Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Today’s guest is Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, Partner at Speedinvest, who has spent over a decade investing in early-stage European startups and scaling the firm across Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, and Munich. He focuses on leading early rounds and supporting founders through the first 3–5 years of company building.
🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!
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Why you should listen
You should listen to this if you want to understand why Europe consistently produces top-tier technical talent but fails to retain and scale its biggest AI opportunities.
As the conversation unfolded, the tension between capital availability and regulatory fragmentation became clear as the core constraint holding back European tech.
What we talk about
00:00 - Introduction
01:32 - The Peter Steinberger moment and what Europe missed
06:20 - The 0.1 percent vs 3 percent pension fund gap, explained
10:51 - How European money flows to Sandhill Road and back at a markup
16:48 - EU Inc, public procurement, and the 28th regime
26:18 - What European founders do differently
Our main take away’s
Capital is the single bottleneck that explains most of Europe’s startup gap. European pension funds allocate around 0.1% to venture compared to roughly 3% in the US, creating a 25x gap that directly limits late-stage funding and forces founders to look abroad.
Europe is indirectly financing its own competitive disadvantage. Large parts of European institutional capital flow into US venture funds, which then reinvest into European companies at later stages, capturing upside that could have stayed local.
Regulatory fragmentation, not regulation itself, is the real growth killer. Founders face 27 different national systems, making expansion in Europe as complex as entering the US, which slows scaling and discourages early ambition.
Europe’s talent gap is not about engineers but about scaling experience. The region produces strong technical and research talent, but lacks operators who have taken companies to billion dollar scale, forcing startups to import leadership from US tech ecosystems.
Constraints in Europe create disciplined companies but delay outcomes. Founders learn to operate with less capital and think internationally from day one, but this comes at the cost of slower scaling and reduced room to compete when massive funding rounds define the market.
