Episode · Nov 13, 2025 · 43 min

Europe’s Real Startup Problem Is Permission | Project Europe’s Kitty Mayo

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About this episode

What does it take to give young founders permission to be audacious, before they have credentials to hide behind?

In this episode of Follow the Gradient, we sit down with Kitty Mayo, CEO of Project Europe, an under 25 founder fund backed by more than 200 of Europe’s leading entrepreneurs. Kitty previously spent five years at Entrepreneur First, working closely with early stage founders at the very start of their careers.

The conversation explores how ambition actually forms, why culture often matters more than capital, and what it means to build a founder movement without headquarters, playbooks, or institutional safety nets.

We talk about:

Why Europe’s biggest constraint on young founders is cultural permission, not access to capital
What Kitty looks for in founders that never shows up in pitch decks or metrics
How building without an HQ increases surface area and creates stronger founder bonds
The hidden cost of chasing venture funding when the ambition is not truly venture scale
Why earnest obsession beats fashionable ideas when backing founders under 25
What Europe should borrow from Silicon Valley, and what it needs to consciously reject

This episode is less about frameworks and more about how beliefs, environments, and peer groups shape founder behavior long before outcomes are visible.

Our biggest takeaways, including Kitty’s view on what European founders consistently underestimate:

https://followthegradient.io/p/kitty-mayo-podcast

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Where to find Kitty:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kittymm/

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🎙 Follow the Gradient: conversations about building a business from Europe while staying sane.

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