fundamentals you need to do in building a company, you through Slush had to do a little bit too early on in your career, which meant that you could do those mistakes early on enough to where then you can sort of correct them quite quickly, if that makes sense. So you obviously started Volte here in Helsinki, Finland, but since then you've expanded to dozens and dozens of countries and have been super successful like growing your business also outside Finland. So what would be the main lessons that you could share with our entrepreneurs looking to do the same? Yeah, I think one thing that has been like an elemental thing of building Volte since the start was that we always had a big vision for what we wanted to do, like a big market. We saw that there's going to be like the world is going online. That's what's happening. And I was thinking that how are the cities going to go online? And I figured that local services, shops, boutiques, restaurants, they're going to end up online one way or another. So we had this kind of big vision, big market to work off with. But then you need to have the first step and the second step and the third step. And these steps need to be very small that you can see that step by step by step, if you take hundreds and thousands of steps, you can ultimately end up towards the vision. And I think finding that balance between having a massive market, massive opportunity, big vision, but ultimately, you know, we were a takeaway service for 10 restaurants in Helsinki back in 2015. So you need to get started somewhere. And I think finding the balance between those two things is very, very important. I think in Volte's journey, what you can find is that like we were always super focused on, you know, on the customer, building the best possible service for the customer, you know, building the best possible product to be to be able to get there, to be able to do this in environments where it's difficult, you know, to have an amazing customer experience, because population density or income disparity or these kind of things that make last mile delivery easy in some markets, that's not the case in our markets. So we need to find efficiency through technology and our culture. But I think this balance between, you know, big vision, step by step by step, getting there, and also finding niches in a big market, like, you know, our market is one of the biggest markets in the world, you don't need to win the US to build a massive company. And, you know, for us, we kind of saw that, you know, people eat everywhere. And, you know, most of the people in most of the countries don't have a service like, like the service that we were building. So we kind of figured that, you know, we might not have the biggest wall chest, but we're going to be very efficient when it comes to, you know, creating value for as many customers as possible in all different parts of the world. And today we operate in 23 countries. So Marianne, you led this expansion, what advice would you give to somebody who's looking to do the same? Yeah, Miki told well about the market opportunity, but then obviously this is a business of execution. And we've been always a company about doing common things and commonly wealth. So really excelling at the things you really need to excel, be it in customer experience and recruiting, in team building, leadership, doing the common things and commonly well. And a practical example could be maybe recruiting. When we go to a completely new market where we've never been before, you have to go and get the people. Like, no one's going to apply. Go and hunt the people down you need and go after them like you need to run. And that applies to all the new things when you go to a new market, like just get your hands dirty. So what do you do in practice? You go to LinkedIn and browse for people or? Literally that. Then use accounts of people that have the most power to look influential, have calls with them, pitch them. It's, it's a sales story, right? Just like you would be selling a service you've built. You're selling the company to a candidate. And that has to take as long as the candidate is convinced that, okay, this is an opportunity I want to pursue. And then you switch to a mode of, okay, is this person someone we want to work with actually? So as a board member of the world, like one of the things I was most impressive, and I remember you and I having discussion about expansion to Japan, it's obviously like feels like an extremely difficult thing to do. And very, there's a very small number of like companies in the Western world who even been able to do that. But you guys being like surprisingly successful there. So did the, did the exact same lessons like apply to Japan? Ultimately, yeah. We need to find the best people and we, we need to find them literally. No one's going to come to us, especially in Japan, where the brand is not at all known. Beyond that, identify the best restaurants in our business model. So basically what makes your platform local. And that's all about this business. It's not even CDs, it's neighborhoods. So you need to be there on the ground to really understand what the customers, one of what makes sense in Hiroshima or Sapporo or Tokyo. And there's no way you could do that only by being in Helsinki. So Riku, you know, you obviously have played a key role in the kind of birth of the state of European tech report. Like, tell us like, how did that come about? And especially I was asked you to ask you the question like, where did that happen? The origin story is a bit weird and I'll get into it. But the background is, like there are a few of these sort of reporting institutions, cool things that come out annually on various sectors and industries that everybody in that space look up to. There's one very well-known one on the internet, for example. And we were kind of like talking about these and thinking like, there's a lot going on in Europe all of a sudden, like there hadn't been for, you know, decades, if ever in terms of tech. And suddenly it was coming up and there were individual pieces of information, like somebody was talking about there being a boom in venture capital and, you know, showed some chart of how that was going in a nice direction. And people were talking about talent shortages in different areas of Europe and there being great hubs for talent in others. And we kind of asked ourselves, like, why is no one putting that together to where you could just sort of see what's going on in European tech by browsing one sort of report or one publication or whatever it may be. And we thought, if we do that consistently for five years or 10 years, and we actually were talking of a longer time already at that point, we figured it could maybe become a sort of institution that people refer to when they think of what's going on in tech in Europe. So that was the seed of thought into this. And then what actually happened is we were doing Slush in Tokyo at the time. We had a few international events and Tom, the head of research at Atomico, he was a speaker at the event. And it's a pretty, pretty funny story. There's an actual tent sauna, a very sort of Finnish concept, obviously, brought to the streets of Tokyo. It was an outside event. And for some reason, we found ourselves having a drink in the tent sauna with Tom. And we kind of got talking about exactly the things that I just referred to. So, like, why was nobody doing this? It was a great time for tech in Europe. And no one was sort of pulling all the data together and telling everybody what it looks like analytically. Where are things going? We said, you know, why don't we take a stab at that? And of course, the first year you could argue was a very handmade version of it, where we tried to find partners that could provide us with information as to what the hell's going on in the first place. And then it kind of matured and went from there. And of course, to be completely fair, I haven't really been involved with this for like six years at this point. So it's much better and bigger than we ever imagined at the time. But that was the origin story. Right. And it was 2015, right? I believe that was 2015. Yes. Yeah. So I was checking out the report. And I think in that report, we were getting super excited about, you know, I think it was like 10 billion being invested into European startups. We had reached, I think, 10 unicorns, like companies valued over a billion dollars at that time. How do you think? I have to say one thing, because I remember that when we were doing the first report, there was a page on unicorns in general and some categorization of them. And there were still a few enough to where we would put the logos onto a slide to show the ones that exist. And the funny thing is if you did that today, well, first of all, nobody with, you know, a PowerPoint or any other tool would bother to do that because there's probably hundreds and you wouldn't even find the logos. But there's a few of these sort of anecdotes were, you know, it's really easy to see how things have changed over the last half a decade. So what would you say has changed, say, from 2015, when the first version of a report came out? For me, what has changed the most is it's a bit of a theory to practice matter, right? But like there was a lot of talk back five or six years ago about like talent availability and how many people wanted to get into startups or growth companies or whatever. And I think especially coming from Helsinki, like it wasn't obvious. It was not an obvious choice for a lot of people, even though there was this supposed boom at the time, but I would still argue it hadn't kind of gone mainstream to where people from more traditional companies that had worked there for 15 or 20 years would seriously be considering taking that leap of faith. I think that's the biggest change. Like you see people coming into growth companies from completely different, almost unimaginable backgrounds sort of five years ago, like you never would have thought those types of people would have come to these types of companies for jobs and been successful and they definitely are. And to me, that's the biggest change. Mariana, what's been the biggest change for you? Absolutely that. On top of it, obviously availability of capital. It's completely different. Nowadays I see VCs really, really competing to get into a round over here, whereas five years ago you were really chasing as an entrepreneur for funding. And usually there just wasn't any available in Finland, in the Nordics, barely in Europe. So massive change. Yeah, I remember when we raised our first half a million euro round of financing back in 2014. It was a real fight to get that round together in hindsight. And today, and back in the days, like raising like a half a million euro round was unheard of, at least in Finland. Like that was a humongous round and crazy valuation for a company that basically was founded a week earlier. But I think like today there's so much more examples that we can build these companies also out of Europe. This is not a Silicon Valley thing anymore. Like we can have global and local champions emerge that were not founded in London. They were not founded even in Berlin. Like they were founded in some place where there was a group of people and talent and they saw something that they wanted to solve. And I think that power of the internet and how we're not only building global services anymore, but we're building hyper-local services means that there's going to be more and more success stories coming from like unobvious places. And I think that's really the big change. And the power of example is very, very important in this because I remember as a kid working at Supercell back in 2012, and that was the crazy year of Rovio and Angry Birds. I remember you said in a meeting that I'll be damned if our ambition is to be the second largest gaming company out of Finland. And I remember because it was a crazy thing to say at the time because Angry Birds was like this unheard of thing coming out of like Finland and coming out of Europe, that how could anyone build something bigger than that? And that's what you guys did. And I think this kind of power of examples is showing people in Europe that we can build these companies. These companies can kind of out of here. They can't be built by people that don't have to go to Silicon Valley anymore to do this. It's funny back in the days five, six years ago, we always were saying like, there's something happening in the Nordics or there's something happening in Europe to kind of demystify and start the story of there's a lot of good stuff cooking here. You just don't know about it. And now people do know about it. It's definitely changed. Yeah. So Marianne, like Rick already mentioned about this concept, you know, known as the fly wheel. So this idea that, you know, success creates success. You know, talk a bit about that, like what role, first of all, have you experienced that revolt and it's so how? Obviously, it's only getting started over here, but we're far ahead where we were five, 10 years ago. Obviously, Supercell and the gaming companies being the first wave and all the knowledge and also ability to invest further that came from that is now nurturing the second or the third wave, how we do want to put it a flywheel over here in the Nordics. And it's not just about the capital and the angels that come about, but also just the knowledge of building these companies that's even harder than the capital, at least in my opinion. So to keep that flywheel going on, like what role will each of the three of you guys play in the next chapter? I think we'll keep building. Like it's still very early days for our company, still very early days for our industry. What I'm most excited about is that I remember being this like young kid in 2012 working for Supercell back in the days when Supercell was like a 40 person company. And, you know, sitting here, I can recognize everything I got from that journey to be able to do the things that I've done. And my hope is that, you know, having over 4,000 people working at Walt today, that we're going to be able to create as many similar stories as my personal story through the people of Walt. And ultimately, as Marian said, it all comes down to people. And I think like, you know, we as a company, we as individuals, we're ultimately growing people that I think are that are going to build amazing companies, you know, today, hopefully continue to build Walt also for many years, but, you know, eventually, you know, doing other companies, joining, you know, existing companies or founding new companies. Considering how many, how many people are employed at Walt, like, I don't know, Mickey, what your number is, but I would definitely be bummed if the current employees of Walt didn't start at least 100 companies over the next five years. Because we do employ thousands of people, and most people are very entrepreneurially minded. In fact, I think there's already like five or six that exist that I know of, probably more than I don't know of. And to see that become more than 100 or several 100, I don't think that's a that's a stretch of imagination by any means. And each of the moments when you see someone from the community, be it a Walt alumni or slush alumni or the wider ecosystem alumni, setting up a company of their own is definitely a moment of like being proud about what we've done so far. Fantastic. So my favorite piece of this year's report was this data point. I'm going to read it aloud from here. So the report is saying that Europe accounts for 33% of all capital invested globally in rounds of up to $5 million and we are now on par with the US for the first time. So how important are the early stage investors for you guys? And what advice would you give to a founder who's looking for the best early stage investors? Yeah, we wouldn't be here without our our like early investors, like yourself and like a bunch of like other ex operators and entrepreneurs who've kind of, you know, seen what it is like to build a company like this themselves. I think like once companies get to this kind of scale up phase, it becomes more, more of like a science of like how you scale up a company and how you build different functions and so forth. And there's a lot of very good professional growth stage investors who know that really well. But when you're in the early stage, like it's it's not science, it's an art. And you need like other artists to be able to succeed in that phase. And I think like other people who've gone through the journey kind of understand what it is like, what it is like to be to try to have like constrained resources to be constantly in a place where you're going to run out of money unless you're able to figure this thing out, how to build amazing product, you know, get amazing customer experience, you know, build an organization, build a culture, deal with the stress of it all. So like my advice on that is, you know, try to find people that kind of understand what it is really like to go through that because that's the kind of support you need in the very early stage. Maria and Erika, what would you guys look in in an early stage? I have to agree with Mickey. Like, even if I think in the later years, like, you know, early investors such as yourself, like what's the most important thing that we got from that relationship? It was trust initially to be able to do the things that we wanted to do. And then it was a lot of emotional support later. And that's actually a surprisingly undervalued part of that relationship is the just sort of the emotional support for when things are difficult. It's difficult to explain how shitty things can feel, and how much sort of help can be derived from the fact that somebody trusted you as an investor is also there for you in that situation. So I think that's a big part of it that people under appreciate. Yeah, it's a rough journey to go through. It's a rough journey to go through. Like, you know, we have gone through this 70 years and ended up now in this like big transaction and everything, but there were multiple times when we were running out of money, we didn't have a long runway left. It was difficult to find investors. You know, we needed to cut down on costs. People that are your friends. Yeah, so it's not like none of these journeys are like these trade arrow journeys where you just like go from success to success. The reality is that there's a lot of hurdles you need to go through and you need support in dealing with those hurdles because it's very lonely and very heavy to go through those battles. And you're doing it for the first time. Yeah, in most cases. And that's exactly the point where the early stage investors can help. It's not that difficult, typically, but the first time is always difficult. So once you know how to deal with it, it's so much easier. This is the reason why people probably don't find like a second successful company because you're going to realize that, oh, it was done. And the first time you know what it is and then you don't want to do it again. You don't want to do it again. Fantastic. Where does European tech go from here? Is it mission accomplished? I mean, certainly not. I think if you think about this type of stuff, it's always like compounding effects. So if we think about where the world was in 2013, and that was kind of the early predictor of what it was going to be a couple years later, then at that time we thought it would maybe go here and it sort of far exceeded that. I think that's what we'll see is it's really difficult for the human mind to grasp like how big things can actually become. You just sort of try to linearly extrapolate things that already exist. And I think if we look at European tech, it's just going to keep going on the same sort of exponential trajectory. And it's tough to concretely visualize what that would mean in two or three years. But I think we'll sit here in two or three years wondering how the heck that happened again. I think that's what'll happen. So we are going to end this session with a lightning round. So I want each of you guys to give me in just one sentence, only one sentence, Miki, a prediction about European tech and a surprising prediction. Who wants to go first? I can go first. We already talked a little bit about the sort of funding landscape early stage venture capital. But the one thing we didn't touch upon was sort of the overall venture capital situation. In a sentence, what I would say the prediction that I personally make for the next five years is that the funding gap between US and Europe will become much smaller, much, much smaller than what people think perhaps based on today. Yeah, this is not a surprising prediction, at least to me it's evident. I think we're going to have at least five to 10 companies valued at over 100 billion euros coming out of Europe in the next five years. And continuing from the discussion we've had on enabling cities and local shops, I definitely think we'll see a renaissance of brick and mortar shops flourishing in downtowns. Thanks to technology. Fantastic. Marianne, Riku, Miki, thank you very much for sharing these thoughts. Very inspiring and congratulations again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ilke, Miki, Marianne and Riku for joining us. You are a perfect encapsulation of the European talent flywheel at work. In this year's State of European Tech Report, diversity and inclusion was front of mind. With the help of extend ventures, we were able to cover diversity beyond gender for the first time at a European level. The huge funding divide that exists between white founders and those from ethnic minority backgrounds is something Cyril Lutterout experienced firsthand after moving back to the UK from the US, where he had launched a number of startups. And what I noticed was that the landscape and the funding like opportunities are much more abundant in the US and the UK. And as a black founder fundamentally, I kind of struggled and found it hard to tap into these networks which are able to provide me capital. Cyril's experience was the inspiration for Black Seed, an organization he co-founded to provide funding for black founders. It's based in Brixton, South London, where Black Seed's other co-founder, Carl Loco, sat down with our very own partner, Hiro Tamura. Seed, Time, Harvest, Green Trees, Black Seeds, Afro-Caribbean Leads, History Colorful, People Colorful, Lens Colorful, Trends Colorful, Spectrum Black. Hi, I'm a Tomaco partner, Hiro Tamura. I'm in Brixton, South London today with co-founder and chairman of Black Seed, Carl Loco. Carl, thanks for having us today. It's great to be with you. You took an unconventional path to get into tech investing, to say the least. What was your journey growing up in Brixton? To get to a place of, I want to make a difference in my community and then even expansively beyond that. I mean pain. Pain. I came from one of the most underserved communities in London and as a result actually it was statistically the worst estate in London. Went to the wrong school and when we say wrong, not that there is a right, but the statistic speaks of there being a right. We know that 70% of venture capital in the UK goes to 1% of the population, which is Oxbridge graduates. I am not an Oxbridge graduate. However, I've always been, had the theme around potential and that being there I was diagnosed as a child genius. When I was in primary school, did my year 9 SATs in year 6, big song and dance that I can be and do whatever I wanted to be and do. But my community, my environment was giving me another message. So I ended up subscribing actually to a detrimental lifestyle of which was mainly around those that had financial freedom in my area. Couldn't drive German cars where Italian clothes and go to tropical destinations. They actually were doing it illegitimately. It was through the means of criminality and the rest of it. I actually witnessed someone being shot for the first time when I was 12 years old. The shooter after discharging the firearm actually came back to where me and my friends were playing and go to go and basically seek cover, not using us as shields, but literally just took off his jumper, put it on one of our makeshift goalposts and asked me to pass him the ball. You tend to listen to the person you've just seen pull that off. So I mean that was my introduction to kind of like Gangland London. We all knew that there was a glass ceiling, you know, beyond actually it being glass because glass even gives you the, it has the connotations that maybe you might be able to see past it. I would say a brick, just a roof. You know, and we were aware that basically this is our remit, you know, everyone in our community, this is basically, you're born here, you have this accent, you went to this school, your parents are in this social economic bracket. So this is your, you know, potential essentially. And ultimately, it seemed like the only way to get ahead was illegitimately. You know, so I did subscribe. I was very fortunate to my reformation that she came in the form of a woman called Pastor Mimi. She ran a church led initiative in the community. And her son was my right hand man in the gang that we were in. So she ultimately wanted to save his life, felt that maybe if she could reach one of his mates, I might cross pollinate. And I was that mate. You know, so she actually turned the house into like an informal therapy community gang rehabilitation center. She didn't know she was doing that. All she did was give her damn, you know, all she did was work with what she had, you know, and gave it all. And ultimately, like I was a fruit of that, I denounced all my involvement in what I was prior, kind of like leading, you know, essentially, and I was left with a clean slate. And that inspired me to also want to present, create a solution that I could present to the public of which was scalable and could actually help us as a nation. You know, because I realized it wasn't this in London situation. This was happening in Glasgow. This was happening in Birmingham. This was happening in Dublin. You know, so basically went about trying to move the dial in that way that put me into the place of advocating for a fairer business ecosystem. Because I understood that gangsterism itself was a byproduct of exclusion. Tell us what is Black Seed? What is it doing? What is the impact that you see it having? Black Seed is a response. I actually started Black Seed the day after George Floyd's online execution. I was having a conversation with my now co-founder around him raising. He had taken part in 10 of the country's top accelerator programs, pitched to over 100 VCs. I mean, he had the NHS on the line as a client, had the right patents. It was his third start-up, was able to raise successfully in the U.S. twice, but in the U.K. it just wasn't happening. You know, so he reached out to me and we always have this job, not because I'm any lighter than he is, but because my black book's a lot darker than us all. You know, so essentially through the graces and nephatism, you felt I'll be able to help him raise. And he was correct. In a week, we were able to help him raise his seed. And it shouldn't be the case. He deserved it. However, he was unable to tap into that without my network. So then when we've now seen what's happening with George Floyd, we're like, do we move the Dow for us on a micro or for us on a macro? And we pick the latter. So literally from that day and from that period, that's when I'm being a tech investor. What is it that you're doing? Tell us about the impact that you're making? It's one of the most robust offerings we've seen out there in terms of any seed program. We actually give capital for equity. We give a six month wrap around component. We also give six months to rent free in our offices in Bricson. And the reason why it's so robust is because black founders have been typically over mentored and underfunded. It's more likely that a black founder will contract skin cancer than to get venture capital funding in the UK. It is that dial. So we're like, we get to the bone of it by actually deploying capital. And it seems like a simple thing, but it's not been happening. 88% of black businesses in the country actually self funded. So there's the seed fund program angle, and then there's also the community. The community runs in tandem. So what we do is online and offline events. We run the monthly in the Bricson area because our whole framing and our long term vision for the areas to make it a home of black tech. So what we do is that we do online events, offline events, of which we have that fireside chats. We get existing tech entrepreneurs. We get office hours. We have workshops. We recently did a startup we can with in association with Google for startups and where we were able to award one of the founders, 10,000 pounds towards their business. So essentially seed fund program, community running in tandem and just offering the black community what they have been denied essentially. It's really exciting that you're doing that. I think it's incredible. And we'd also love to be as supportive as we can. Tell us about some of the businesses that you're working with. What kind of founders are there? There's a lot of talent that you're uncovering. We're finding so many resilient founders that have been taken on with almost nothing. No real kind of allies because the black tech ecosystem is one that has been so underdeveloped and underserved essentially. We have everything from deep tech companies. There's one young lady that actually has a bit of tech that she has created that within your full snails or within your luxury watches, you're able to do actually like Apple payments, you know, so which is a really nice touch. We have those like SaaS businesses. We have one that's actually who was awarded the 10K. He has a company called Gigbridge and basically they're just offering solutions. It's almost like a task 3.0. There's one where it's a celebrity and they had a child and they were looking for with an app called ThinkDirty to find basically where it's a natural product that they could put on their daughter and they couldn't find one that had a zero rating. So they created one and essentially what we've done is digitized the process with them so they're able to create like a subscription and also it has a QR code that's able to tell kind of diaspora stories for black families essentially and black mothers and fathers to share with their children. So I mean there's a array of different kind of founders and businesses. Very cool. Tell me a little bit about your investors, how they are working with you, what are the types of say limited partners that you're in touch with maybe the funding behind the scenes for Black Seed? We have some LPs that have been quite like candid. We appreciate that. We feel as if the period for pleasantries is kind of over with. We need to really kind of move the dial in a real way and some have said that they've never actually had a black founder knock on their doors for maybe let's say a series scene around. It's just never happened. So they're like ultimately we can tell that that's a pipeline issue. So we totally get that even the institutions are turning their focus to move the dial for let's say Black entrepreneurs and Black founders. A lot of their remit actually says and their investment criteria is that they don't invest in seed. But this is where the stimulus is. That's where we've seen a big dislocation in terms of maybe the friends and family remit where those that are coming from particular communities can't raise a seed from friends and family. They couldn't raise a seed from friends and family and their neighbors, friends and family and their neighbors combined. So they're just not being granted any kind of opportunity or access. So we're having pretty straightforward conversations in that way. And a lot of them are actually in for the long term vision. They see and understand that it stimulates even this geographical setting to be the home of Black tech. And they understand it's an ambitious goal because ultimately we say we're going to make bricks in the Black Silicon Valley and the US doesn't even have a Black Silicon Valley. And they love the audacity. They also understand that in my day job I take lead on a 20 story building that's coming of which we'll literally be able to and we have actually imposed it to house the first Black entrepreneur ecosystem. So they know it's not just wishful thinking but we have actually some things in play that we're going to be able to move on in a real way. And they know ultimately underrepresented must mean underestimated. I know for a fact that your ambition levels are incredibly high. Tell us a little bit about what long term success looks like for you. Yeah. Wow. And Black Sea. Yeah. Yeah. Long term success is we live in a society where the parameters of one's ambitions is purely down to their imagination and their commitment to fulfilling that. And they have the ability to be able to pursue their ambitions but create those solutions in all those generational companies. You know being able to give the best offering they can to humanity without going through all of those barriers doing those particular dances. You know. So yeah that would be my grand like long term vision. But I mean if we're talking over the next decade over the next decade for me it would be that that number of 88 percent of Black businesses are self-funded. I want that to drop to about 40. You know. That would be like for me Black Seed decade. Yeah. Very cool. But I think maybe the first ambition is something that you know maybe you push yourself to try to make happen in 10 years and the second one you make happen in five. Wow. I'm a man. Vision. Colorful. Mission. Colorful. Intention. Black. And droves. That's so cool that you can do that in your neighborhood where you grew up. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal. Now it means a lot. It means a lot. This is more than business. So Carl I think you do serve as an example and for people to be able to believe that's very meaningful. I understand this is the future but it's probably beyond SportsDirect and USC. For sure. What's going to happen here. Yeah. So at the moment it looks like a sports director at USC. I promise you we have plans to build a 20 story building here. I mean this is actually going to be the home of the country's first Black entrepreneurial ecosystem. I mean exclusively working in tandem to be able to not just give inclusion but actually like actively like pump and generate Black businesses and really incubate Black enterprise and founders you know. So we envision venture studios in their Black seed itself and all our portfolio companies will occupy a space here also. I mean the building is socially configured in a way where 20,000 square foot will be given to a civic center space right in the center of the building of which it will be ran independently by the community. You know also 40% goals towards affordable workspaces you know. So we're definitely socially minded but it is capitalism 2.0 embodied you know and the provisional work intact at the moment is one bricks. I can see already the future of the good work that you'll do out of this and the impact that that you'll make but also that you know it's refreshing how you bring an element of reality to your efforts and lots of respect and we want to be part of that journey too. It's been awesome spending time with you. Thank you. Thank you Carl for sharing with us your inspirational story. And now from one inspiring leader to another next up we have a message from Erin Platts at Silicon Valley Bank. Hello and thank you for joining us today for the launch of the Atomico State of European Tech 2021 report. I'm Erin Platts, head of AMIA and president of the UK branch of Silicon Valley Bank. We are really delighted to again sponsor and partner with Atomico on its annual report providing the most in-depth look at what's shaping our European innovation economy and driving its record levels of growth. The State of European Tech report is without doubt the most comprehensive review of the European tech ecosystem in 2021 has proven itself to be a defining year and really a catalyst for the next decade ahead. At Silicon Valley Bank we help feel innovation for a better world by working exclusively with innovators and investors to increase their probability of success. So with clients like Atomico we support the ecosystem to help finance the growth of innovation businesses and funds from seed to IPO and beyond. We strongly believe that European innovation ecosystem is at a pivotal point of its maturity as we herald the beginning of a golden era. The data and insight from this year's report clearly show this to be true. So today's lineup of experts will expand on what's driving the step change of Europe arriving as a global superpower when it comes to all things innovation and venture. We will also cover the opportunities to accelerate the momentum we've all enjoyed this year and the headwinds that could potentially hold us back. So we really hope that you enjoy the discussions and on behalf of Silicon Valley Bank we'd like to thank you for taking the time to tune in. We really can't wait to see what this group does next and look forward to supporting you on your journey ahead. Thanks for that message Erin and I'm now so excited to share the story of Corinne Vigroy the co-founder and CEO CMO of TomTom. She's a true tech pioneer and she's being interviewed by Yannick Anisen who's the co-founder of Capital T and an inspirational figure in her own right. Both have worked for much of their lives in the Netherlands which as we saw in this year's report has had a standout year. So let's now go to the Kodam coding college in Amsterdam. Hi everybody, welcome to Amsterdam. My name is Yannick Anisen. I'm partner at Seed Fund Capital T and I'm really excited to be here today with Corinne Vigroy. Corinne is co-founder of TomTom, vice chair of GIST-E Takeaway, chair of Tech Leap, founder of Kodam coding college, basically a pioneer in so many things. She was the first female founder that built a unicorn in Europe and it took us another 10 years to get number two. She's one of the OGs of the European tech ecosystem and she's an amazing example of giving back, so I'm really proud that she's here with us today. Corinne, welcome. Great to have you. Thanks. You make me blush. Thank God they did a lot of makeup. So what an introduction. You are awesome. Thank you. So one of the headlines in this year's report is that a hundred billion was invested in the European tech ecosystem. For somebody that has been around for so long, what are your thoughts? Brilliant news. I think it's great. I think it also shows that the potential of the European tech ecosystem. I think when so much money migrates to this ecosystem, it means that people are seeing the vibe and the vibrancy of those new founders coming to the tech community in Europe. So I think it's good news. If you look at what's happened in the U.S., you've had a couple of very successful tech companies that created quite a lot of wealth and that was reinvested into the ecosystem and the flywheel in the U.S. has been now turning faster and faster for the last 10 to 15 years. What are we seeing now in Europe is that flywheel is starting to turn. I think it's excellent news and I think it's just testimony to the quality of some of the companies that are emerging from this ecosystem. So this year's report shows a really vibrant ecosystem. The Netherlands stood out in this year's reports. So what do you think are the reasons that we as a country have performed so well? Well, there have come some extraordinary big successes in Holland, of course. If you look at ISML, it was the biggest tech company in Europe today with a market cap in excess of 300 billion. If you look at the newcomers, like Adion, it was at 70 billion. You look at Takeaway. You look at also smaller companies that managed to attract quite a lot of funding, like Moly, but also Autrium in the smaller companies. And you look at Picnic. You see that Holland is actually building on the top of very strong companies. And I think that the flywheel I was talking about earlier, you see a lot of people in the ecosystem starting giving back and basically talent coming out of this ecosystem, working and feeding the flywheel back. So I think this is a very interesting development. And I think, to be honest, I'm not completely surprised. We look also at booking. Booking is not listed here, but the head office is here. That's a company that originated in Holland. So you can see so many big impact, success story in this ecosystem. So I'm super, certainly as chair of Takeaway, but it's fantastic to see so many companies, so many founders doing so well. And so much money coming into the ecosystem, so much value being created here. And do you think the European market is too fragmented? Or do you also aside from that every country has a strong ecosystem, do you also see a strong European ecosystem? Yeah, I think more and more we'll need to work with each other. I think that we're not where it should be. But again, I think we should look as Europe as a whole. For me, it's really important to have strong tech companies in Europe. Looking at this report today and the level of investment in that community gives me a lot of optimism with the future. And I think we have a lot of very talented people in this ecosystem. What I find really painful sometimes is seeing founders selling out too early, especially to companies outside Europe. Founders that feel they have to go abroad to be successful or to grow. I think that's also a loss to the ecosystem. So it's very interesting to see companies like Addion, like Takeaway, like booking, like TomTom, having grown in this ecosystem to a very large size and hard market capitalization. So I think that's encouraging. So as somebody who has been around for quite some time, you have seen a lot happening over the last 20 years. But when you look ahead for the next 20 years, what is it that really excites you? And what do you hope that will happen? So I'm super psyched when I look at what's happening and how much money is pouring in here. It's the beginning of Europe and the recognition of Europe as a serious ecosystem. I'm looking next 20 years with a very strong Europe, building the next giant, tech giant, in the world to compete with what's happening in the US and in Asia. So I think that's a good sign. There's one thing that worries me is the tech education. I think that I'd like government to realize that tech is actually here to stay. Tech has a big impact on our lives, whether it's health tech, whether it's climate change, whether it is the new type of mobility. There is a lot to be done and tech will have a massive impact on our lives. And I think it's important that the government recognize that and introduce digital education early on in the curriculum. Just for young people also to understand the world around them, to be able to understand the news that they consume, where is it coming from? That actually a lot of algorithms are deciding what's happening and if they get a feel for that, they're also going to make them more active citizens if you want in this next generation. So I think it is one thing that I find a little bit disappointing in Europe is we're not catching up fast enough and not changing education fast enough. One of the reasons I've set up CODAM, again on the great initiative Xavier Niel in France and based on Ecole Caron de, now 33 schools around the world following that same system. So I am very optimistic that Europe can make it. I think what we're seeing today is a sign in the right direction, but I'd like to see more digital education throughout and more collaboration between the different ecosystems as well with London, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, of course, and Amsterdam. And I think we have a chance if we pull our resources together or knowledge together to really be serious contenders for building the next tech giants. Yeah and I think I can remember when I first started being an entrepreneur was not a sexy thing, not an obvious career choice. Everybody basically told me, don't do it. I guess you experience the same and see also that that changed in the ecosystem more talent. Yeah more talent, more, yeah it's more taking risk is probably more persuasive that at the time it was also people were looking at you funny. I remember I never said I was a founder of a tech company. It's only recently that as well as it looks like it's quite cool to be a founder of a tech company. It wasn't in the in the last 20 years. So I think that's one thing but more importantly what's interesting is sort of startup founders are innovators and we I feel that we kind of make the world turn around and I think that's important to see that this is changing and we see a lot of young people and talented people wanted actually to take risk and make things happen. I mean if you look at TomTom there is a world before TomTom and after TomTom the amount of marriages we've saved you know and we bought digital navigation to the world and that feels good and other companies could have done it but they didn't. So I think you see and you see this with a lot of tech companies today that are really making a big difference and so you want to get that ecosystem to flourish and want to do that in Europe. You also are very passionate about diversity and inclusion. Why is that? Well I think that first of all I think if you again if you are an innovator and you want to change the world what you want to do something different you need to also have people who think in the different ways. So what I like about diversity at every level is when you look at solving a problem it's much easier to do it when you have different points of use because people who think the same or look the same want it's unlikely to be to have a very interesting ways of solving issues. The other thing is of course we've got a big war for talent it is probably one of the biggest problems today about the tech community worldwide. So I think that we don't want to be fishing in a half a pond and therefore we need to really embrace diversity and I think we yeah we need to make it a very comfortable place for yeah men women but also people of every culture and I think that's very I think we're going to have to anyway and hopefully make sure that women feel comfortable in in that tech world. Yes and and what I'm sometimes wondering I'm curious what you think because we publish diversity stats for years we've talking we've been talking about it for years but still changes really slow. Do people not care is it really unconscious bias or are they just lazy what do you think. No I think it is difficult to you so but it is possible I mean look we here we had co-downers this coding school that that I funded that and we have it's coding software engineering school. We have 36 percent of women so if we go and talk to women specifically and explain and make it a nice environment actually software engineering is bad creativity so we attract women. There's also more women founders we can see that that they're coming but it's it's too slow. I think we just need to yeah to maybe what we're doing today show that women like you and I who founded tech companies we're kind of okay we we've raised kids mine a bit older than yours but they've done fine and we've always worked so I think it's also a way of showing that it's possible but also making an environment that where women feel they can thrive as well and just get a little bit away from that grow culture but again that fight for talent is is playing in in women's favor because companies will have to ensure that they have a more diverse group at TomTom we're quite good at it we're really trying to encourage more women to come through. I believe in mentorship as well and sponsorship within organization looking and onboarding younger women. I think that's one way of bringing them to the top. There's no silver bullet but creating a good environment I think will help. Yeah one of the things that's also clear from the report that investment for female founders and the represented founders is still behind and slow what do you see can change that and actually get more great entrepreneurs that happen to be women or and the represented founders also funded. People like you? Yeah I mean there's the reason why I became an LP in capital T. I think the work that you and Eva are doing not only because you're women but your approach to investment is is super interesting. You're looking at statistics you're looking at you're looking at it from a very scientific way in a way and just using also your experience into investing into successful companies. So I think that that's yeah this is like yourself that are really making it a point and and taking the time to look at mixed teams and female founder that's going to make the difference. We need more capital T. Well I can of course only upload that. Well and I guess all the companies also attract a lot of talent which is helpful because talent is one of the things we are all looking for. The infrastructure is great. Do you also see any challenges in the Dutch ecosystem? Talent is probably the biggest issue that tech has in general and some of the worry I have is some large tech companies are coming and sucking that talent out. So it's interesting to see that we are training more and more people so people worked for when I started TomTom it was quite difficult to recruit and also we didn't have many employees that came from a tech ecosystem because it wasn't just wasn't there. When I see now all employees ending up in as a starting companies themselves like Flinders for example in Holland or a very successful e-commerce company you see that that yeah the people we've trained with this risk-taking this mental for this innovation drive that's really helping the ecosystem as a whole and you see a lot of TomTom employees everywhere in the ecosystem and people from booking. We basically there is a virtual circle if you want and I think that's very encouraging. Being a founder of stuff I think we both recognize that that it's not easy and well it can be a big thing and now that the ecosystem is growing further there's more money flowing around it there's more pressure on the founders. Do you feel there's enough attention to mental health of founders in Europe or is that still a subject we prefer not to talk about and just go on? Well the problem is being a founder and running a tech company is not easy I mean in general it's you know it's well it goes really fast you need to be I mean if you look at TomTom I mean good we have been disrupted so many times and if you look at how we pivoted the whole business from being inventing sat nav as I said earlier to now being leading in in mapping with one of three map makers in the world in traffic information we're basically sort of looking at mapping the world in real time so it's all about sort of sensor derived observations so things we get from cameras and new inputs into our maps and automation at a high at high level the amount of you need to keep going and never lose sight of your big picture and sort of your nose and start it's not easy but at the same time yeah do we have really time to I don't know it's you know I've never stopped working I started the business I run the business for the first 12 years on my own and how old and the the guys came on and I was chief commercial and then I run the consumer P&L I run the this consumer P&L at the time where you know I had to let it glide where where things were starting to decrease and so running a business in a declining market that's the reason why I started the sports which is you you always look at how can I keep innovating keep serving my customers keep growing my business we have 5000 employees 35 countries the responsibility towards your employees you don't have much time to think about yeah no that's true but what I think and that's why I'm so excited also about the ecosystem getting stronger is that I I think it can feel very lonely like you're the only one facing all these challenges so having other entrepreneurs to talk about it and I think you have also you also have a group of founders and I always try to tell the founders we invest in make sure you have a group of people you trust feel free to always reach out to us trying to because I I can see in that the pressure on founders is yeah you did a high level of resilience to be a tech founder I think that that's true and it's not but did it help you to have other founders around you to talk I'm going to be very honest I met them later on in life I think as we were building the business it's you your head is down and and you're trying of you know you're you're working hard and you're trying to make things kind of yeah at some point you get the impression you're driving that that Ferrari very close to the cliff so you kind of sell hold hands and deck and with your board and you're I think it's important for founders especially the one who look for investors from the outside that people understand your business that's more the point because when you're trying to manage a business in difficult circumstances and you've got people who've invested and try to give you all sorts of advice but don't necessarily understand what it is that you try to do that makes things a lot more complex and difficult you know where the fact that we would strive to IPO and that we still have 48% of the shares helps because you kind of you can't really look long term and I think that's probably more helpful to founders to find people in their ecosystem or to fund them that actually understand what motivates them that passion because when when things go up and down you want to be working with people who's going to help you find a solution instead of saying well you know we put that much money and now it's time to return I think that is important to look at the longer term and yes talking to other founders can help but I don't think that's the end of the day you need to yeah look at yourself and and and that resilience I think it's been nice to to have a group of people and but it's not like I would be lying if I said that that that was a bigger that it's it's nice and we meet once a year and it's and when you have a bad day you have a bad day I come here yeah at Kodam you know at TomTom when it's like every company you see oh my god I come here and I see the students and how they're doing and and the fact that as a as a founder I've been able to give back as well I mean so that's also something that gives me a lot of satisfaction and help me cope with the with the tough days yeah no I can imagine if you walk around here you basically see the future and so that's that's a nice bridge to my next question what excites you about the next 20 years what 20 years what do you hope to see how what are you excited about when you think about the future well I I generally would like to see a strong European tech industry and I know you would say that because we're having this interview but that that's generally for me a big driver I think that there is so much knowledge and so much talent in Europe that we've got to be master of our own destiny especially in technology and I'd like people to understand that technology is everywhere and it's everywhere for good it helps gonna help a lot of problems that's gonna be have a massive impact in health a massive impact in education have a massive impact in mobility and all sorts of areas where tech is having a big ball and we've got to we've got to be at the table and not on the menu in Europe you really have to develop a strong European community so tech community so I want to see that for the next 20 years what I'd like to see is more better tech education I think governments underestimate the the digital literacy and and I would bring digital literacy much earlier on the curriculum there's a lot of differences depending on European on European different European countries but I would really see that as a as a priority and then trying not only to work in tech industry but also to understand the world around you you want to understand how information is given to you you want to understand what happens behind those algorithms that they're written by the people so it's understand a bit more of the keys and decode what's happening around you so I'd like to see that and yeah so I but I'm a big believer in technology I think technology is there for good it's there to stay and will have a very positive impact I just want Europe to have a strong Europe to to help solve some of the climate issues that we have energy issues that we have health issues that we have no I think we can definitely agree there as an ecosystem we need to act like entrepreneurs as soon as you think you've arrived basically that's the end so we need to stay sharp and continue to strive for better things one last question to to end with today you mentioned something about turtles being important for the tech ecosystem can you explain what they are and why they are so important we love turtles and turtles are basically Europeans that have moved over to the US or to Asia coming back to Europe so people who've experienced their life and the the the entrepreneurialism of Silicon Valley for example in product management which is something that's not very well developed in Europe have been a bit in that Silicon Valley pressure cooker and just want to come back to yeah to to to their roots maybe or to Europe that's and we've said where a lot more money is flowing in a lot more opportunities and where they can contribute at TomTom we're just recruiting more and more turtles and you can see that they're coming with a different point of view a different the thing in the US is everything is possible and something you want to to bring into Europe is that it's at risk taking it's the level of ambition and and with mixing the talent that we have here with entrepreneurs that I've seen and a different way of working abroad I think that's that's a recipe for good magic to make Europe bigger in terms of tech well thanks a lot I think we can conclude that we are really excited about the future of Europe we still have a lot of ambitions and we would love to see more turtles as well thank you a huge thank you to Corin and Yanica for your insights we wouldn't have as much to celebrate in the state of European tech report if it wasn't for everything you've done to champion the ecosystem next up we have a short message from Steven Pace at Bay Gifford welcome to the SOET family hi I'm Steven Pace head of European equities at Bailey Gifford through the last hundred years or so of being an independent partnership as well as making many mistakes we've come to believe that to generate extreme positive returns we need to find and invest in the world's most exceptional growth companies and to support them for long periods of time even as they transition from private to public markets we've had the pleasure of co-investing with Atomico before but this year we are also delighted to sponsor their state of European tech report this report as previous additions have also done shines a welcome light on the tremendous progress of Europe's tech ecosystem whether it's a number of companies reaching unicorn status or the increasingly supportive funding environment we think you'll agree that Europe's future has never looked as promising this is our time to accelerate the revolution we are seeing in some industries and to help build a sustainable future we hope you take as much inspiration from the reports findings as we do there is still a lot of work to be done but the combination of unprecedented levels of ambition and patient capital is a truly potent mix thank you and now on with the show thank you so much Steven one of the biggest stories this past year has been the continued rise of fintech which has attracted the most investment and created more value than any other sector and the company leading the way is based in sweden which is where we're headed next and these two speakers need little in the way of introduction Sebastian Semiekowski Semiekowski is the co-founder and CEO of kalana Europe's most valuable private tech company and nicolas zenstrom is one of the true pioneers of european tech having co-founded skype as well as atomico they sat down in stock home to talk about how kalana became a global category leader and why its ambitions for the future are even greater Sebastian thank you so much for having me and it's great to be here in kalana headquarters in Stockholm to share a little bit about the journey of scaling one of europe's most successful tech company thank you so much thank you for coming the success you've had with kalana is extraordinary but i know also it wasn't always smooth sailing and can you share a little bit with us how how you went about to scale from first sweden and then now becoming a global company when we started it very early 2005 with three founders you know we did a lot of sales we're out there meeting clients and we started this kind of snowball that started really rolling and then as we were growing as a company starting to reach like a thousand people it really changed it put a very different type of requirements on ourselves as founders as managers um and and and really kind of challenged us on like how do you use how do you make a big company work like i understand how to make a small company work but a big company and so in 2010 11 when we started going into new markets and so forth um was a time when i started getting nervous about the momentum in the business i started feeling that we weren't taking decisions as fast we were growing political we were hiring a lot of senior executives that were supposed to come in and fix everything and and you could feel that that momentum was slowing down so it was a quite challenging time but obviously we were very focused on still kind of learning experimenting and trying to find a way forward and it took us about i'd say about three years until 15 really when when my second co-founder left um that we started kind of finding a new way of working um internally and then that kind of laid the foundation for the continued growth the big thing for me the last um 18 months or so or two years maybe it's been the success of the us which now is the largest market for carna was there a moment or pivotal point where you realize how you could make that really big we launched in the us in 15 and at that point of time it was more just to put like a flag there and say like we're we're going to do something but we didn't really had yet like a clear idea of um what the opportunity would look like and how we should create the perfect product market fit and so forth my biggest challenge was that i felt that i could go and speak to a merchant and come back with an idea or do something but then i was going back to an organization in sweden that you know in order to deliver a new feature a new service could take up to a year and i realized that with that pace we would just never break through in that market so in 15 to 18 i really spent my main focus on kind of really that was the time i really started finding a way of working we had re-hauled a lot of the technology we got the right managers in place and so we were well equipped and then in 2018 um i remember going to uh to the us with the management team and we kind of said like this is it like it's either now we're going to make it work or not and so then we just uh you know then i just we just dropped everything and it was just a hundred percent focus on the us um uh after that um and that has really you know given results now but but it was fairly i would say i felt fairly dark in the beginning because we had some strong competition they were you know slightly ahead of us and so it was uh it required a lot of discipline and a lot of like hard work to overcome that and given the size of the us market and typically if you know if you win the us market then it's easier to become the global company right in hindsight now would have been better to use when you started the company from the beginning or at some point you just kind of pick up everything and just move the whole company to the us or do you think that scaling a company from from uh stock in europe is actually uh pretty okay i think that that is something that has changed massively right so when we started clon in 2005 like really the only person we could look to that had done something on a global scale was you right i mean you were a massive inspiration for us with what you had done with skype and because it was the only european example of a company that had started here and that had had that global success um and i think also when i look at my first years like 2005 to maybe 12 um at that point of time the advice that we were getting on how to grow and scale the company was a very poor quality so we were poorly advised by so many people that were involved with the company at that point of time board members that you know claimed to have experienced people and so forth they had simply never scaled at this rate like because it hadn't happened at that time there were very few companies that had done that so they had a very poor understanding of what that meant and what the challenges and what how you needed to go about and i think at that point of time in san francisco if you were you know 2005 to 12 you already had google you had a couple of you know really successful companies and so there was more maturity more understanding of what the requirements were what kind of people you need how you need to operate and so forth to be able to scale at that rate and i think we were so we had we were you know struggling with that now it's changed massively right because now there is in europe a number of companies that done really well and has scaled so that experience exists and at the same point of time what's happened in san francisco is that it's totally over over hyped right so engineers there work for maximum one year at a company and then they move on to another actually most companies that i speak to today that are entrepreneurs and that are in silicon valley they are the entrepreneur entrepreneurs it's in silicon valley and then all the engineers are in ukraine right so like you know really it's just like you just the entrepreneur that sits there but like so i think today we feel that being in europe has a massive advantage we have access to you know fantastic engineering talent across across the continent and and it's it's kind of a healthier environment to operate in which actually allows us to be you know successful in many markets well thank you for that and it's true that silicon valley had so many role models and now you're one of the role models here let's move a little bit to the buy now pay later model which is everyone is so excited about this the fastest growing payment method because this was actually based a little bit on some swedish um spending patterns so tell us a little bit about when you started what was the kind of the the problem that you tried to solve the kind of 2004 and five when we started clona was a fun time because there was a lot of e-commerce entrepreneurs out there and they all were starting these small companies and they realized that they could like buy google ad words really cheaply and sell something right um and some of them developed to amazing companies so it was it was kind of a fun time and but we realized at that point of time that the usage of a debit card online because sweden was a debit card market it basically asks the consumer to send money to the merchant and then hopefully receive the product that they saw in the picture which at the point of time especially then people were very nervous would i receive this you know people didn't trust the internet etc and so the idea very basic concept was like why wouldn't the consumer get the products first touch and feel them before they pay for them um and that was it and and it turned out that like both consumers prefer that because if they felt more safe and well more easy and so forth but also merchants as a consequence could see more sales and growing faster so that was kind of that that was the basic form of it now what has accelerated clona and what's why you're seeing this by now political is because in the u.s. and in the u.k. there's a shift away from credit cards towards debit cards so more people have debit cards than ever which is great because people should have debit cards not credit cards so that's amazing but then when they shop online um they struggle with debit cards and so you know our services so for them and today clonize is a 46 billion dollar company of course is a textbooks example of of of disruption but also feels to me when i you know follow you you know as a founder and as a company that the more successful you are the more ambitious you get is that accurate well i think yes and i think to some degree i mean obviously you kind of you move the the step of what you want to accomplish and and you get more you know a bold about what you're trying to but i also think to some degree that you know um it is a very interesting market because we're in this trillion dollar market called retail banking and and it hasn't you really cared about this customer and it doesn't have modern technology and you know so like to your point all of the prerequisites are really there um which is super exciting and and and at the same point of time i kind of recognize and i think to me maybe more because i was there at the early days of e-commerce i mean i remember when we first raised money for clana some investors told us people are never going to shop clothing online because that was the sentiment in 2004 like that was still the sentiment right so like and i recognize and then e-commerce came along and then zalando started growing and you know everyone was screaming at chinevik that was crazy that they had this valuation because it didn't make sense like and then you know wow suddenly salando was worth a lot of money like so the point is that like it's it's coming now you can see this shift and people always there's a hype and then comes a down and then come up but the shift but the trend doesn't like it doesn't change like e-commerce is eating more and more retail and and and digital banking will eat more and more of the traditional banks and you came into this with as a payment service but i liked about what you guys did early on that you said we're gonna be a bank so you're taking approach now to transform retail banking coming from from an entry point of payments which i like as an investor because your unit economics are used so much better than than the other entrance yes no i think that's the case and i think that i mean in essence if you look at banking it really is saving lending and payments right that's the those are the three core elements of what it's been about and and i think the payments is a very natural entry point and that's where we're going to be very very focused so one thing we set out to do with Atomico when we started was to build an venture firm that could be there for founders in the long term and hopefully add some value to the founders in in their journey and and have empathy with them is that something that is in your mind as as a as a founder is that something that's useful or is is it about raising money at the highest valuation well first and foremost it's definitely not about the highest valuation i did that mistake when we when we took in money in 2010 we had gone from sequoia coming in you know at a hundred million dollar and then just one year later we did a billion dollar and that was just too fast what i learned from that is that it wasn't great because we came into a situation where we had a too high valuation and the latest investors were not too happy about it because they realized that it was going to take time to grow and we started seeing a lot of cracks in in the in the growth of the company and so i really learned from that that like it's not about the highest valuation it's about having you know people that you trust that they're having integrity they're going to support you through the ups and downs and preferably you know so you got to find those people and you got to be willing to take them on not always at the highest valuation and that's the advice that i give to other founders today as well like you know there's a big difference between investors in their integrity and they're willing to back you etc and then secondly to that providing you know um advice or providing additional you know other support services and so forth that varies a lot because that always comes back to like what kind of people do you have in your organization like i mean in atomico um you've always had this guy you know recruitment uh yeah then who's amazing um and like we've had a lot of help from him so like but it becomes very individual like you you know it's it's really about your ability to attract the people that can really you know give give proper and good advice right um and that's hard to judge as an entrepreneur early on when you when you work when you talk to a firm but but it matters um so i think it's it's the trustworthiness and the integrity of the people that you work with silicon valley can be sometimes maybe not so much anymore but it was a time when they were very critical about copper cats and and european copper cats and it's funny now to see that it may be the tightest turn where where you have companies like some of the big silicon valley companies like square a firm and and and even apple to some extent or following and being inspired by you guys have done in clorna how how do you feel about that and how are you going to stay ahead because some of them are pretty big companies first of all obviously it's flattering to some degree and then it's also frustrating to another but i think like my biggest frustration actually was with it was that we when we were not active on the us market right that meant that we were coming with ideas we were trying to come with new ideas and it's hard it's hard to innovate and it's hard to do stay front um and when you did that and then you you know so other companies implementing the same things in the us but you're not active in the market wow that's that's a massive frustration nowadays at least like we can lead ourselves in the us with our offering um so now it's more like well that's just how it's going to play out right like people are going to copy what you do i find that silicon valley still however is very centric on itself um and actually that's one of its weaknesses to be honest like i mean even if like apple now introduces by now pay later as i said in an interview like when is it going to come to europe i don't know like 10 years from now like 15 years from now like it's like the europe is as big as a market as the us and you've been out this now for 16 years and everyone wants to know what's next for chlorine so can you share with us your vision for the future so i think global presence is very key um that's going to continue um and and with global i mean maybe you know x china because china is a very different animal i think the second thing is that um by now pay later for us is a is a fantastic feature it offers a lot of value but obviously it's just a feature um so at the end of it it's like people come into these checkouts they have all these buttons paypal you know apple pay google pay this pay whatever and then they have this clonobutton and i mean the key question right now that i ask everyone internally it's like why would anyone click this button instead of the other buttons like what's the value so what is the value creating for customers how does it you know improving their lives how are you saving them time saving them money um making their less worried about their finances um so i think like keeping really focused at that but right now i feel like more than ever um it's not about like because we did a pivot we've done two pivots one around 10 and one around 15 but now it's not about that now it's just like keep our heads down and just keep extremely focused and just kind of continue doing what we're doing because we're at the right trajectory but again we have the massive benefit of this tremendous addressable market right it's just limitless right it's just so huge congratulations to the success and we're so privileged to be part of of your journey so thank you for that thank you for supporting us thank you for spending the time with us Sebastian thank you thank you Sebastian and Nicholas this year has been an exercise in resetting our ambition to think bigger and bolder than ever and Clara's story is exactly the inspiration we need every year since we launched this report we've heard the same thing policy regulatory fragmentation and geopolitics are some of the most pressing concerns in the minds of entrepreneurs this year a fifth of founders filled policy is the biggest challenge european tech will face in the next 12 months but there's uncertainty and confusion about how these issues are being addressed in brussels and beyond so here to discuss how tech is essential to delivering on policy and why understanding policy is so critical to people innovating through tech are true two people with truly distinct perspectives so now let's join linda griffin co-founder of the european technology alliance and vp of global public policy at kree who's speaking with executive chairman of the institute for global change and former uk prime minister tony blair thank you tom tony blair welcome to this year's launch of the state of european tech report and thank you for joining us today well thank you for having me linda great so let's get straight into it there can be a sense that policymakers often jump on issues that the tech community feel don't matter as much so if you look at the resources that are going into the guy x discussions around the european cloud people can sometimes be worried that's potentially creating further walls rather than helping businesses move data around internationally and giving them legal certainty so my question is quite pointed why should we care whether policymakers have a good understanding of technology and whether tech entrepreneurs themselves have a solid appreciation of policymaking it's important for the for the reason you've just given linda because what the policymakers will do in respect of regulation creating the environment in which companies exist and work and and have to conform that is something that will have a a dramatic impact in the way the technology companies develop policymakers are going to be talking about that impact technology companies that impact their growth their development the markets they exist and work in and you know a lot of tech founders that i meet want as little as possible to do with government with bureaucracy with regulators but it's a fact of life and one of the biggest problems we've got today is the gap between the change makers on the one side and the policymakers on the other and one of the things my institute works on is trying to put the two together because they matter to each other technology matters enormously to the development of the economy and society and policymakers have the power to do good or ill in respect of technology in the tech industry so it's and i know there's a huge reluctance and certainly on the part of the the technology folk to get involved with policymakers but they really should i i think i often say to people it's a case of if you care about who makes the rules that you know govern your operating environment you need to engage and it should be part of your business planning sure it did it must be and and should be if you want well if you want to grow to a decent size i mean often if you're if you're in a very specific niche or maybe you know you're just going to carry on being quite a small company but if you've got ambitions to really grow and go into multiple markets i mean i remember about 10 or 12 years ago having a conversation with one of the tech founders what is now one of the giant technology companies and saying to them you know you really should take seriously the fact that as you grow if you become a giant the policymakers all want to regulate you and you'll have such an impact on society there's going to be massive public interest concerns and they were very indifferent to it at the time but they're not now today vast amounts of compliance officers and government affairs people now you don't need to do that right at the start but you need at least to be you know cognizant of what's going on in in the policy world that can affect your world absolutely so i'm interested in the i suppose the issues that uh founders and policymakers often agree or disagree on so you were the uk prime minister your institute for global change is tech policy at the heart of what it does your son is a successful tech entrepreneur your daughter-in-law at a leading tech investor so your family dinner conversations in a way could be a microcosm of this very debate when the three of you get together is there anything in terms of tech public policy that you agree on well truthfully linda there the knowledge of my son and daughter-in-law about technology is so much greater in terms of depth of understanding that it's more like you know they're the teachers and i'm the pupil really um but i think that there's there's a broad agreement between us that if technology is this thing that is really changing the world today and my theory my theory of politics is that the technology revolution is the thing that politicians should concentrate upon not for reasons of regulation but for reasons to do with what technology can achieve in terms of of of development it should revolutionize and will revolutionize everything from healthcare to education even to law and order and defense and one of the specific things the institute concentrates on is how can tech accelerate development so today in much of the developing world there's no need for them to build the legacy systems of the west they can use technology to circumvent those and then you know we have a whole program for example around agricultural technology and how that can change the way we produce food and consume food and you know you've got technology is the answer to climate change there isn't another answer unless you're going to tell the developing world not to consume so you've got to show them how to consume sustainably so really i think for any people who are broad-minded enough to look at the world not just their own company this relationship between public policy and technology is vital part of the problem is that it's become for a lot of policymakers simply about regulation whereas the purpose of what the institute's trying to do is to say no okay there are all sorts of issues on regulation and we should deal with those they're important issues but it's about much more than how you regulate technology it's also about how you harness that technology for public good absolutely this actually brings me on to this question which is quite related so this year's state of european tech report surveyed response and said the greatest threat that they perceive to the tech ecosystem in europe in the next 12 months first of course access to talent and funding but regulation came a strong third behind in that so industry in the one hand appears to be quite worried about future policy changes and perhaps the focus on what they might think is over regulation but they often don't understand and how to engage in the process effectively so how confounders realistically engage in Brussels policy discussions without it just being seen as a time sink i suppose taking them away from building their business and actually creating jobs yes there are always two risks when you engage with policymakers one is the time sink problem you know you spend time doing that rather than running the business and the second thing is that you look as if you're just arguing for special interests right and not the public interest but there are ways of overcoming that and you know the most important thing to realize about politicians is that their general problem is actually ignorance it's not lack of good will so a lot of politicians you know if you go and speak to members of the european parliament or even members of the uk parliament any parliament you can think of in in in europe right now the first thing they'll probably want to talk to you about is facebook and privacy and all of those things which are all important but what's vital to show them is that is only one part of the discussion the other part of the discussion is for example how the use of technology can transform healthcare can reduce costs extend provision for people and how revolutionary new treatments can be properly utilized how you want to reorganize your healthcare system so that it's about prevention and not just about cure you know a whole series of things like equality of access yeah of course and these these things are massive and you know we're looking at things now like what's the future of food right which may appear to be very long term but i think we'll be upon us quite quickly and then you know the important thing is also for people to realize we've now got a climate change ambition which is massive i mean i think people in the uk for example they haven't really got the heads around the fact that our climate ambition which is now a matter of political consensus is going to mean we have to double electricity provision in the uk over the next 10 to 15 years i don't think that's commonly known no people people don't know this at all now that is a massive undertaking so how are you going to do it how are you going to show people how to to change the demand side of of power generation and not just the supply side which is what people have looked at up to now so you've got all of these questions in which for the policymakers it's vital they understand what what technology can do and this this revolution that's going to change everything about the way that we we work and live and interact with each other that is the thing i mean it's the and you know i find when i'm talking to politicians and i say to them look you guys should be thinking about technology before you think about anything else he's obviously been out of power for too long doesn't quite understand it and i said to me you're not understanding how the world's changing it in the 19th century by the way it took politics decades to catch up with industrial revolution i mean for several decades in the 19th century people were still talking about kind of you know landlords and tenants and wigs and Tories in a very old-fashioned way then suddenly towards the middle of the century people started to realize no the real world thing that's happening is people working in new industrial organizations people going down the mines you know people were all sorts of issues around how industry was going to be changed with massive social and economic impacts and then politics eventually took them almost until the end of the century to catch up with it now the world moves faster today yeah but the principle is still the same it's interesting there's a lot of elections coming up in europe have just been had but the discussions are really the same kind of clinchers that were around 20 years ago it there's not really you know it it votes aren't going to be decided on environmental policy it'll be a nice to have but i don't think it's really at the center of these political debates at the moment no it's coming that way yeah and you can see this for example by the advance of the greens in germany but no it's it's not and one of the reasons why a lot of the debate in europe is around on the left quite an old-fashioned you know more power to the state agenda and on the right towards nationalism you know anti-immigrant policies and by the way that's also important for tech i mean if one of the biggest problems is attracting talent you've got to have an immigration policy that encourages the talent to come and one of the problems you know i've always thought with brexit is that you you know the moment you end that european freedom of movement you're going to make it tougher for the uk to attract tech talent and yet for the uk the tech sector is one of the two or three most important sectors for industrial growth absolutely i'm glad you've brought a brexit because we love talking about it so we won't debate brexit brexit is you know it's been done in some form but looking forward obviously a lot of major european startups are coming out of the uk still and we don't want more fragmentation across the european market how do we ensure that there's more cooperation or at least that we don't lose the sense of cooperation between the uk and the rest of europe when it comes to tech policies yeah i mean look the problem with brexit is you can say that the decision to do it is over and legally we've left unfortunately the consequences are still with us and we have to work through them and you know i've always said this that britain will miss europe but europe will miss britain and this is one of the areas in which europe will miss britain because i think if britain was around the table when it comes to technology regulation you'd actually have a better chance of getting it getting it right so i think we've got to i mean if i was backing power today i would be making cooperation around technology regulation one of the areas that europe and britain work on i mean there's no reason why we can't by the way even outside of the european union so you know in one sense the uk could set a standard that is more ambitious around technology yeah but on the other hand if you end up with two completely different systems and you've already got a different system in the us it's not going to be good and you know the recent paper of my institute was suggesting that really you need to try and build a transatlantic bridge on technology regulation between the us and the european union because ultimately we're all going to be competing with china yeah that actually this is a i suppose a timeless question i think one we've discussed before but basically we know tech can reach across national regional barriers and it's great for us to use those services but it's notoriously hard to regulate for so in europe and beyond we're seeing a lot more fragmentation so looking at crypto new forms of growing food ai platform workers rights digital health content competition and more data and privacy this is all fragmenting do you think we need a new type of institution to regulate tech i think we need a new type of cooperation sure and and whether that's done or how that's done institutionally i i've got an open mind on but yes for sure because you know you're right it's it's it's going to be across virtually every area ai raises huge issues and you know if food technology becomes as big as i think it will eventually then that's got a whole series of of issues that arise from that you've got gdpr from europe already setting a standard in a way but it's not always clear that that is a standard that's it's quite a fragmented standard it is and so it would make a lot of sense for at least the major democracies to come together because that's the other thing that's happening with the internet there are countries that are using control of the internet shutting down the the availability of it and that's also going to be a big problem because when you come to regulate you know there will be different values been china will have a different value system it's it's it's creating technology and using it in different ways underpinned by different values and different interests so we need to get this right and that's why it's so important that you've got you know if i was back in government again today i would say i would have a very strong linkage between the people creating the change and the people deciding how you regulate it another interesting fact from this year's report was only about a quarter of founders in europe felt that the regulatory environment had changed for the better over the last year while 20 felt that it actually got worse so we talked a little bit about what founders you know how founders should be engaging more and why but what can specifically brussels policymakers do to improve these perceptions now because they're finalizing a lot of huge cross cutting proposals on ai on competition on content and what can they do to engage with the community more i think you know it it is a weakness of the european system that they've got quite an old-fashioned view around regulation and part of the problem with regulation in a fast-moving world is that it's it's it becomes out of date very quickly and there is a case you know we've discussed this from an institute perspective of having a principle-based regulation rather than as a rule-based a list of things you can do yeah and also that your your regulation is it you you build within it the capacity for it to evolve without necessitating every time the world moves that you have to introduce a whole lot of new regulation and i think this is really important to get right and it's important that there is a a clear understanding you know between the policymakers and those who are inventing the changes that affect all of us and i think some european politicians get it very well you know i think macron gets it absolutely and and there are other sometimes from the smaller countries and if you look at how estonia has you know changed the whole way government works you know there's lots that we can can do if we approach it in the right way but you know to be clear the ambition of the regulators in europe should be yes to prevent harm but also to enable good and to make sure that that we're creating an environment in which europe is able to compete with with with the best in the world now you know that there are some good signs i mean for the first time this year i think that that you know that the amount of investment flowing into to new technology topped a hundred billion dollars you've got you know roughly a hundred unicorns been created in in europe many of them actually in the uk you know so there's a lot happening and there's some very good stuff happening but we need to be you know we need to be on top of it yeah i often hear from policymakers that regulation is giving europe a competitive edge but i'm not really sure how that translates into growths and job i think having you know legal frameworks that are clear so you can grow your business you know what the rules are and what they're not is helpful but i think the focus can sometimes be a bit skewed which is quite interesting because this year's report and politico they did some research on uh us big tech being the single most frequently talked about tech related term with european policymakers so do you think that europe is perhaps focusing a little too much on handicapping competition in the u.s or do you think it's really focused on on enabling its own businesses well i think that the risk is it is too much focused on american big tech without asking the question why are they all american so i think if you know if we want to make a reality of european technology including britain within europe for these purposes you know you've got to make sure our environment is one that actually encourages it and you know there's no doubt that's partly about creating the right ecosystem it's partly about which we've done pretty well in the uk by the way using our universities and research centers as means of generating new technology but it's also about creating an environment in which people feel they can found companies where there's capital available because you've you've got the right rules around the use of capital and what happens when people create companies so no i i think absolutely there there is there is a strong risk that europe ends up fearing the big american giants which you know i understand the reasons people have them out and there are all sorts of issues to do with them but it would be much better if we at least had equal concentration and how we enable european tech to grow that was one of the the founding principles behind the establishment of the european tech alliance a couple of years ago i was part of a different european unicorn at the time and arriving in brussels i thought the red carpet would be rolled out for us because we were this great european business but actually it was it was hard to get face time with people and so that's why we got together in the alliance and said like let's european tech companies need to work together to to be at the table and part of these conversations yeah it's it's i mean i mean it is a problem with the european system and particularly with a lot of people in the european parliament okay because if you want to get publicity as a member of parliament you know if you're sounding off about american technology company and facebook amazin etc google how how powerful they are not paying the right tax and all of which are important issues you probably think you've got a much greater chance of getting publicity than if you say we should be reforming using technology the european energy market so that we don't have to consume the same amount of energy and can make use of what is obviously going to be necessary which is a coordination of energy markets across europe in order to reduce emissions that's a more complicated thing to get across than you know facebook's peering into your private life harder harder to make the headlines as well so in fairness to i think our colleagues in brussels there is a big focus on uh you know how do we create the next generation of really like internationally competitive tech companies coming out of europe are there certain areas that you're particularly excited about that you think europe might have an edge on i think bioscience is is one and then i think energy is another because of the huge ambitions we've europe's got um i think i think around some things we was talking about earlier around food and the future of food and food technology uh yeah i think europe's got lots of i mean it's a big market it's fertile grant yeah it's it's the biggest market i mean the european single market it's still the biggest commercial market in the world and i think the other thing is that it that it's you know it it's got issues to do with the university sector in europe i think um you know the uk is is a standout in terms of you know if you look at the top 100 universities in the in the world the uk is up there with the us um um i think europe's got a you know it's got a way to go in terms of how it does all of that but no i think there are real areas fintech probably as well if if we if we want to do but that does depend on getting the regulatory system very much though right and you know you the whole issue to do with digital services digital currency you know these are going to be massive questions and it will depend you know to the point we started with it will depend a lot on what the regulatory environment is yeah so speaking of digital currency um question about crypto so in june this year el salvador passed a law making it the first country in the world except bitcoin is legal tender this was news to me so more recently they've actually announced plans to construct a bitcoin city near a volcano uh that will be funded solely by cryptocurrency so how much do you think crypto will play in the future of european tech and we often obsess about obviously the u.s and china which we've talked about but should we be looking to places like el salvador for inspiration so this is where you know although i talk a lot about the importance of technology i'm aware that there's a certain point of which my my knowledge for sure you were mentioning my son dawton a lot earlier than that when i asked my son to explain crypto and blockchain to me he did and i said i'm not really getting it so he sent me something called the idiot's guide to blockchain and i struggled with that too but blockchain for sure has got a huge future and has obviously used a lot of cryptocurrencies i mean i think there are thousands now of companies involved in cryptocurrencies and it's what is it's 2.6 trillion dollars worth of assets in it i mean the only thing i think is that there's going to come a point when again regulation you know when it comes becomes systemically important the regulators are going to step in and i think the interest that there is in digital currencies and you know we've suggested that you know we have a digital pound and i'm sure countries will move in in that direction i think you just can't be sure where cryptocurrencies will then fit into it because of course they're all based on the idea that you cut out the the government yeah and that's fine until the government decides it doesn't want to be cut out exactly and i think there's the complexity is an issue right when most people i think who use the internet don't understand what they're using we see the same in a different level with online advertising and targeted advertising most people don't truly understand the process is involved and obviously brossels is concerned about that understandably and that's why they're looking at things potentially to to regulate advertising online so it's a case of if most people using certain technology don't understand it policy makers will often feel the need to step in yes yes for sure and also people are investing money retail investors and i mean look the world will go cashless i'm pretty sure about that and i think there is i mean i can see this even the countries we work in in africa where fintech is actually accelerating quite fast now and then i think with cryptocurrencies i think some of the principles behind it and what people are trying to to do which is really which is really based on a distrust for for reasons that are understandable in many cases justifiable of state regulators and public policy makers i think some of the principles behind it will will definitely endure and and that's why blockchain is so is so interesting to people because it does give you a trusted authenticity in transactions so this is this all of this i think is really important what i just don't i'm not i'm not expert enough or or knowledgeable enough yet to see is is how public regulators respond to crypto when it becomes something that's you know impacting everyone's daily life well perhaps the point then is that those involved in building businesses around crypto need to be engaging now to help these audiences understand that is for sure otherwise they're going to suddenly find they're stuck out there yeah and there'll be concern and worry and fear rather than actually interest and curiosity yes because i'm sure many of the people involved in these endeavors want to do that they're motivated by doing good and not just doing well but in that case they need to explain to people who are public policy makers what they're trying to do the right way to regulate it the right way to set it within the overall financial system right so final question obviously you talk about your institute is working a lot on these tech issues and it's working a lot across africa as well do you see a lot i think there's a lot of really interesting companies and businesses and ideas emerging from that continent so anything in particular that you're excited about that you think we should be taking note of well i think just to take note of the fact it is exploding and you know the the numbers of startup companies in africa is growing exponentially all the time including you know unicorn companies and you know what's interesting is the potential that these companies have to alter the way that the the countries work and and that you know public services get developed and so you know we're working in roughly 20 different countries in in africa one of the things we're working on specifically is how we use technology to accelerate that development and you know what we're finding is having started with the idea well there are there are tech companies in the developed world that it would be great to bring to to african we're doing a lot of that we're also now finding no there are tech companies in africa started in africa by africans that we we should be partnering with now at the moment i think for a lot of policymakers in africa the the knowledge is even further behind right but they've got to catch up and things like how you you generate and then use data in some of these countries around issues like healthcare i think of enormous importance and and that's one area we're particularly interested in is is how you you know you you will probably have in the future adult vaccination programs not just for covid but for a series of different diseases that means you know you should have a a system where you can register those vaccinations follow them up with the patient you will generate a huge amount of data that could be immensely valuable for people population level health data is something no one's gotten right right but it's i think it's a massive area we're really interested in it and then you you will also find you get these these startup companies beginning in africa that are going to be i think quite quite revolutionary and you know in in financial payments for example i mean kenya was in many ways ahead of a lot of the western world so you know it's a very exciting area and the other thing i i always say to people engaged in building technology companies is think about the developing world because sometimes by the way you'll find a readyer audience for what you're doing then you will in in in the west because part of the problem when you're disrupting things is that and this is what anyone knows who's ever tried to reform anything in government is a whole lot of vested interests come out and stop you and proceeding with the reform whereas in some of the developing countries it's you know it's a virgin market they're interested in new ideas and that they'll give them a welcome if they can see what they can do yeah focus on the outcome rather than i was trying to roll back years and years of heavy regulation tony thank you so much for your time today it's been absolutely fascinating thank you very much thank you um tom and sarah back to you thank you so much to both of you it's not often you get to see such a complex issue explored with this level of insider's knowledge before we sign off you should know that there is much more to explore the new state of european tech website has just launched which has all the data we've talked about today and we'll be updated with new information and common tree over the coming year thank you to everyone who made this year's report in today's launch event so rich with valuable insights from brickson village in south london to the codam coding college in amsterdam from clana's headquarters in stockhome to vault's head office in Helsinki our aim was to transport you to a few of the places where inspirational people are doing extraordinary things and we appreciate the warm welcome the wise words and the food for thought that you shared with us and thank you also to everyone behind the scenes at atomico good love miltown partners aim seer and media works you all made today possible and the final thank you to you there are a number of lot of big numbers in this year's report but the success of european stack ecosystem is really down to people who have the passion patience and persistence to build something that makes a meaningful difference in our lives people like you so we hope you've enjoyed sharing this with us goodbye and thank you so much for tuning in and see you next year goodbye