Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Today’s guest is Judith Dada, General Partner at Visionaries Club, who backs European founders and built Open Source Nanny into a shared database with 100+ real childcare setups from operators worldwide. She has worked across global tech ecosystems and actively shapes European founder policy and talent initiatives.
🎧 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 care about where value in AI will actually accrue and what Europe gives up by conceding the model and infrastructure layers too early.
At some point it became clear to us in the conversation, how founders’ choices reveal a clash between realism and feel-good optimism, especially when the cost of losing scales across Europe.
What we talk about
00:00 Introduction
02:30 Why European tech sovereignty suddenly feels urgent
05:39 Why realism and agency must coexist
08:58 Where Europe is too optimistic about AI layers
10:01 Why statistics don’t define Europe’s future
12:22 AI as a civilizational rather than technical shift
15:05 The widening gap between AI frontier and reality
20:12 Choosing hard problems despite low odds
25:29 Realizing no one else is driving the bus
27:56 From leaving Europe to fixing its foundations
30:21 Speaking up when silence feels safer
35:31 Parenting ambitious careers without pretending it’s easy
45:14 Building the Relativity Collective: peer environments that raise ambition
48:37 Rapid fire questions
Our main take away’s
Europe is weakening its future by treating the model and infrastructure layers as someone else’s problem. This is true because value concentration may shift away from applications, and conceding early locks Europe out of redistribution capacity if AI-driven wealth scales unevenly.
Performative optimism is as damaging as performative pessimism. Pretending Europe is “winning” blocks serious action, while doomsday statistics ignore that outliers still shape history under constraints.
